Draft:Symposium of Australian Gastronomy

Symposium of Australian Gastronomy
The Symposium of Australian Gastronomy (SAG) is a culinary biennale that draws cooks, historians, food writers, academics and the food curious together to present research, share knowledge and discuss topics such as food, gastronomy, cooking, food and culinary history and culture.

That the event is called a symposium, rather than a conference, references the spirit of the ancient Greeks who gathered for drinks and convivial discussion after banqueting. The term is also notable as the title of a work by Plato.

The first symposium: 1984
The first Symposium of Australian Gastronomy (SAG 1), with The Upstart Cuisine as the theme, was held at Carclew, a mansion in North Adelaide, South Australia, on March 12-13, 1984. The symposium was convened by Gay Bilson, Graham Pont and Michael Symons and organised by Barbara Santich.

At the time, Gay Bilson was proprietor of Berowra Waters Inn, a restaurant on the northern perimeter of Sydney; Graham Pont was a senior lecturer at the University of NSW; Michael Symons was proprietor (with Jennifer Hilliard) of the Uraidla Aristologist in the Adelaide Hills and author of the book One Continuous Picnic, a gastronomic history of Australia (Duck Press, 1982); and Barbara Santich was a scholar of French language and cuisine.

Alan Davidson, co-convenor of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, which commenced in 1983 and which inspired the Australian symposium in part, and Don Dunstan, a campaigner for progressive social policy and an Australian politician who had served as premier of South Australia, were both among the attendees.

Barbara Santich writes: “The event was partly inspired by symposia held in Oxford, but covered the broad field of gastronomy. Rather than concentrating on culinary history.

“We considered that Gay Bilson had summed up the history, the pretentiousness and the promise of the Australian cuisine by the comment that ours was an ‘upstart culinary country’. The lack of food traditions called for a positive and reasoned response, so that the emerging culinary exuberance could be guided by food scholarship and perhaps work wonders.”

Well-known writers, restaurateurs and students of gastronomy attended the first symposium. They included chef and restaurateur Stephanie Alexander, restaurateur Dur-e Najaf Dara, writer Marion Halligan, chef Gabriel Gaté, South Australian caterer Cath Kerry, winemaker Max Lake and cook and restauranteur Maggie Beer.

The goal was to attract “a balance of ‘theoreticians’, ‘practitioners’ and ‘passionate amateurs’" to the two-day program of talks and discussions. The 'theoretical' program was interspersed with meals that included a Brown Bread Lunch, Cuisine du Coeur (a lunch ‘cooked from the heart’ by participants) and a banquet prepared by Australian chefs Phillip Searle and Cheong Liew that has since “become gastronomic legend”.

"The banquet was planned as the spectacular finale to the symposium, an extravaganza that would say something about gastronomy… and respond in an exciting and original way to the tag of ‘upstart’.

The ‘banquet’ would go on to become a defining feature of future symposia and showcase the cooking and creative vision of a generation of renowned Australian cooks and chefs.

Organisation
Since 1984, the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy has been held approx. every two years in various towns, cities and states in Australia and in New Zealand.

Bids for hosting the following symposium are made during the plenary session of each symposium.

The convenor and organising committee of each symposium undertake the roles as volunteers and they are free to make decisions about location, duration and content. There is no central secretariat.

The convening committee builds on what has gone before and aims to create an event that connects geography, the theme they have chosen for discussion and food.

Convening committees have reported a desire to balance rigorous discourse (upping intellectual standards, extending invitations to specialists and scholars, following a formal conference format, including a keynote address) with the ‘recipe’ of the earlier symposiums, as expressed by Michael Symons, which originated in food-centeredness and a few unwritten and uncodified conventions.

“We can describe the symposiums as being both ‘open’ (self-selecting, participative, experimental, consensual, nurturing) and ‘closed’ (limited in numbers, self-contained, inward-directed, inconspicuously consuming)," he writes in the prologue of SAG 5, held in Adelaide in 1990.

Published proceedings
The proceedings of the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy provide a valuable insight into Australia’s food history and contribute to the discussion and study of gastronomy.

Copies of the proceedings published in book form (1984 to 2006) are held in National and State libraries.

The 2007 Symposium was produced on a CD, copies of which are held at National Library and University of Adelaide library.

Since 2006, proceedings have been produced in digital form. These can be found on the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy website.

Location of SAG proceedings by library
AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY NEW SOUTH WALES QUEENSLAND SOUTH AUSTRALIA VICTORIA WESTERN AUSTRALIA
 * National Library Australia holds copies of proceedings from SAG numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11A, 12, 14, 15
 * Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies: 7
 * Charles Sturt University: 13
 * Museums of History NSW, Caroline Simpson Collection: 4
 * State Library New South Wales: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13
 * The University of Sydney: 9
 * University New South Wales: 1, 2, 9,
 * Western Sydney University: 9
 * University Queensland: 1, 5
 * Flinders University: 1, 4, 5, 10
 * State Library South Australia: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12
 * University Adelaide: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15
 * Deakin University: 6, 10
 * La Trobe University: 1, 2, 3, 6, 10
 * Monash University: 5, 6, 7
 * State Library Victoria: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14
 * Murdoch University: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10

Conventions
The convenors of the first symposium set out with the intention of making the event food-led and participants, especially in the early years, cooked and contributed food to share.

Jam and Biscuits
Participants were encouraged to bring homemade jam for the breakfast table and biscuits for morning and afternoon tea. Lois Butt and Gwenda Robb baked a selection of eight biscuits for the first symposium.

Box dinner
The Box Dinner was introduced at SAG 5 in 1990. Organisers filled boxes with various foods and, working in small groups, participants cooked a meal and served it to each other, using the contents of the box.

Brown Bread lunch
Lunch on the first day of the first symposium was listed in the program as a ‘brown bread lunch’.

“Bread has strong symbolism. Such was the shortage of grain in the early NSW colony that Governor Phillip added a “bring your own bread” request at the bottom of invitations [to dine at Government House]. We ask participants to bring their own brown bread to the first lunch, which will stress simplicity.”

The brown bread was supplemented with fresh churned butter, boiled fresh lobster and mayonnaise. The meal was served with Perrier Jouet champagne, Petaluma Rhine Riesling 1983 and Hungerford Hill Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 1980.

While not a regular program feature, homage was paid to this lunch at SAG 15 in 2007, in Dover, Tasmania, with a sourdough sandwich of crayfish tail meat and freshly whisked mayonnaise, wrapped in a brown paper bag, was served alongside a glass of Mumm Champagne NV Cordon Rouge. Participants sat on the deck of Martin's Boathouse, feet dangling over the sparkling water below.

The Banquet
The most anticipated SAG convention is the final banquet, an opportunity for the convening committee to create a meal that encompasses and expresses that symposium's theme in collaboration with the culinary talent and food producers of the area in which the symposium is being held.

In the history of the Symposium, many fine meals have been served. Among them:


 * Nature and Culture, Gay Bilson. SAG 7, 1993

“Turned out of a tiny tent in the gallery’s courtyard [National Gallery, Canberra] by a team of six cooks and six waiters, each dish was superbly crafted. More interestingly, it was unlike any banquet at the end of a similar event anywhere in the world, not just in its execution, but in its conception.”


 * Beyond the Tucker Box, Phillip Searle and Chiong Lieu. SAG 10, 1998.

"For two days the cooks cooked and the baker baked. The cooks dug a large rectangular oven in the earth and baked stones to store heat. They stuffed, then coated, young emus (all 'drumstick' as if a deformed foetus) in seasoned butter and flour and wrapped them in banana leaves and paper and cloth and mesh and mud and did variations of the same to sides of pork and to Murray Cod, enough, too much, for seventy people. The parcels were hugely, grandly primeval and of the earth to which they were returned, mud to mud, and buried in a graveyard hours before the time at which it would be ransacked for the feed. Above the pit, scrubbed, tight-lipped oysters were opened and tainted by flaming twigs and leaves as the first course of the banquet. Blue swimmer crabs as cold and fresh as the Grampians air were grilled over the fire to become the unsurpassed food of the banquet. Underneath, the meat and fish suffered stone-warmed changes: in bed with heat for eight hours animal and fish in slow combustion became food."


 * The Beef from this Pasture at The Stanmore Barn, Simon West, Scott Minervini, Steve Cumper and Justin Harris. SAG 15, 2007.

Both the pasture and the cow that had lived on it were to be the feature of this dinner. The pasture was bought "into the barn by laying grass on the long central table as a tablecloth. The idea morphed further when a local orchardist turned up with what he called 'apple prunings' although they were the size of a small tree, laden with wrinkling apples and yellowing leaves. Another arrived with a box of mushrooms that had sprung up overnight in his garden. Rocks laid under the grass made it more like a paddock than a bowling green and in reality it looked more like an orchard than a pasture but then who's splitting hairs? We felt that the beast we had chosen to give up its life for our pleasure on the night was honoured both by the setting and the delicious meal."