Meredith Shayne

The food and landscape of Whitewater

Two things are quite important in Whitewater: food, and Coogee Beach.

If you bought the paperback of the anthology, you will know already that there’s a glossary in it, that explains some Aussie terms, and on my part, provides some information on the Australian-specific food mentioned in Whitewater. I am quite keen for people to be able to picture the food that Luke makes accurately, and to that end I’ll reproduce here the explanations and recipe links that are in the glossary in the paperback version.

Biscuit – cookie.

Flat white – coffee, with milk. No froth or other embellishments (cocoa powder, cinnamon, etc).

Sausage roll – minced meat (typically beef and pork, but sometimes chicken), herbs and onion wrapped in puff pastry. An example of a recipe is here.

Scone – a small bread-like cake. Can be sweet or savoury. Wikipedia entry for scones.

Tomato sauce – the Australian equivalent of ketchup.

Vanilla slice – a firm vanilla custard between puff pastry sheets, typically decorated with either a simple water and icing sugar-based icing or a dusting of icing sugar. An example of a recipe is here.

Now I would really, really like a sausage roll. NOM.

Also, in Australian, thongs = flip flops. 🙂

Now we get to Coogee beach. In a spectacular case of good timing, I happened to be going back to Sydney at a time when I had just finished the first draft of Whitewater, so I decided to visit all the locations featured in the book and take some photos, which turned out to be incredibly useful, particularly when it came to Wylie’s Baths.

I posted an album of some of the photos I took that day on Facebook, which is here if anyone wants to take a look at it. It just so happened to be one of those beautiful Sydney spring days that Luke thinks about on the day that he and Cam go to Wylie’s Baths for the first time. What it wasn’t, though, was a good surfing day. Cam and Luke wouldn’t have gotten much out of a surf that day. 🙂