Vegetarianism in Australia a History
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Vegetarianism in Australia a history Edgar Crook For Martine S. Crook with love Canberra First published 2008 Revised edition 2014 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Australia License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ Introduction This book charts the birth of vegetarianism in Australia from the first vegetarian convict to the recent past. It details the growth of the diet, through its religious, health and animal welfare supporters. The major part of the work gives the history of the diet prior to 1948 as this was when the Vegetarian Society that still exists today was founded and there is much available documentary evidence of vegetarianism and the role it has played in Australian society since. Before 1948 there is virtually nothing in the public record. This book seeks to address that missing chapter in Australia’s history. In defining the term ‘vegetarian’ I have used the word to describe people who ate no animal products derived from a slaughtered animal. Many of the people mentioned in this work were what we would now call vegan, but as this word did not exist until 1944 - and so could not have been used as a self- descriptor - it has generally been avoided. In many cases it has been impossible to judge whether an individual was or was not continuously a vegetarian (or vegan), as many people who identified themselves as vegetarians adopted or abandoned the diet as their situations and lifestyles demanded. I assume only that a person was vegetarian if either they identified themselves as one, or were identified as such by a reliable source contemporary to them. In Carol J. Adams’ book, The Sexual Politics of Meat,2 she records an entry into her personal journal reflecting the difficulty she (and other) researchers into the history of vegetarianism have found: ‘One has to approach your reading material with a hopeful approach, faith-filled attitude, hoping for one small mention.’ Researching historical Australian vegetarians has also involved searching for this ‘one small mention’. Biographers of eminent Australians, as of eminent foreigners, have shown a curious propensity to hide or ignore evidence of a different diet. Sometimes this was done to make the subject appear more ‘normal’ - to hide a supposed fad, which might impugn their dignity - or at other times because the biographer thought that their subject’s diet would be of no interest to readers. For this reason, Australia’s many past vegetarians have been hidden from history. Conversely, vegetarianism has been highlighted in the biographies of other notable persons because they were perceived as living outside of normal society. As a result, vegetarianism can seem unduly emphasised among the radical or plainly eccentric. In general, there have been practically no studies, academic articles or books on the subject of Australian vegetarianism. While some recent Australian vegetarians, such as Peter Singer, receive relatively considerable attention, vegetarianism remains absent from all the major works of general Australian history as it does from international histories. The standard works of vegetarian history generally do not mention Australia at all, while Australian works of culinary history have all too often dismissed vegetarianism as merely a ‘food fad’3 and therefore unworthy of serious attention. In Britain, 2 The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, Continuum, New York, 1990, p. 145. 3 See for example the scant mention in Symons, Michael, One Continuous Picnic, Adelaide, Duck Press, 1982, p.115 Germany, France and the United States – the major western nations that had founded vegetarian Societies before Australia - vegetarians were leading advocates, not only of dietary change, but of many other aspects of social improvement as well. At the first meeting of the American Vegetarian Society in New York in 1850, alongside the health reformers and animal welfare supporters were the anti-slavery activists, Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Alcott family. In Germany and the United Kingdom, the list of members of the vegetarian Societies also contained numerous well-known social welfare crusaders. Australia was no exception. We find among the vegetarian advocates of the 19th century many leading figures in the religious, feminist, political and literary life of the nation. It is impossible to say whether there was ever a vegetarian among Australia’s first inhabitants. As the Australian Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers it is considered highly unlikely. The Aboriginal diet varied according to the climate and region within which each people lived but, in general, their diet consisted of small marsupials, fish, shellfish, reptiles and insects as well as larger animals such as kangaroos and wallabies. Some 300 plant foods have been identified as available to Aboriginal people, of which bush vegetables and fruits - such as quandongs and figs - as well as various nuts and seeds would have been staples. Plant foods, however, would have provided only a supplement to the basic diet of animal foods and would not have been a substitute for them. It is reasonable to assume therefore that the first vegetarian in Australia would have been either a visitor from elsewhere in the Asia/Pacific region or a later emigrant from Europe. 1. The Establishment of Meat Well before European settlement seafaring visitors to Australia were killing animals for food, these people would have come from as far afield as China and Japan as well as from the nearer Pacific islands and from the close neighbours directly across the Timor Sea. Later, European navigators and explorers would have landed in order to re-supply their ships with whatever plants and animals were available. Lieutenant James Cook and his compatriots feasted on all manner of Australian fauna as they mapped the coastline. As well as being a superlative botanist, Sir Joseph Banks was also a naturalist of a different order. His journal of the voyage of the Endeavour shows that he delighted in his discoveries of new species of fish, birds and mammals. While his observations of Australian native fauna in their natural state added considerably to zoological knowledge, Banks and the other naturalists did much of their research by eating them - classifying them, not just by type, but also by taste. For those surviving on ships’ rations of hard biscuits and salted meat, Australia’s exotic species must have seemed to them to be rare delicacies indeed. In 1788, when the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove, its nine ships carried enough provisions for the new convicts and settlers aboard to survive for two years. Among the tons of provisions were cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, rabbits, goats and a good number of chickens, geese, turkeys and ducks. Also on board were 8,000 fishhooks, 14 fishing nets, 6 harpoons, whale line and butchers’ knives. Australia was never then destined to be a new Garden of Eden either for the transported convicts or for the captive domesticated animals. It was intended to be an antipodean version of Britain, and therefore a meat-based diet was always planned for the new colony. The impetus for establishing the predominant emphasis on meat in the Australian diet came from the British - not from those used to eating it, but rather from the poor who had previously rarely eaten it. Since the middle ages, Britons had associated meat eating with wealth and status. Meat, especially beef, was then the preserve of the wealthy. By the 18th Century, with land clearances and the enclosure of common land, often the only time the poor had access to meat was from poaching the animals, which were on their social superior’s land. Considering that poaching was responsible for a large number of criminal cases, it is the case that some convicts were actually transported to Australia purely out of their desire for meat. In the little land that was available to them the rural poor grew what they could, but the basic diet was often not much more than bread, oats and potatoes Between 1830 and 1850, over two million people from Great Britain and Ireland emigrated to North America and Australia. The majority of these made this voyage unwillingly because the poverty in their homeland was unbearable and later because of famine, which reached its peak during the ‘hungry 40s’. Tempting the hungry British to come to Australia was Caroline Chisholm (1808-1877), then popularly known as ‘the emigrant’s friend.’ In 1847, Chisholm, whilst on a return visit to England to promote Australian settlement, published a pamphlet entitled Comfort for the poor: meat three times a day! This advised prospective migrants of the supposed benefits of emigrating to a country where meat was plentiful. For many of these - who had probably not had their fill of meat for years - the prospect of coming to Australia, a land where meat was both plentiful and cheap, was a dream come true. A vegetarian diet must have seemed then a poor substitute for a meat-based one, signifying both poverty and low social status. Ironically, during a tour of Australia in 1871 the British author, Anthony Trollope, recorded a discussion with a Townsville workman, who said, “If you knew what it was… to have to eat mutton three times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, you would not come here and tell us that we ought to be contented with our condition.”4 Still, to most British immigrants the avid and conspicuous consumption of meat was a continuing sign of success in their new land. The new Australians continued to hold this view, eating meat at every opportunity - even after memories of the dietary deprivations of their native lands had faded.