Positive thinking does help.

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Courtesy of

hey guys,

so if you’re wondering exactly how green the party that you’re voting for on saturday is, check some of the reports below.

On climate change the Australian Conservation Foundation rated the Greens climate change policies at the top with a score of 94/100, ahead of the Democrats on (90/100), Labor (58/100), Family First (34/100) and the Coalition (21/100). See:
tinyurl.com/2skxtm

The Big Switch website compiled by Conservation Councils, Greenpeace and Get Up! meanwhile was topped by the Greens (4.8 out of 5), the Democrats (4.4) and followed by Labor (1.9) , Family First (1.2) with the Liberal and National parties on a disappointing and sceptical 0.8. See:
tinyurl.com/2tg6pn

The Climate Institute meanwhile gives the Greens and Democrats a chart-topping 90 per cent for their policies on climate change with Labor on 60% and Liberal on 30%.
See:
tinyurl.com/3al4m9

hope it’s useful!

best, si.

The Australian public is smart and recognises the need for change.
The Australian public is smart and recognises the need for change.

Must repeat this throughout the next 36 hours…

after almost a month of waiting and waiting and angry emails and cranky phonecalls…. the radelai.de domain is now actually working!

there’s nothing much up there yet – but soon there will be!

Since I’ve returned to Adelaide I’ve had opportunity to host a few guests as part of CouchSurfing, the program that introduced me to Sid, Ninnu, Ronja and a whole bunch of other lovely people. Regularly, conversation with my international visitors comes down to eating: favourite foods, traditional foods from their homelands and the difficulty of finding good bread while on the road. Just as it was when I was travelling overseas, I’m faced with the difficulty of defining what typical Australian food is.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.

Over the last couple of years of drought, larger birds, more used to the Adelaide Hills and the outlying country areas have been moving into the leafy green/brown suburbs in search of water and food. Most importantly for this story, a beautiful kookaburra has moved into the trees surrounding my house.

A couple of times a day I’ll hear it laughing and lately it’s taken to perching on the mandarin tree or the main electricity wire coming from the street. I’ve finally had a chance to observe the brown and white patterns on its chest, the size of its massive beak, the helmet like crest on its head and the slight turquoise markings on the wing which mark it as a member of the kingfisher family of birds.

Today when I went outside for a break from style sheets and cms wrangling, I saw the most amazing thing. The kookaburra was surveying the yard from the wire and suddenly its entire stance changed, a ripple seemed to pass through its chest as it tensed up. A few more seconds passed and I followed the kookaburra’s line of sight down to the grass near the path – I couldn’t see anything…

And then, not as fast as I thought it would, the kookaburra gracefully drifted down to the path and picked something up in its beak. As the kookaburra whipped it’s head around, I saw the shine of a skink’s belly and heard the actual crunch of the little lizard being consumed.

“Wow”, I realised, “my kookaburra just caught its own food, and I got to watch!”

I had a feeling today that it would be snowing in Helsinki, and it turns out my intuition is right!

Hopefully the reflections off the snow help keep my friends happier through the scary dark month of November. And the fact that it’s November already means that in less than 3 months I’ll be getting on a plane to head back over to the other side of the world. I can’t wait to go back to Finland and visit other parts of the world, but at the same time I really don’t want to leave my lovely hometown.

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A few months ago I tried to articulate to a friend who’s spent some time living in Japan the feeling that you get when you’ve really fallen for another culture and group of friends. It’s not that you don’t love your origins anymore, but that your heart just stretches and gets bigger to fit all the new people and experiences in. It is a frustrating experience, because you know that if you spend a significant amount of time in either place you’ll always end up missing what you don’t have.

Lately I’ve been desiring specific experiences that were easily come by in Finland – as I can still talk to my friends and listen to the music, the experiences I was looking for were mainly culinary. Last week I tried to find cheese equivalent to the rather bland Finnish juusto and a rye bread similar to the amazing black bread splits I lived off – but to no avail. I’ve also been regularly stocking up on Dutch salt liquorice in a desperate attempt to capture the ever so slightly different taste of salmiakki. On a trip to Ikea I stocked up on gloggi (mulled wine) mix, lingonberry jam and was over the moon to find a carton of blueberry soup. The lingonberry jam will be dolloped on spinach pancakes (pinaattiohukainen), and breakfasts for the next week will be porridge with cinammon (canelli) and blueberry soup stirred in. Pure comfort food.

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As Christmas rushes towards us, I’m planning on making piparkakut (gingerbreads) to eat while sipping on vodka spiked gloggi, and maybe I’ll even attempt to make some of the traditional casseroles. Carrot and rice casseroles will be easy to recreate – but my favourite casserole was made of lantuu (rutabaga or swedes) which is a winter vegetable, so that will have to wait for another time.

Despite the possibility to recreate the culinary experiences of Finland, the consumption will not be entirely satisfactory, as the food may be real, but the experience will be a simulacra of something I remembered. I’ll pick nettles to dry for tea and sit down to my porridge and blueberry soup for breakfast, but I won’t be eating it in the company of Ninnu, Sid and Ronja. In February, when I’m sitting down with the people that I miss in kitchens on the other side of the world, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll pull out my tube of Vegemite and be plotting the creation of pie floaters in an attempt to taste the memories of this side of the world.

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