The Night They Stormed Eureka (27 page)

Crystallised violets on top of a cake make it fit to serve to a queen.

Dip each dry violet in stiffly beaten egg white, then in caster sugar. Leave in a breeze till dry. Don’t store. Don’t let the bees on ‘em neither.

This were one of Queen Victoria’s favourites.

Boil 6 cups rosehips in 6 cups water. Press through a sieve. Throw out the seeds and prickly bits. Add 1 cup white sugar and the juice o’ three lemons. Simmer till thick, stirring all the time so it don’t burn. Serve with roast mutton or any fried food.

Pull out all the lumps of fat from between the meat and the skin o’ the sheep. Place ‘em in a pot and cover with water. Put it at the edge of the fire so it cooks slowly for four hours. The fat’ll melt and float to the top. Take the pan off the heat and let cool overnight. The tough bits an’ blood will sink to the bottom of the pot and the layer of fat will turn firm on the top. Lift it off in the morning and store in a tin where the flies can’t get it. Keep the tin cool in the creek on hot days or it’ll melt and go pong out the tent.

If you ain’t got time to render the fat, keep the lumps fresh in the middle of the flour bag, where they’ll stay cool and the flies can’t get to them.

Pour water into your washbasin and put the tin in too. Ants ain’t swimmers. Or put each leg of your table into a tobacco tin filled with water. The ants won’t be able to climb the table and your sugar, treacle or currants will be safe on top.

A smooth flat rock cooks flat bread or eggs a treat. Don’t use rocks straight from a creek, though — they’ll be full of water, and might explode. I saw a cove blinded when a rock exploded once.

Dust off leaves or wombat droppings. Put it near a hot fire or, if you’re in a hurry, pile hot coals on it and count yer blessings ten times over, then brush the coals off with a green branch. Don’t worry if the rock has soot on it — it won’t do you any harm. You can always scrape it off.

Drip a couple of drops o’ water onto the rock. If the water splutters and dances everywhere, or if it explodes in a cloud of steam, yer rock is hot enough. Break your egg onto the hot rock or lay your damper on it, squashed as thin as you can between yer hands. Keep lifting up the edge of the damper with a stick an’ when it’s brown turn it over.

Cooking rocks can be used over and over. They get so hot that leftovers shrivel away — no washing-up. Sometimes they split and then you have two cooking rocks.

Stick a bit of meat like bacon or salt beef on a green stick and hold it over the fire till it cooks, if you’ve got a strong wrist and lots of patience. Otherwise prop up your stick against a log or a rock.

Make sure you use green sticks, or your cooking sticks’ll turn into firewood and your tucker will land in the flames.

First catch your ducks. If Badger Joe caught ‘em pick out the bits of lead shot. Dip ducks in hot water with a bit of wood ash added. This’ll get into the oily coating on the duck’s feathers and make ‘em easier to pull out. Leave for as long as it takes to sing to three verses of
Old Joe’s a Blowin'.
Take out, and pluck off feathers. (If you want to use the feathers to make a pillow or quilt though, it’s best to pull out the feathers without washing ‘em, so they stays fluffy.)

Take a sharp knife and cut through between the hip bones, just above you-know-where. Now put your hand in and pull out the guts. Make sure you don’t break the guts or you’ll taint the meat — just wriggle your hand between the guts and the meat.

Wash the guts well. You can wash out the long wriggly bits to make sausage skins. Other bits makes good soup.

Put a long green stick in through the you-know-what and out through the mouth. Rest the stick on two other sticks above a fire what’s been left to burn down to glowing coals. Turn lots so one side don’t burn. Watch out as the fat drips — it can flare up and set your apron alight.

If you have old damper and some savoury and onions you can mix up a good stuffin'. Serve with stewed cherries if they’re in season, or redcurrant jelly.

A pumpkin makes a grand oven if you ain’t got a camp oven. You cuts off the top and scoops out the seeds, thenfills the pumpkin with chopped meat or fish and vegetables or slices of bread and cheese and lots of cream. Put the lid back and leave it by the fire for three or four hours. The food will slowly cook inside the pumpkin. Make sure you gives each cove a good serve of the pumpkin too. It’s cheaper than what meat is.

Prick a pinhole in one end o’ the egg. Lay it in the hot ashes of the fire. Cover with hot ash or coals. Leave for five minutes or as long as it takes to dash into the bush and do you-know-what afore breakfast. It should be nicely soft boiled.

Keep food cool by placin’ it in the creek, or wrappin’ it in a wet cloth and hangin’ it from a tree.

Keep meat and lumps of fat fresh even in a tent by stuffin’ ‘em into the middle o’ the flour bag — the flour keeps the heat an’ flies away.

A billy full of butter or milk stays cool under a tree in a camp oven filled with water. Make sure you keep the lid on the billy to keep out flies and beetles.

The sun is at its highest up in the sky at midday even if it ain’t overhead. You can push a stick into the ground and the shortest shadow is at midday.

Most times it don’t matter what time it is — ye just need to know how long it is till sunset ‘cause that’s when the coves stop work and need a feed.

Badger Joe showed me this trick: late in the afternoon, fill the gap between the sun and the horizon with your fingers with your arm outstretched. Each ‘finger gap’ is about fifteen minutes — so when you can only fit one finger between the sun and the horizon, you’ve only got fifteen minutes till the sun drops out o’ sight and the stew’s got to be hot.

This works even when you’re near a high mountain, though then you’ve got longer till it gets really dark.

Wash the meat in the creek till the maggots float downstream. Then rub the meat gently with your hands till all the slime washes away too. Soak the meat in 1 cup of vinegar in a bucket of water to take away the bad-meat taste. If the meat won’t fit into a bucket, paint it all over with a paste of 1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of salt and ¼ cup of vinegar. Let it dry then add some more afore you cook the meal.

A slush lamp is a tin o’ fat with a wick in it. The wick and fat burn an’ give off light. A slush lamp’ll burn for hours.

Take an old tin (don’t use glass or it’ll break; Jackie says don’t use plastic neither) and cut off the top part — if the can is too high the light’ll be trapped inside. Small cans won’t need cutting back.

Fill with dripping. A wick is a piece of string dipped in vinegar to make it tough, or in saltpetre to help it burn, then dried. If you wants a thicker wick plait the string afore you dips it in the vinegar.

Find a small twig, no longer than your can is wide, and tie one end o’ the wick onto it. This’ll stop it sinking into the fat. Slide the wick into the fat, with the twig stickin’ out.

When your wick has burned away put in another. When your fat starts to stink, get some more.

A slush lamp is smoky, but it keeps bugs away.

Warning. Jackie says:
use gloves to make this, as water that has been washed through ashes can irritate or even badly burn your hands.

Half fill a billy with wood ash, then fill it up with water. Stir it with a stick, then pour into another billy, straining the ash out through an old petticoat.

Now you’ve got good strong ash water that’ll bubble if you add it to buttermilk or soured milk or lemon juice. The bubbles will help make your scones and damper light. It’ll clean plates or clothes too, but be careful as it will be very strong and ‘cause it’ll burn your hands. Use about half a billy can of ‘bush soap’ to a barrel of water.

Jackie says:
the ‘ash water’ is very alkaline. That’s why it bubbles when added to acids (sour milk or lemon juice). It’s too dangerous for me to use. I stick to self-raising flour and soap.

1 cup beeswax

2 cups stewed apple

2 cups coconut oil or mutton dripping

Place all in a pan an’ boil. Pour into tins to set. Keep tins in the creek on hot days.