'We now have the very popular "Outback Steakhouses", purporting to be
Australian but serving very little mutton and a lot of beef in the
finest traditions of old Albion.'

I gather the Outback Steakhouse bears as much resemblance to what we
eat in Australia as McDonalds does to Scottish food [or foodways as we
say in archaeology for some reason].

More generally, is all this food discussion getting back to a pretty
simplistic 'marker artefact' type of search for ethnicity / social
grouping / whatever?  I thought that the discipline had gone beyond the
'Chinese ceramic = Chinese person' kind of equivalence, because a
typical [non Outback Steakhouse] Australian diet in any week = Thai,
Lebanese, Italian, Croatian regional, Vietnamese, English crap, US fast
food etc.

Back last century Martin Wobst wrote a really neat paper on how
material culture distinguished people's membership of different groups,
using the Balkans as an example.  Food was far less effective than other
means, mainly dress, shaving / hairstyles etc.  His research was done in
an area where social grouping was multi-layered, and often volatile
between groups.  On this basis could you expect Southernnessness to be
more pronounced in conditions where group membership mattered - ACW,
enclaves of southern migrants in northern cities etc?

Denis



Denis Gojak
Heritage Asset Manager
Planning NSW

PO Box 404
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