Chapter XIV: The Australian at the Breakfast Table

From a close observation of Australian restaurants I have come to the conclusion that the Australian does not eat his food--he wolfs it. He's not very particular either what he eats. (In Queensland earth is in his dieting scale). What he chiefly wants is something to chew, and he usually bites off more than he comfortably can.

He's argumentative at the breakfast table, and the less he knows about a subject the more he'll say. One of him wanted to argue with me only the other morning on this very subject of eating. The argument turned on the word "dinner," and he let his porridge get cold while he went for a dictionary. "_To dine_," he said, with his mouth full, "is to 'take dinner,' and according to this dictionary that is 'the chief meal of the day.'" That's just it--the Australian regulates it by size; he cannot distinguish between a meal and a dinner.

Delicate glass, spotless napery, flowers, and above all sparkling conversation--those larger delights!--he does not encourage. He is a mere gross feeder. I am talking now of the man who can afford these things (even the employment of a conversationalist), not of the sixpenny "Dining" rooms, of which Australia is the home. How horrible these "dining" rooms are on a hot day! You can smell them two streets off. If you are brave enough to look in you will see what you usually go to the zoo at 4 o'clock to watch.

There is no restaurant in Australia where you can get a meal suited to the climate, and as for "home" meals, well, if an Australian asks you to his house to dine don't go unless you're an ostrich. Cooking among Australian women is a lost art. The Australian girl goes in for "accomplishments" only. If she is ever called upon to cook anything she uses the frypan.

If I ever set up business in Australia it would be in three "lines"--frying pans, false teeth, and patent medicines.

Everything is washed down in Australia with tea. It is a dangerous beverage as it is made there, in witness thereof are the clayey complexions and dyspeptic noses of the women. Why they don't drink wine, the natural beverage of the country, I never could make out until I tasted the vintages. But they are improving. Some foreigners are making very decent wine in Australia just now; but the Australians won't drink it until it is exported and returns again to the country with a French brand on it. The same remark applies to most things in Australia. They don't manufacture anything. I once dined with a squatter in Queensland, and there was not an article of furniture in the room that had been made in Australia, and not a thing on the table, except the vegetables, but was imported. The table linen, the glassware, the knives, the crockery--all were imported. The wine was imported, so was the salmon, and the coffee, and his "Missus's" cat was Manx. And yet there wasn't a thing in the room but the raw material could have been produced in the country, right down to the condiments.