ABSTRACT
The first recorded sighting of the Devil at work in Australia was June 1829 in the modest dining room of Government House in Hobart, the capital of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). That Satan had a hand in their dinner caused no alarm to the 14 men who sat down to it with the Governor that evening. Perhaps the animated conversation on fox hunting had been too engrossing, or the “excellent” wine had dulled their senses, such that not even the officer of the church present noted the influence of his nemesis in the meal (Stukeley 1829, 4). Yet when the writer among the party afterward reported on this event he imputed the evil one had influenced the output of the gubernatorial kitchen by declaring “the dinner was good of its kind”, but “though Heaven sends meat, the Devil sends cooks” (ibid.). This “rough old adage” – about the Devil and cooks – was regularly restated in newspapers and other serial publications across the Australian colonies, claiming Beelzebub as a key influence on local cookery (see Argus 1876, 4; O’Brien 2016, 71). In 1854, an “enterprising Frenchman” reportedly assisted Sydney residents to “evade” the fiendish influence evident in the “tough beef and tasteless mutton” they had been enduring when he opened a restaurant there (The Café Restaurant George Street 1854, 3). The Prince of Darkness was also said to have shown his hand in the viands provided at a public banquet in Bendigo in 1859 (Inauguration of Bendigo Waterworks 1859, 2) and was spotted again some 2,000 kilometres north in Maryborough in 1868, where he apparently influenced the “indescribable loafers” loitering around the sugar mills there to concoct an inferior “slabby compound” of raw sugar to sell (Maryborough Chronicle 1868, 2). In the remote Northern Territory, the only cooks available were apparently of this dastardly mould, unable to tell the “difference between soap and porridge” (Northern Territory Times and Gazette 1870, 2). By 1876, diabolic cookery was so widespread it was claimed “thousands of women” were causing their husbands and children to “perish” every year by feeding them “improper or badly cooked food” (Argus 1876, 4): It was a “very ghastly record… altogether disgraceful to… civilisation” (ibid.).
