As part of the brand-new series Memory Bites with Matt Moran on SBS, Christine is walked through a ‘memory box’ by Matt to reveal relics that speak to her special memories of her upbringing and her father – honouring her Torres Strait Islander heritage with a seafood feast.
For Christine, Memory Bites was an opportunity to talk about the provider that her late father was – something she says she had previously taken for granted. “I then became really interested in the idea of what those memories would be for me, because it really is a trip down memory lane,” she tells Missing Perspectives.
“If we didn’t go hunting, fishing, collecting food, then there’d be nothing to eat for dinner. Absolutely everyone was involved in making that come to fruition for the evening. So, you know, it was just a fact of life. And you know, dad spearfishing wasn’t something that he could do every day, hunting as well. It’s seasonal, and the weather’s not always great for it. But the fact that dad could do that was really – for me – really quite amazing. And it wasn’t until his passing in 2019 that those sorts of memories really came alive,” she says.
To Christine, her father was many things – and a lover of the ocean. “You don’t sort of walk around with those memories and talk about them all the time. You think, oh, wow. Dad was a pearl diver. Growing up, when we go to the pool in Brisbane or go to the pool anywhere we were, he loves diving games. Now, what I mean by that is they weren’t just, let’s dive into the pool with your arms outstretched and, you know, head first kind of thing. No, you’d say, Okay, we find a rock. This would be right, you know, in the ocean, zoom around, find yourself a rock. Hold on to the rock and let your breath out slowly, and let the rock take you to the bottom. And once we get used to that idea of letting the breath out and staying still, then he’d go, you can stay down for the longest. Because he always won.”
For Christine, preparing a seafood feast is a way of honouring her father’s spearfishing legacy and his love for the ocean, and her Torres Strait Islander heritage. She says that she’s loved the increased presence of Torres Strait Islander cuisines in Australian cities, and on TV, such as through the work of renowned Melbourne chef Nornie Bero from Masterchef. “It’s just been so wonderful that our food, our cuisine, has become visible on the Aussie palate, you know, just recently,” she says. “And it’s so worthy of celebration and and it has its place.”
Christine says that Torres Strait Islander people each have their own variation of the seafood feast prepared on the show. “So these dishes will be eaten by every Torres Strait Islander, no matter where you live in Australia. And everyone knows this dish, but every family does that dish differently, and why not give it to Matt [Moran], to give Matt’s little, you know, flavour to it,” she says.
“So bully beef is one of them, right? So after the Second World War, when men came home and sort of mimicked what they received in their army kit [and] the rations. I think it was for World War Two; they started introducing tinned produce, tinned meat, tinned fruit. Things were tinned. And I guess that became the first time that tinned meat was introduced to the [Torres Strait] Islanders. Now, when I talked about fishing and hunting being seasonal, this all of a sudden completely put something else there for those times when food was unavailable from the ocean. So everybody around Australia in the Torres Strait, everyone’s got bully beef, and we call it bully beef, but it’s really called beef in a tin, and everybody’s got their own version of it.”
Christine’s love for her traditional cuisine really does shine through – and it’s clear the memory associations with the food has really surprised her during the process of making the show. “I would never have thought about memory associations with this food…. It’s been so long, you know, since I’ve had this food, or you go to someone’s house and, you know, family or community, and they’ve got that dish there, it’s like, Oh my God. Now I know I’m really taking home and back to your memories.”
Christine Anu’s episode of Memory Bites with Matt Moran airs on Monday March 24 on SBS Food and SBS On Demand. All six episodes of Memory Bites with Matt Moran will be available to stream on SBS On Demand with
subtitles in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
Top photo source: Supplied/SBS
