As restrictions on movement intensify due to Covid-19, the lure of country life is ever strengthening. Lockdowns present a poignant time for those of us who are city bound to imagine a tree change from the comfort of the couch but, if you really want to understand rural life in Australia, Australia’s Food Bowl is a great place to start.
Hosted by charismatic and committed Mildura restaurateur Stefano de Pieri and currently streaming on SBS On Demand, Australia’s Food Bowl makes the Murray and Darling-Barka rivers the stars of the show. Australia’s Food Bowl is lush with bountiful fresh food, hard-working people, the pleasures of eating; yet food production and community life are shown to be reliant on ecosystems that are under extreme pressure. The river system is in strife.
De Pieri visits all manner of growers across the rich red-soiled Mallee region. Innovation in agriculture is his central theme and it is occurring on many fronts in response to a suite of pressures. Take brothers Paul and Craig, who shifted their large acreage from grapes to snow peas a decade ago. We learn that their experiment with ground cover crops and mulching has reduced their usage of scarce water by an astonishing 50%. De Pieri also meets Barkandji elder Peter Peterson and learns of the river as the spiritual and ecological source that connects all living things. De Pieri enjoys a riverside barbecue of kangaroo rissoles, mash and snow peas cooked by his former apprentices, local Aboriginal women Whitney and Tamara.
Standing with fifth-generation farmer Rachel Strachan, Stefano shares the jubilation as water flows across the parched Darling-Barka riverbed for the first time in two years. The compounding water crisis has led Strachan to destroy decades-old citrus plantations and grapevines and replace them with sheep. She has also become a formidable campaigner for fairer water allocation and regulation.
The series brings to the fore just how important it is to understanding the interconnections of things. Almond trees cannot produce nuts without the pollination of bees. Communities of fish, birds, animals and people cannot survive without water flowing through their rivers. Commitments to place run deep out here – despite intensifying pressures, people don’t talk of moving to the city. The elephant in the room, subtly invoked, is the need for far better and fairer regulation of water flow by governments.
Australia’s Food Bowl makes a striking contrast with other streaming offerings on the theme of rural life, none more so than the ABC’s Movin’ to the Country. In that show, we meet “gutsy entrepreneurs” and “dreamers” who have decamped from the city, ostensibly for a simpler life. Such as the story of Richard and Ian, who bought a law firm in central New South Wales and expanded it into a national business via a $6m purpose-built digital platform. Not content to stop there, courtesy of genetic experimentation, the couple also invented a new species of red wagyu beef cattle for export to a “super-premium” market. Then there is Toni, who left a high-flying Wall Street career to take up sheep farming in central Victoria. Her marketing eye soon hit upon the idea of selling a new kind of bacon made from lamb bellies. Before the pandemic closed international borders, Toni was vigorously pursuing export contracts in the Middle East.
Movin’ to the Country’s cheerful individual success stories pile up but any sense of how these connect to life on the ground, or to any idea of rural community, is missing. What this series delivers is rather a celebration of the commercialisation of ideas, and an extractivist attitude that many argue continues to wreak havoc in the bush, most evidently in the profit-driven imperatives of foreign ag-investors.
Back on the Murray, standing in the middle of an expansive almond grove, De Pieri introduces an intergenerational Anglo-Australian farmer to the sheer delight of eating young green nuts straight from the tree. In this simple but intimate moment of exchange across cultural traditions, something vital is communicated of how communities are cultivated and sustained.
What Australia’s Food Bowl demonstrates is that securing a future for regional Australia will not turn on the arrival of a new stream of individuals primed for their own success and ready to move on when markets draw them elsewhere. Rather, it will turn upon shared recognition of unprecedented challenges and interdependent needs, desires and responsibilities. Addressing those of us watching on, de Pieri subtly extends the edges of his community outwards: “We all have a stake in making sure we have healthy rivers.”
