From Guangdong to Goulburn

There is perhaps one thing that unites every Australian town — an institution that has been embedded in our national story since the 18th century: the Australian-Chinese restaurant.

From the Torres Strait to the Tasman Sea, thousands of country towns and outposts lie draped across a multitude of landscapes. In the Top End of the Northern Territory, towns like Katherine emerge from the savannah. In Ceduna, on the eastern edge of the desolate Nullarbor, distinctly South Australian buildings straddle the tiny hospitable strip of land between the wild Southern Ocean and the unforgiving Mallee Scrub. While in NSW, towns like Broken Hill could easily be on another planet, lying beneath the slag heap that replaced its long-gone eponymous land feature.

Yet, there is perhaps one thing that unites every Australian town — an institution that has been embedded in our national story since the 18th century: the Australian-Chinese restaurant.

Australian-Chinese cuisine has a long and fascinating history in our country. Despite popular urban myths, Chinese immigrant communities have been a vital thread in the patchwork of Australian society since Europeans arrived on these shores. According to Historian Michael Williams from the University of Western Sydney, “there’s a bit of a myth around that all Chinese food got introduced to Australia by the American soldiers during [WWII] because they were more used to eating Chinese food in San Francisco — that’s all bullshit”. Not only were American GIs “overpaid, oversexed and over here”, but they were eating Australian-Chinese food that had already been developing into a unique cuisine for over 100 years.

Australian-Chinese cuisine really emerged on the goldfields. From the 1850s onwards, the Gold Rush spread across the pre-federation colonies. It was in this context that Chinese immigration, particularly from the Pearl River Delta in southern China, began in earnest. Chinese migrants — just like many from Western Europe — were initially racked with gold fever and intended to strike it big. However, gold prospecting was a thankless career, and so many Chinese-Australians began to diversify into a wide range of mercantile activities. Some of these activities involved setting up restaurants to cater for the boomtowns of the Gold Rush, the first opening in Ballarat in 1854.

It's thought that by 1890, 1 in 3 chefs in the country were Chinese-Australian. These chefs were cooking for a wide clientele: their restaurants were not only hospitality centres for homesick Chinese émigrés, but businesses targeting predominantly Anglo-European Australians. It was for this reason that an entirely new cuisine developed, fusing elements of predominantly southern Chinese cooking with tastes palatable to white Australians.

Mongolian lamb is one such dish: Chef and food historian Ross Dobson notes that the recipe combines flavours of Guangzhou with Australian lamb — a meat uncommon in southern China but ubiquitous across Australia. Mongolian lamb has nothing at all to do with Mongolia and is “almost entirely unique to Australia”. My personal favourite, sweet and sour pork, is considerably more popular around the world but still diverges from traditional Chinese recipes. Meat as a culinary centrepiece is a theme in Australian-Chinese cuisine, and in sweet and sour pork it is often unconventionally deep-fried, cooked in that delicious, fluoro-red sauce and topped with pineapple — three acts all incongruous with the dish’s origins in Guangdong province.

By the turn of the 20th century, Australian-Chinese cuisine was ubiquitous from Sydney to Sarina in Queensland. From our capital cities to the outback, it remains a unique and thriving cuisine across Australia.

But why is small-town Chinese food in particular so special? For me, it is an essential part of any good Australian town. I have been lucky enough to travel extensively across Australia, and in every far-flung settlement I’ve visited, its exquisite and homely flavours have been a perpetual source of joy. There is something inexpressibly special about throwing your bags down in a Hughenden motel and taking a stroll through the evening light to one of the best Australian-Chinese restaurants in Australia. Piling the delicious food from plastic takeaway containers onto motel plates is an essential part of the ritual, as is sitting cross-legged on a delightfully 1960s style bed to consume the meal.

Eating at these delightful establishments is just as dear to my heart. The visual aesthetic of the small-town Chinese restaurant is simultaneously tacky and incredibly beautiful. Take Coonabarabran’s Golden Sea Dragon Chinese Restaurant as an example, ornately decked from the floor to the ceiling in elaborate and vibrant décor. Or Katherine’s Regent Court Chinese Restaurant at the gateway to the Top End: its dim interior, populated by quilted circular tables capped with Lazy Susan’s, coupled with an incredible sweet and sour pork, makes for an ideal small-town Chinese restaurant.

Enjoying Australian-Chinese food throughout rural and outback Australia has become a quintessential part of my road-trip experience since childhood. It is neither ‘authentically’ Chinese nor Anglo-Australian. Rather, it represents an important – and delicious – component of Australia’s multicultural society, an inventive blending of global techniques and local tastes to produce a delightful cuisine unique to Australia.