We all know and understand the notion of mutton dressed as lamb. The worlds of politics and of celebrity are full of muttony old people cosmetically-enhanced to try to make them look younger than they are. But with some fossicking at the National Archives of Australia's new exhibition A Place To Call Home? Migrant hostel memories (it opened on Thursday) visitors will find a story of mutton being dressed as ham.
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Back to that culinary miracle in a moment. But first, a report that the Archives are rich in pictures of hostels and migrants because they are a repository of government materials and because more than 7.5 million migrants, brought here by governments, have arrived in Australia since World War II. At the end of that war, with migrants arriving in droves and with housing at a premium, the government converted former air force and army camps into hostels to provide temporary accommodation for the new Australians. The government took photographs galore of radiantly happy migrants, using the pictures to entice others (including, in 1965, your columnist) to this promised land.
But back to the ham and how the exhibition dwells on how lackustre the food could be at these hostels. Migrants suffered repeated ordeals of boiled mutton, for the migrants' new country teemed with a superabundance of tough old sheep.
But thousands of the migrants who passed through the migrant camp at Bonegilla (near Albury) had cause to bless Hungarian-born Laszlo Makay because between 1963 and 1970 he was Bonegilla's catering officer. He overhauled the unadventurous, mutton-dominated menu and just about doubled the available food options. A Canberran today, he's allowed some of his Bonegilla recipes to be displayed in the A Place To Call Home? exhibition.
He was obviously still under the tyranny of mutton and one recipe, one of his creations that leaps off the page, is his Virginia-Glazed Mock Ham. It was made from corned mutton legs, creatively enhanced and camouflaged by the Virginia glaze. That glaze was made with that famous Australian 1960s' staple - tinned pineapple juice, plus a pound of butter ("or substitute") and a pound of dark brown sugar.
Other hostel morale-lifting recipes of his included the ubiquitous mutton chops but enhanced as Mutton Chops In A Tangy Sauce so tangy-sounding, from the recipe, that it may well have masked any taste of mutton.
This columnist, arriving from England in 1965 (God help me, I was only 18) and spending just a fortnight in a Sydney hostel was struck by how all meals at our hostel, and especially breakfast, were (welcome) bombardments of meat in all its types and guises. This added to the sense of having arrived in a land of plenty where, at the beaches, the young women were as lubriciously lovely in their bikinis as they were in the photographs in the booklets with which, in the 1960s, Australia House in London buttered up poms who had expressed any interest in migration to Australia.
Which brings us back to A Place Called Home? because as the exhibition's curator Amy Lay explained as we stood admiring a picture of vibrantly healthy (and mostly radiantly, north Europeanally blonde) migrant infants at the Bathust Reception Centre in 1951, lots of the migrant and migrant hostel pictures the Archives have in their collection are government-taken photographs. Every visitor to the exhibition who was once a migrant beckoned to Australia by Australian governments' booklets will recognise at once the glowing, smiling, sun-kissed style of the pictures that dominate the show.
And pictures like this one (see the kangaroos?) were meant not only to entice migrants, Lay narrates, but to be published in newspapers so as to give Australians who might be migrant-averse reassuring glimpses of how decent and average migrants were, how like the Australians whose land they had arrived to share, sharing Australia-born Australians' love of children.
But all of this posed loveliness helps contribute to a rather bland show. It and its space are as neat and tidy and quiet (no recordings of migrants' voices, no music of the lands the migrants came from) as a meticulously supervised migrant hostel of the 1960s where audible conversation is frowned upon. Given that migrants' experiences and feelings were so dramatic (they'd crossed the world and were in a strange land) and that the camps were such strange communities, the lives of the camps must have been full of human grittiness. Surely there was despair, dancing, sex, music, laughter, tears? This show barely hints at grit like that.
In search of a little grit one looks among the exhibition's few, small family snaps that have an intimacy, humanity and artlessness the big pictures lack. In one of them an unhappy-looking, dressed-up-in-his-Sunday-best-for-the-camera little Olaf Prattl encounters a kangaroo at the hostel in God-forsaken Greta in 1951. Is it Olaf's first kangaroo? The boy looks as if he may be about to cry and/or to turn and run. Behind him white things flap in a foreign, outback breeze on clothes lines in front of the bleak weatherboard huts of the grim hostel.
The show needs some humanising with some sounds, and some smells too. Why not invite in someone to cook there the sorts of foods people knew at the migrant hostels? What Proustian moments former Bonegilla residents would be given by the unique aromas of the preparation of Pigs Feet (another Laszlo Makay specialty) or of Virginia-Glazed Mock Ham.
