Sean Dooley - Cooking with Baz: How I Got to Know My Father

PRAISE FOR SEAN DOOLEY

If you write well, you really can write about anything. Never has
this truism been more effectively demonstrated than in this
delightfully quirky book... [Dooley] has turned a potentially
turgid subject into a sweet wonderland of human eccentricity.
Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald

A funny man, and surprise, surprise, The Big Twitch is a
disarmingly entertaining book. An unexpected charmer.
Adelaide Advertiser

This is vivid and wickedly funny writing an unabashed celebration
of life, of diversity, and of going all-out to realize a dream.
Good Reading Magazine

[Dooley is] engaging, funny and self-aware.
Stephen Moss, The Guardian (UK)

[Dooley] somehow manages to amuse and engage readers
who couldnt care less whether he does catch up with
a Buff-breasted Paradise Kingfisher.
Ian Warden, Canberra Times

[a] marvelously funny memoir will keep even the non-birding
reader in stitches. Prepare to laugh out loud.
Nancy Bent, Booklist

Seans wry observations of everyday life provide an
entertaining distraction.
www.surfbirds.com

Sean has a lively imagination, an antipodean propensity to
exaggeration and a sense of the ridiculous clearly forged in the
twin fires of his youth where Monty Python vied for his
attention as often as Bill Oddies Little Black Book.
www.fatbirder.com

SEAN DOOLEY

First published in 2009

Copyright Sean Dooley 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Dooley, Sean, 1968

Cooking with Baz: how I got to know my father /

Sean Dooley.

ISBN: 978 1 74175 273 1 (pbk.)

Dooley, Barry.

Fathers and sonsAustraliaBiography.

Authors, AustralianBiography.

FamilyAustralia.

Parent and childAustralia.

CookeryAnecdotes.

306.8742

Cover and text design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Typesetting by Pauline Haas, Bluerinse Setting

Edited by Jo Jarrah

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

For Eleanor and Edie
The greatest joy in my life is to have the two of you by my side.
The greatest sadness is that you never got to meet Baz and Di.
They would have loved you both so much.

Its much better to take a punt, especially an informed one. You take a risk, and have to be prepared to cop more losses than usual, but when you win, the rewards are so much greater. In fact, both the wins and the losses are sweeter. You can spend your life making sure you are right, that you are on a sure thing, but it is ultimately a life of little joy and very little thrill. You dont necessarily have to go for the rank outsider but, believe me, you feel much more alive backing a 10 to 1 shot than an odds-on favourite every time.BARRY DOOLEY

I never thought Id end up cooking with Baz.

It was never something that was particularly high on my agenda of things to do with my life. While I had enjoyed my fathers cooking over the years, Baz and my culinary tastes had, like virtually everything in our lives, moved in different directions. He was a meat and three veg kind of bloke, particularly if you replaced one or two of the vegies with more meat. Me, well, I didnt know what kind of bloke I was; all I knew was that as I got older, a constant diet of steak and chips was not enough.

At one point in my late teens I had flirted with the notion of going vegetarian. While this phase didnt last too long, it was enough to set the plate tectonics of our relationship into a continent-size drift, particularly when one day I declared (parroting what a vegan friend had told me) that of all the dairy products, Dad, cheese is the biggest killer. Baz looked at me as if I had blasphemed. He got angry on behalf of cheese and demanded to know what the hell I was on about. I didnt really know myself but stuck to my guns and gave a garbled response about high saturated fat content and cholesterol levels. As a recent survivor of bowel cancer brought on, no doubt, by a diet excessively high in animal fats and exceptionally low in fibre, I thought Baz might have been interested in such a titbit.

I was wrong. Bazs look of sheer incomprehension that his own son could believe such a thing about something as dependable and innocent as cheese said to me that my father and I were not only on a different page, we were following an entirely different cookbook. No, I never foresaw the possibility that Baz and I would ever cook together. Perhaps I could imagine stirring the gravy for him when I visited home for a roast dinner while he gave the spuds one last blast, and I might ask for his advice on when to turn the steak at a family barbecue, but I was sure that would be about it as far as it would go for Baz and me when it came to cooking together. But then, life is full of Vesta situations.

For those completely baffled by this last sentence, life is full of Vesta situations is a line from a 1970s ad for a type of instant rice dinner. It involved boatloads of people unexpectedly dropping in on a couple in a remote lighthouse. As each visitor knocks on the door seeking shelter from the storm, the wife just smiles, pulls out a packet of Vesta and utters that memorable phrase. The woman who played the role of the philosophical housewife was the smoky-voiced comic Noelene Brown. I remember as an eight year old, thinking she was the most glamorous creature I had ever seen, and I would look forward with a salacious, yet nonsexual thrill to the moment at the end of Blankety Blanks when she would stage-kiss the host, Graham Kennedy. I am glad that it was a thrill of a pre-sexual kind, because it would be disturbing to me now to think that I got my rocks off watching a woman so heavily made up like a drag queen (as was the style of the time) pretending to pash a closeted gay man.

In her autobiography, Noelene comments that of all the advertising shoots she ever worked on, this was the only one where the crew didnt tuck into the food immediately after filming was over. As to the quality of the Vesta product, I cant comment. We never ate it in our house. My mother, Di, would resort to frozen hamburgers, fish fingers and packets of instant, self-saucing pasta, but somehow drew the line at Vesta. Yet, even though I never ate a Vesta dinner, the tag line from the ad will, on the odd occasion, still pop out of my mouth. I find it disturbing that the names of people I have just met slip from my grasp while slogans from TV commercials of the seventies and eighties will enter my head without any prompting. I tell you, ooh, it does get in; it really can change the colour of your day, so avagoodweekend Mr Walker...