My food evolved out of necessity, the need to modify recipes, design and prepare dishes that would work consistently in the outdoors, from a four wheel drive trailer modified into an Outback kitchen, to a backpack on the summit of a mountain peak. The recipes in my book OUTBACK - recipes and stories from the campfire are those that I have prepared time and time again in the wilderness. They simply work. In today’s busy world, many people don’t have the time to go to great lengths preparing complex dishes. They need something that comes together quickly, is nutritious, has plenty of flavour, and doesn’t require the skills of a three star chef to succeed, so these recipes work in the home kitchen as well. In order to appreciate this, I need to explain my background and how that influenced the evolution of my food. 

I grew up in Melbourne in the sixties – all patriotism aside, a culinary wilderness. When Ave Gardner came to film ‘On the Beach’, she dryly referred to 1959 Melbourne as ‘the ideal place to film the end of the world’. Dinner parties were popular because there were so few restaurants. They generally involved plenty of liquor but not much wine. Everyone smoked lots of cigarettes. The hors d’oeuvres were invariably ‘devils on horseback’ – bacon wrapped prunes, or brightly colored cocktail onions and cubes of tasteless cheddar on toothpicks. The favored entrée was seafood cocktail – bite size pieces of fish plus one prawn served in a cocktail glass on a piece of iceberg lettuce with a dollop of Thousand Island dressing. Dessert was usually chocolate mousse. My parents were very keen sailors, so my sister and I were lucky and ate a lot of delicious fresh fish, mainly flathead caught in Port Phillip Bay.. They’re not the brightest of fish: my father once caught one using a cigarette butt for bait. Red meat was cheap and plentiful, so we regularly enjoyed roasts, chops and steaks. On Thursday nights our parents would take us to Rigoletto, a small Italian Restaurant in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond where I could order Oysters Mornay and enjoy a glass of red wine. On the occasional Sunday we would be treated to an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord in the Mayfair Room at the Southern Cross – for years Melbourne’s premier hotel. Even the Beatles stayed there!

When I was ten I sent a job application to my ‘Uncle’ Ollie who operated a ski resort in the Mt. Buffalo National Park in North East Victoria. Ollie was really my godfather, he was a Czech who fought the Nazis, then came to Australia as a refugee after the Second World War. In his eastern European kitchen I discovered a whole new world of food. I learned to roll out apple strudel, whisk zabaglione and froth cappuccino. I learnt to speak basic German. During the summer when I was not in the kitchen I was out bushwalking and climbing amongst the granite tors of the national park, and in winter I was snow skiing. My childhood and teen years at Mt. Buffalo set me on a lifelong course that would involve a passion for food and a profound love of nature and wild places.When I was fourteen my father married Chow Siu Mai, who came from Hong Kong, and all of a sudden a whole new cuisine appeared in our life. We often dined at Melbourne’s Flower Drum Restaurant, where Suzie would order all kinds of weird stuff that wasn’t on the menu. I just couldn’t get enough of it. chicken’s feet, tripe, pork dumplings. She showed me how the cheeks and the eyes of steamed fish are the sweetest part. At home she taught me to stir fry, steam and braise; how to make delicate sauces, how important the combination of sweet and salt was.
I delighted in inviting my school friends around and cooking for them.

When I finished school I had a brief dalliance with hotel management. The college I studied at was still stuck in sixties. One of the subjects we studied was cocktail service. Trouble was there was no liquor license, so we mixed pineapple creams and soda shakes. At the time I was working at night as a trainee manager with a restaurant chain, so I lost interest very quickly in my course. I went into the industry full time. I was soon sent to Adelaide as assistant manager of the South Australian operation. During that period I developed a musical mime show which I performed at Adelaide's Toucan Club. I soon grew tired of the erratic hours, smoky bars and unhealthy lifestyle. I pined for the mountains, but Ollie had sold his resort at Mt. Buffalo. I went instead to Mt. Buller where I worked as a ski lift operator, house musician and DJ. From there I moved to the Austrian Tyrol, where I qualified as a ski instructor. My winters were spent skiing and playing guitar in the après bars. Spring, summer and autumn were spent mountaineering, climbing many of Europe’s most famous peaks. Suspended on an ice wall high above a glacier you know without words both the fragility of your own life and your oneness with nature.Later in London, working as a musician I fell in love, and within a year I was back in Melbourne, married to my wife Jane and working as an audio producer in a recording studio. It sounded cool, but the enclosed environment of the recording studio was a long way from the sparkling powder snow of Tyrol.

Cabin fever was setting in: it was time to reappraise my life and change direction. I had bush skills, I could cook. Ski instructing had taught me how to get on with people, and I loved the outdoors. Jane and I decided to become tour operators, and in 1987 we registered the Diamantina Touring Company. That same year we moved to Jamieson, a tiny town in the Victorian high Country. We had one son, Paddy and Jane was pregnant with our second son Jack.  We advertised a 14 day wilderness walk into the back country in the Victorian Alps. The idea was that I would lead a group along the Alpine Walking Track whilst a back up four wheel drive vehicle would carry the gear. Where the walking track intersected a vehicle track we would camp, and I would cook an evening meal. We called it extreme cuisine -fine dining in a wilderness setting.I borrowed a trailer and emptied the kitchen drawer. I bought an old refrigerator, took the motor out of it, laid the casing on its side and filled it with ice, and at four am on the morning of our first expedition (we had five guests), I went down to the Victoria markets and bought the best food I could lay my hands on. After a couple of days of rough travel the blood from the meat had mixed with the ice. The stone fruit was bruised. The greens had wilted, bottles had smashed, and the trailer had turned into a nasty mass of frothing food combinations. The bread went mouldy; all the wine glasses had broken. At intervals an abraided beer can would explode as we bounced over corrugated roads.The wilderness teaches hard lessons. If I was going to serve the kind of food I had in mind, I was going to have to have a major rethink. I did. The next winter, having changed everything – menus, the choice of food, and all aspects of its storage and transport and preparation – I lead a disaster-free expedition to climb Mt. Woodruffe, South Australia’s highest and most collectible peak. That same year I became the inaugural President of the Victorian Tourism Operators Association, a position I held for seven years.

The Outback was getting under my skin. More expeditions were planned to increasingly remote places. We teamed up with arid zone ecologists, museum and university researchers. In 1990 Jane gave birth to our daughter Rose. In 1991 Diamantina won a Victorian Tourism Award, and I was appointed a Commissioner of the Victorian Tourism Commission. In 1994 we won the prestigious German Holiday Oscar for best expedition worldwide. That same year I was asked to guide Ted Egan and a film crew from Channel 7's "The Great Outdoors" into the High Country. I think they must have liked the food, because a producer rang me the following week and asked me if I would like to produce cooking segments, so within a couple of weeks I was cooking on prime time national television. We pioneered a lot of the outdoor cooking techniques now a part of the whole 'celebrity chef' thing. They say there are two kinds of television presenter, those who have been axed, and those who are about to be. Although we were receiving hundreds of letters every week, the network wanted to change the program to a travel show and had no further use for a chef. Because I was so busy with the outback expeditions, I had no time to chase around the agencies for more work in that industry, so my television career came to an abrupt end,to be years later be ressurected.

In 1998 I led an expedition across a trackless section of the Simpson Desert to relocate nine abandoned Aboriginal wells in the Simpson Desert discovered by the explorer David Lindsay in 1886. I was leading expeditions to more and more remote places, like the Warburton Groove and the mouth of the Cooper.

The outback in general is a culinary wilderness. South Australia has some wonderful outback country, and also hosts in Adelaide one of the world’s best food festivals ‘Tasting Australia’, which is attended by many food writers from around the world. To solve the culinary problem they asked me if I would take a group of food writers to Lake Eyre, the Oodnadatta Track and the Flinders Ranges. It was on that expedition that I met Cathy Cochrane, who was at that time managing a series of cooking schools at the Central Markets in Texas. She asked me if I would come to Texas in 2001 and give a series of cooking classes in the major cities around Texas. It was a great success and a lot of fun, so I went back in 2004 for another series. It was then that Cathy suggested that I write a cookbook, so I guess without her initial input OUTBACK may not have ever eventuated.

In 2006 I was awarded the Qantas award for the Most Significant Contribution by an Individual at the Victorian Tourism Awards. The honeymoon was short lived however because a couple of weeks later the fires broke out in the hills around Jamieson and being a volunteer with the CFA, I was soon called up to fight the fires. A week later I became Media Liaison Officer for the Terrible complex. The fire went on to burn out 1.3 million hectares.

In 2008, a new book OUTBACK Cooking was released by Miegunyah. I presented several segments on Channel 9's flagship cooking program Fresh TV, with host Pete Evans at Mt Beauty, and on my own in the Flinders Ranges. I spent the last months of 2008 writing my next book, OCEANS - Recipes and Stories from Australia's coast, a seafood book with stories of the maritime exploration of Australia. OCEANS was launched by Sir Andrew Grimwade at Docklands in Melbourne in November 2009. During March of that year I travelled to the USA. I addressed the Australian American Association in New York and gave an address at the World Congress of the Interational Association of Culinary Professionals held in Denver. It was a huge event, but the highlight for me was cooking up a storm with Chef John Ash at an exclusive five star evening at the Denver Cookschool.

In October - November 2010 I produced The Campfire Chronicles, a pilot for a television series. An episode titled"The Wonnangatta Murders" as shot in December in the Alpine National Park in Victoria.

I am also a keen ocean racer, and in 2010 crewed in The Melbourne - Stanley and Latitude Series as well as the Melbourne - Hobart race on "Escapade".

I live in Jamieson with my wife Jane. We have three children who are all young adults, two in Melbourne, one in Shanghai.