Bangalow resident, author Robert Drewe, who is also, we are proud to say, one of  Verandah Magazine’s regular columinsts, has a nifty turn of phrase – and he’s put his way with words to good use over the years.  Not only is Drewe the author of such classic masterpieces as The Bodysurfers, The Drowner, Shark Net (which won the Premier’s prize for fiction in every state) and Our Sunshine - on which the Ned Kelly film was based – but he’s also the winner of numerous awards for his journalism, including two Walkley awards.

The Bowlo in Bangalow is hosting a special afternoon to celebrate Drewe’s latest books, Swimming to the Moon and The Local Wildlife, both of which are collections of pieces – columns, essays and even ‘thoughts’.  Wry, sardonic, funny – and sometimes sad – these books are classic Robert Drewe.  Spend Sunday afternoon in the company of a masterful wordsmith – with music by Ross Nobel, and high tea provided.

Books will be on sale at the event courtesy of the Bangalow Newsagency.

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Apparently not everybody likes kale…

Our Bangalow-based columnist, Robert Drewe, is not a fan of kale – as far he’s concerned you can give him bacon any time.

Lately I seem to be writing a lot about food. Is it because my family grows a few fruits and vegetables here in the country? That I got a taste for food-writing with my article for Gourmet Traveller in praise of the original Rottnest jam doughnut? That I enjoy eating out? Above all, that I live with a truly excellent cook?

No, it’s because I find the fads, descriptive jargon and pretentions surrounding food to be ridiculously entertaining. Take kale, for example. I know this is sacrilege in these parts but has any single vegetable ever been so suddenly popular for such little reason? Is there a restaurant menu that doesn’t feel it compulsory to feature kale in a walk-on role?

I’m quite familiar with kale. Curious about its wondrous benefits as the latest ‘super-food’, we planted some, and I must say our kale is doing marvellously. In a harsh winter in Bangalow it was the only vegetable not only to survive but to thrive. It’s frost resistant, bug resistant and snail resistant. Kale is also kangaroo and rabbit resistant. Does this tell you anything?

Yes, it’s also flavour resistant. Well, of course you can deep-fry the leaves, drizzle them with oil, then crisp or sauté them and finish with a smidge of garlic (notice my familiarity with the words ‘drizzle’ and ‘smidge’). Then kale is vaguely tasty. But any food that depends totally on garlic and oil for its taste surely isn’t pulling its weight.

Before I leave the subject of kale, I should mention a recent recipe in Gourmet Traveller that said it all for me: ‘Blistered Kale Ribs with Kale-Leaf and Quinoa Salad’. No more common old stalks; apparently vegetables, like animals, now have ribs. (Do you recall quinoa? It was the kale of ten years ago. It took us that long to remember it was pronounced ‘keen-wa’.) It’s great that the two fads are now married in a single meal (a ‘duo’, in fact). But will I, in my lifetime, ever choose to eat this particular dish, whether blistered or not? Nah.

My favourite local restaurant not only fails to see the point of kale, but doesn’t dress up its menu with verbosity. It just gives a reasonable description of what’s on offer. Seeing as we’re not actually in Avignon, its spuds aren’t pommes de terre but potatoes. Its meals don’t claim to be ‘farm-to-table’, ‘farm-fresh’, ‘garden-fresh’ or ‘natural’, claims so over-used they have no meaning. Unlike everywhere else, its soups are ‘hearty’, its salads ‘zesty’, without, for once, having to say so.

“It’s frost-resistant, bug resistant and snail resistant.  Kale is also kangaroo and rabbit resistant.  Does this tell you anything?”

It seldom uses such menu-speak as ‘hand-glazed’, ‘pan-fried’ and ‘oven-roasted’ (how else?), not to mention ‘foraged’, ‘deconstructed’, ‘artisan’, ‘bathed’ and ‘market-fresh’. Did the chef really venture into the fields himself and forage for the mushrooms, or just get them from the market – or Woolies? Of course fresh food comes from a market – and your point is? I suspect chefs want you to be awestruck that they get up at the crack of dawn to hunt down produce at the market. (This isn’t always the case.)

Most chefs prefer to serve a ‘duo’ of ingredients, rather than two. So they can be ‘married’, I guess. If you’re lucky they’re ‘delicately-balanced’, maybe even ‘nestling’ on a ‘bed’ of something.

Why is a dish better for being ‘deconstructed’: ripped up and put together again? (That sounds suspiciously like literary theory.) Meanwhile, ‘artisan’, already grossly over-used, might just be excused as a word for a time-honoured food uniquely crafted by a specialist, but not for potato wedges. And do I want my steak ‘bathed’? I’d prefer an already clean one, thanks. And hold the merlot-thyme jus.

And the kale as well, of course. But I suspect I’m alone here. Kale-mania has spread far beyond Australia. From the New York Times to the mass-market US Weekly (‘Stars Who Love Kale’), the vegetable is a hot topic. The Times said kale had become ‘a symbol of a certain kind of artisanal, ecological lifestyle’. The most popular T-shirt sold in America in the past decade is one emblazoned with the slogan ‘Eat More Kale’.

As the now-wealthy T-shirt creator, Bo Muller-Moore, says, ‘I can tell a lot about a person based on whether they know what kale is. If someone comes up to me and says, ‘What’s kale?’ I feel sorry for them.’

As I said, I’ve tried kale. I prefer bacon.

Robert Drewe’s latest book, a collection of his columns entitled Swimming to the Moon is published by Fremantle Press: fremantlepress

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Digby Hildreth reviews Robert Drewe’s latest book, Swimming to the Moon, a collection of Drewe’s newspaper columns and finds them wry, entertaining and insightful.

Prolific Northern Rivers-based novelist Robert Drewe long ago mastered the short-form newspaper column, telling stories, exploring the goldmine of memory and providing insightful educational précis in about 700 finely crafted words.

Among the 50 vignettes offered here, there’s much that provokes loud laughter, such as the piece Sitting Backwards on Chairs, which turns a sceptical eye on the movie cliché used to signify male earnestness. “The hero (a cop, a reporter, a private eye) can only nut out the problem in hand by spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards,” he notes, although the serious professional men in films, doctors, judges and so forth, “always sit on chairs the right way round”. Just as, he wryly observes, “…in my experience, do all men discussing problems in real life”.

Swimming to the Moon examines such conundrums of popular culture (including popular names for children and their increasingly outlandish spelling variations), makes small histories out of the everyday (such as the loss of his grandmother’s generation’s seemingly endless talent for baking cakes, biscuits and puddings, each lovingly recalled, their sweet delights still fresh in the memory).

There’s more: stirring recollections of an early childhood in Melbourne, followed by a coming of age in WA, with all its golden glow of nostalgia and wince-making efforts to woo his town’s brown-limbed girls.

His “West Australianness, for want of a better description, is more accepting than it was back then. Though more sharply tuned by experience, it’s also more romantic and sentimental”.

Romantic perhaps, but Drewe never lapses into sentimentality. He has too sharp a sense of irony, of the absurd; he’s too curious about today to be mooning about the yesteryears.

And some things are always with us: mention of WA’s doublegee prickle segues into a mini essay on the bindii, which has recently unsheathed itself once again for the summer season, to punish any barefoot chancers. “Prickles” is devoted to the horrible, painful phenomenon but, characteristically, Drewe doesn’t dwell on his personal encounters with the spiky weed, to bleat about the discomfort induced by “the devil’s claw”, but looks more deeply into his subject to reveal, wonderfully, that one type of bindii (Tribulus terrestris) is used by men (and gym junkies) to boost muscle growth and sexual performance. However, he warns (always going that further step into discovery), a study of sheep that ate the plant showed they developed the staggers “and couldn’t mount”.

He gets out and about, revelling in the desert, the shores of the Southern Ocean, and country pubs and fairs, whose activities offer so much to the writer’s eye. “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” he says of the elaborate, often sadistic, shenanigans of the local agricultural show. He doesn’t have to invent material but, as they say, it’s the way he tells ‘em.

Whether drilling down into the details of everyday life, finding the extraordinary in the mundane, navigating his past and current connection with landscape and family, or mocking the vanities of the present age, Drewe maintains his quiet, amused tone: his writing is droll, vivid, clear-sighted, nuanced. He is, above all, witty and entertaining, a restless, inquiring mind shaped by an enviable sense of wonder and expressed through a gift for the exact word.

Swimming to the Moon is, as he remarks about plunging into the ocean after a scorching day, “as good as it gets”.

Swimming to the Moon by Robert Drewe.

Fremantle Press, rrp $29.99 pp224

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