Pie night

It is one of the standing jokes of Football that the finals series usually goes by without supporters of the Melbourne Demons even noticing as they catch up on a little late season snow on the fields or chew on a cheese board in the MCC Members. Finally, 57 years since their last success, it was the Melbourne FC that held the cup aloft on Grand Final night, running out winners against the Footscray Bulldogs. Congrats to you Melbourne. Those old, moggies were obviously not listening when I advised them last month to, “Carpe Diem”. In this house we watched the Grand Final from Perth on the telly, just like tens of thousands of other households across Melbourne that night and in our case, tucking into a traditional Footy Pie Night during the game. There are any number of ways to make that great Australian culinary masterpiece, the meat pie. If you’re a vegetarian, you don’t even really need to use meat, but tonight when the attention of Footy tragics turns to the draft, here’s tell of a serve of “dog’s eye and dead horse” from the 2021 Finals series that was.

The rest of us can eat humble pie: Melbourne, not so bitter on Grand Final night.

2021 GF pie

Shortcrust pastry ingredients

• 275g plain flour
• ¾ tsp salt
• 150g unsalted butter, cold, cut into 1cm cubes
• Butter to grease the pie dishes
• 4½ tbsp chilled water (plus more as needed)

Pie lid

• 1kg packet, store bought frozen puff pastry sheets, recently thawed
• 1 egg yolk, lightly whisked with 1 tbsp water

Filling

• 1.25kg gravy beef cut into small pieces
• 250g short cut bacon cut into short strips
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp pepper
• 2 or 3 tbsp olive oil
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 150g frozen green peas, defrosted, plus extra to serve
• 2 onions, diced
• 5 tbsp plain flour
• 1¼ cups (315ml) beef stock
• 3 cups (750ml bottle) dry red wine
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp black pepper, coarsely ground
• Tasty, sliced cheese

Method

For the filling, sprinkle beef with ½ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large heavy-based pot over high heat. Add half of the beef and brown, then remove. Repeat with remaining beef, adding more oil as needed. Set aside.

Turn the heat down to medium-high. Add crushed garlic, bacon and onion with a little oil and cook for about 3 minutes. Add the flour and stir through. Slowly add beef stock, stirring constantly. Once the flour is dissolved thoroughly, add the tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, pepper and dry red wine. This recipe uses a full 750ml bottle.

Return the beef to the pot, cover with lid and adjust heat so it’s simmering gently. Leave to cook slowly for up to 2 hours. Remove pot cover, increase heat slightly and simmer for a further 30 minutes, stirring regularly or until the beef is fork tender and the liquid has reduced to a thickish gravy. Stir through 150g thawed peas and allow the filling to cool before chilling in the fridge until quite cold, (warm filling will ruin the pastry).

For the shortcrust pastry, combine 275g plain flour, ¾ tsp salt and 150g unsalted butter and mix by hand into a dough. Turn out onto lightly floured work surface, briefly knead together to form a smooth ball then pat into a 2cm-thick round disc. Wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 1 hour.

You will need individual pie dishes. I used the single pie dishes my mother baked with 30 years ago but you could use ramekins or large muffin tins if you don’t have individual pie tins. Butter each dish and cover with a piece of baking paper. Roll out the shortcrust dough thinly on a lightly floured work surface. Cut out pie dish shapes and line the pie tins. Prick bases with a fork and freeze for ½ hour.

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan-forced (200°C conventional). Fill each pie base with the cooled pie filling topped by a slice of Tasty cheese. Cut pie shapes from the recently thawed puff pastry. Brush around the edge of the shortcrust with egg, then top with the puff pastry. Trim the excess, stamping round the edges firmly with a fork, then brush the lid with egg and cut a 1cm cross in the centre.

Bake for 30 minutes until a deep golden brown. Serve with tomato sauce and steamed peas.

Home-made pies take time and patience, sort of like your favourite footy team.

Did somebody say Pie Night?

Put away the muskets

The sight of Australia’s first Governor, Arthur Phillip lying face down on a Sydney beach in1790 with over three metres of Indigenous barbed spear in his shoulder is not something that immediately springs to mind when we think of Reconciliation. The tribes had many grievances but what elevates this story in my mind is what came next, or rather what didn’t come next. As the critically injured Phillip was bundled back into the bottom of his boat by his men, he ordered his soldiers to put away their muskets.

Phillip survived and went on to make a full recovery but there’s no escaping the fact that the arrival of European society in this country remained a catastrophic event in the lives of First Nations people. It is hard at times to reconcile the many perspectives borne of the cross cultural clashes that followed but asking forgiveness for what happened in the past does not necessarily mean to forget history, even where the passage of time makes truth telling a challenge.

In my last post, I wrote about one of the greatest athletes of Australia’s colonial age, Tom Wills who now lies mouldering away in a grave up at the Warringal Cemetery, within easy reach of the mortal remains of the not so athletic Mr T Wragge Esq of Yallambie. As Wills’ old football clubs, Melbourne and Geelong readied themselves to play off in the 2021 football finals series, it seemed to me like a good time to recount a shortened version of the short life of Tom Wills. Here was a Ripping Yarn for the telling, make no mistake. The documented friendships Wills enjoyed with First Nations people, touched only lightly upon in my post, was another side to that story, made all the more remarkable by the death of his father who was murdered alongside 18 others by Indigenous people in Queensland.

Maybe like me you saw the sensationalist claims that surfaced in the press soon after that post. Those claims detailed the alleged involvement of Tom in a deadly and disproportionate retaliatory raid on Indigenous people that followed the Cullin-la-ringo massacre. The claims were based on a racist diatribe written anonymously to a Chicago newspaper in America, more than 30 years after the event and if true, they put Wills in a very damaging light. On first reading the detail of the I Zingari jacket sounded particularly incriminating.

Days passed. Indigenous leaders were asked to comment. The AFL said they would need to take advice. Melbourne FC triumphed in the Grand Final. Finally, the day following that game, Martin Flanagan revealed in The Age that the story about Wills had only partly quoted the Chicago article. Taken in its entirety, little of the source material could be said to be plausible. The Chicago writer had managed to get nearly all Tom’s family relationships wrong, the lurid portrayal of the attack by the tribes at Cullin-la-ringo was clearly an utter fabrication, while the writer had even managed to locate Cullin-la-ringo in the wrong Australian Colony altogether.

Wills’ biographer, Greg de Moore who spent more than ten years of his life researching his definitive “First Wild Man of Australian Sport”, while not prepared to dismiss completely the possibility of Wills involvement in the attacks that followed Cullin-la-ringo, said he had found no evidence of it during his research. In the heat of the moment that followed the death of his father, as first man on the scene after the attack, Tom had certainly called out for vengeance, but was Tom thinking of lawful or lynch mob justice?

Last weekend, following up on the original story, another much more likely event appeared in the press, describing how Wills had lead the Indigenous cricketers he was supposed to be mentoring into the destructive effects of alcohol abuse. Alcohol likely led to the premature deaths of a number of the Indigenous cricketers but then, this was a fate also shared by Wills himself. Wills has been elevated to legendary hero status by proponents of the history of our game and his early recognition of the natural brilliance of Indigenous sportsmen is well understood but in the final analysis, off the field Wills was something of a flawed character. Last month saw a famous Grand Final victory for the Melbourne Football Club, the first for the club in 57 years, and but for the questions so recently raised, a moment that should have been celebrated in Tom Wills’ folklore.

The story of Reconciliation has for a long time been a story filled with suspicion and mutual misunderstanding, made worse by the lack of a Treaty with the First Nations and the so called “History Wars”. It can be a fraught topic to write about but The Age lead this morning made a pretty good attempt. In that story, associate editor, Tony Wright summarized the murder and dispossession of Indigenous people that marked the first years of settlement in the Port Phillip District, a dark irony he says as many of the perpetrators were Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who had themselves been victims of the Scottish Clearances. These were brutal times for many but Wright says the British government, having just banned slavery across its empire, was infused with evangelical, humanitarian fervour for the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Wright quotes the first resident Supreme Court judge, John Walpole Willis who said that “the colonists and not the Aborigines are the foreigners… [the colonists] uninvited intruders.” What transpired though was a different reality. Land was seized under the doctrine of Terra Nullius, massacres were covered up and the influx of European diseases resulted in an almost complete crash in the Indigenous population. The total Indigenous populace of Victoria before white settlement has been difficult to estimate and is hotly debated today but it is thought that the decline after 30 years had been by as much as 80 per cent.

Such a figure is a sad indictment on our society but there is a way forward. Today Victoria has plans to become the first jurisdiction in Australia to develop a long overdue Treaty with First Nations people via its Yoo-rrook Justice Commission. Wright says, “Victoria’s quest for truth and justice, we might reflect, does not come before time.” It seems to me that after 18 months of lockdowns, conspiracy theories, global warming inaction and nuclear subs, Australia stands on a threshold, more divided now than at perhaps any time since Federation. Last week even saw the bizarre sight of Americans in New York, egged on by a conservative media, demonstrating to “Save Australia” from itself. Maybe it’s time for us to look beyond the lines that divide us in this country and remember what it is that makes every single one of us an Australian, from those very first inhabitants to all of us Johnny-Come-Latelies. Yes, it is time for truth telling but after the truth has been told, let’s put away the muskets.