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Gladys Weston recounted her memories of cooking in the mountains to Rosemary Curry, in an interview recorded in 1988. 

We used to make lovely bread in a big camp oven, I couldn't lift it, a huge thing. You wouldn't have much fire underneath - if you did, you'd burn the bread.


We used bark around the but of the snow gums - it stayed hot all the time. It wouldn't flare up.

We had those huge iron saucepans and we could cook rice. We used to take our own vegetables up - carrots, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, because we could dig a hole in the ground and put them in.

Our peas were always dried peas. Meat was never a problem of course.

We didn't vary the diet - strangely enough the men when the diet was varied, they didn't like it. Grilled chops, grilled chops, baked leg of mutton, and then they used to corn it. They had the ribs sometimes you'd make a crown out of them, bake it. Other times we'd boil them.

The men were good at salting meat, curing meat. We'd put salt on it, pack it into a little meat cask, and keep it. Things would keep up in the mountains indefinitely.

I made jellies - there was a little place, it was really a swamp - they called them bogs - if an animal walked over it, they'd go down. My husband built a hole in it, put a board over the hole, and you could put on the top of this board, butter and that, and it would be as hard as anything.

You'd have to put something over the top of it.

You'd put butter and everything in billies down the hole - you couldn't keep those things in the hut, it was too hot. Everything went in the little swamp outside.

Rosemary Curry: Stan Weston (Gladys' son) told me when they cooked for themselves, they'd start off with some soup, lots of dried vegetables they'd taken up. Next night it would become stew, next night curry and so on.