A brie(f) history of cheese in Australia

2nd March 2021 | Morag Kobez

The history of cheese in Australia has, until recently, been a rather tasteless affair. Not so long ago, our choice was limited to either “vintage”, “tasty” or processed and wrapped in plastic. But just as cheese always gets better with age, over the past decade, Australia’s taste for quality, artisanal cheese has matured in a big whey.

We associate Italy with salty wedges of Parmigiano-Reggiano. France is synonymous with pillowy-soft triple bries and intensely aromatic Roquefort. Paneer is the cheese of Indian curries and the Spanish have manchego. Queso Oaxaca is quintessentially Mexican, while the humble cheddar is named for the English village in which it was first produced.

Australia’s most well-known cheese, on the other hand, is not recognised for its remarkable flavour or texture but rather its brand name, which was recently changed to Cheer following campaigning of many years against its racist connotations.

Great cuisines — and their cheeses — have arisen from peasant societies. As the historian Keith Hancock wrote in 1930, Australia “has not inherited a village civilisation nor love of the soil, but she has inherited factories and factory farms”.

Coon Cheese eventually bowed to public pressure and changed its name.

Early provisions

Cheese is listed among the provisions aboard the First Fleet. Even convicts received a weekly cheese ration — albeit less than that of officers and seamen.

Ensuring access to cheese upon arrival also seems to have been a priority for the white settlers, who acquired several cows and bulls on the fleet’s final stop in the Cape of Good Hope. However, the plan to begin cheesemaking was thwarted when the cattle escaped soon after they arrived in what they called New South Wales. (They were found seven years later, happily living south of the Nepean River in an area that later became known as Cowpastures, where they’d thrived and expanded to a herd of more than 60.)

The first dairy was built in Rose Hill in 1796, near the banks of the Parramatta River. The fledgling industry expanded with the foundation of Van Diemen’s Land in 1804. By 1820, the weekly produce market was offering cheese for sale at two shillings a pound.

Given that cheddar was by far the most common cheese being produced in England at the time, this cheese was most likely a rudimentary cheddar.

Australia’s first commercial cheese factory — the Van Diemen’s Land Company — was established in Tasmania in the 1820s. Not long after, farmers from the NSW district of Illawarra began to send their cheese and butter to Sydney by sea. As more ports opened, dairying extended all the way down to Bega in southern NSW.

Processed cheddar was once pretty much the only cheese option Australians had.

Industrialisation

Henry Harding arrived in Bodalla on the NSW south coast from England in 1853. The son of the “father of Cheddar cheese” Joseph Harding, he shared his father’s dictum: “cheese is not made in the field, nor in the byre, nor even in the cow, it is made in the dairy”.

This began a long era of commercialisation and industrialisation in which consistency, ease of storage and distribution and longevity were key. The blue and yellow boxes of Kraft processed cheddar which travelled so well became a fixture of our cheese landscape.

Before the 1980s, most of the cheese made in Australia were cheddars from big factories. But in that decade we began to see some European varieties introduced — though virtually all white-mould cheeses sold in Australia until the mid 1980s were tinned camemberts and bries, mass-produced in Europe and stabilised to survive long periods in transit.

Holy Goat’s award-winning handmade goat’s cheese, La Luna.

This cheese bore little resemblance to those available in Europe, and stand in stark contrast to the vast range of artisan cheeses on offer in Australia today: delicate, hand-tied pouches of cow’s milk mozzarella with their oozy filling of stracciatella from Vannella Cheese; nutty, aged French-style washed rind from Holy Goat made with organic goat milk; or biodynamic quark and feta from Mungalli Creek Dairy produced without fertilisers or pesticides.

To what then, can we attribute the rise of this vibrant cheese industry? Broadly speaking, there was a cultural and political shift towards more ethical practices in food production and a backlash against industrial food systems. The values and meaning we associate with mass-produced food have changed.

Vannella Cheese’s hand-tied braids of mozzarella.

Food cultures

Perhaps it started with the tree-change hippies in the 1970s. A small, decaying dairy in Nimbin was resurrected following the counter-cultural Aquarius Festival of 1973, bringing with it an ethos of sustainability, community, resilience and simplicity.

Then there is the slow food movement founded in Italy in 1989. It espouses ideals of good-quality flavoursome food, clean production that doesn’t harm the environment, fair accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.

More recently, we’ve seen an “artisanal turn”, with its critical focus on the industrialisation of food. The proliferation of food media, celebrity-driven television cooking shows and social media have taught us good food is small-scale, artisan, local, connected – and the antitheses of factory-produced sliced cheddar.

Whether you like it sharp or buttery, runny or blue, Aussies are now spoiled for cheese choice.

Three decades ago, low-cost cheddar accounted for around 70 percent of the cheese we consumed. These days, we eat a diversity of fresh, mouldy, semi-hard and stretched cheese — making up almost half of the cheese we consumed in 2019.

We may not have a national cheese of our own, but we have certainly developed a distinctly Australian food culture. Central to this culture is the emphasis on quality over quantity. There is certainly something to cheer about in that.

This article was written by Morag Kobez, associate lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, and was originally published by The Conversation.