Geologist David Leaman says if you want to understand how liquids behave, don’t study water.

The scope of the book is limited mostly to Tasmania, which is not noted in as suffering much of a water problem. Actually, it suffers from almost all the problems driving the catastrophe on the mainland and, given its small size, Tasmania is an ideal case study because of its geological and hydrological variety. It’s the Australian canary, warning us of dangers before we can smell them.

The behaviour of this odd liquid determines life on earth. We rarely notice its arcane workings unless there is either too much of it or, more so lately, too little. This book will jolt us out of a potentially fatal complacency.

Like all tellers of inconvenient truths, Leaman has been attacked by those who want to continue the untrammelled exploitation of this most fundamental of all resources and by myopic politicians who see no further than the next election.

The trouble with current debates about water is split vision. On the one hand we have the economy, a sacrosanct entity invoked whenever awkward questions are asked about what we’re doing to the world; and on the other we have the environment, which is over there somewhere in a special little box in the political mind, quite distinct from the economy.

The economy is definitely not in the environment, but the environment can be in the economy whenever it can be dug up, chopped down or sold off in plastic bottles.

Water underlies everything, including the economy. Our world is a vast, self-adjusting hydrostatic machine, and through our profligacy we have intervened so massively in its workings that we risk throwing it completely out of balance. Unless we learn to husband water more carefully, there won’t be an economy any more.

That is Leaman’s ultimate message and that is why anyone who cares about the way the world is going ought to make the effort to read this difficult book.

It’s difficult because the subject is so complex. The hydrological cycle can be easily grasped but its consequences are not only unpredictable but seem to defy logic without the understanding this book brings.

Its replete with graphs, tables and maps; it covers land use, power generation, forestry practices, engineering, the politics of privatisation, pollution, erosion, to name just a few of the fundamental questions raised by water and how we use and abuse it. And it can’t all be done in layman’s language.

Earlier editions of this book — this is the third — had the subtitle ‘Facts, issues and problems’; this one adds ‘solutions’. But those solutions won’t come about unless we can get our leaders to get their eyes off the bottom line and take the plunge.

Water — Facts, issues, problems and solutions by David Leaman | Published by Leaman Geophysics | ISBN 978-0-9581199-4-8
Available in Tasmania only at The Green Shop, 83 Harrington St, Hobart, and the Green Room, 174 Charles St. Launceston. Normally $40 but offered by The Greens at the special price of $25.

Paul County portfolio

From Before we eat …

Paul County is a fifth generation Tasmanian who grew up in Hobart.

A statement which is nowhere as lively as the piece Bernard Lloyd wrote on the back flap of their book Before we eat … a delicious slice of Tasmania’s culinary life:

Lamb chops and three veg seems an unlikely entrée for the founder of an historical culinary research organisiation but that is because it leaves out Dino Bonifacio, the Italian next-door neighbour who offered him bitter black olives over the back fence: a playmate’s father, a Lebanese butcher, who hung meat to cure in the back shed; and the heady smell of chocolate wafting from the Cadbury factory.

Add a mother with a love of books and a father who kept the family’s history alive with stories of Paul’s colourful ancestors (one who charted the rugged west coast in the 1820s, another who operated the first private sawmill in Tasmania on the Huon River and a third who played violin in Martin Cash’s bushranging gang) and you have Paul County, teacher and cook as well as a photographer and storyteller, who still loves roast lamb with three veg.

The end result of the exercise was a stunning exhibition — and we feature a selection in this Paul County portfolio.

Read our reviews here

A recipe from the book, accompanied by one of his tasty photographs, will be published under the Tastes of Tasmania category every Wednesday.

When we eat
A seasonal guide to Tasmania’s fine food and drink
By Liz McLeod and Bernard Lloyd
Photography by Paul County
Published by The Culinary Historians of Tasmania 2004
ISBN 0-646-44132-9

Here we have the main course, so to speak, following the delicious and tantalising entree that was the first book by the Culinary Historians of Tasmania — Before we eat.

Where Before we eat talked about Tassie foodstuffs and the people who grow, prepare and serve them, When we eat presents recipe after recipe that will have the armchair chef salivating and the earnest cook out in the kitchen sharpening up the knives.

As the authors say “its 328 pages lay out the journey of food and drink in Tasmania, from the wild to the table, and from the remotest past to the present”. The high priestess of good Aussie tucker, Maggie Beer, wrote the foreword.

In it she remarks how Tasmanian produce is beautifully fresh and fortunately now more widely available, adding that our biggest advantage is our seasonality:

“Seasonality, eating food only at its peak, has almost disappeared Australia-wide but you have four distinct seasons here and this book has an especially Tasmanian calendar, indicating just when your (and only your) fresh Tasmanian produce is available … This book celebrates working with the climate rather than against it.”

The premium crops or catches of each season, many with recipes from leading restaurants all over the island, are introduced alphabetically.
Seasonal delights

And so, for Spring, we have a selection including anchovies, artichokes (Essence Restaurant in Devonport delights with Flinders’ Island lamb rump with artichokes, green olives, tomato and a parsley fetta butter), crayfish (plus recipe for Waji’s incomparable Crayfish Laksa, made with Waji’s own Laksa Paste that I can vouch is equally sensational with many other ingredients), and so on.

In Summer, with a nostalgic nod to those lazy hazy days spent at the shack, choose from berries of all kinds (try Freycinet Lodge’s White chocolate and blueberry creme brulee), stone fruits, cheeses, salmon and trout (a campfire recipe by Dennis Alexander, first published by the Hobart Walk Club in 1972, explains how to cook the latter to perfection) and other fish — like Mures’ Scallop pocketed blue eye.

For Autumn, you find apples, mushrooms, pepperberries and much much more.

Finishing in Winter with delicacies such as quinces and olives, plus its extra special bonus of mussels — with a swag of recipes from The Deck at Devonport, The Mussel Boys on the Tasman Peninsula, Meadowbank at Cambridge and others.

Did you say potatoes? Truffles? Venison or wallaby? And how about matching Tasmanian food with Tasmanian wine? All there in these pages of plenty, with wonderfully evocative photography, interesting historical snippets, along with harvesting, storing and cooking tips. LV

Before we eat:
A delicious slice of Tasmania’s culinary life
By Paul County and Bernard Lloyd
Published by The Culinary Historians of Tasmania
ISBN 0-646-42903-5

This is not a cookbook. Not a recipe in sight. Instead a glorious potage of what makes Tassie cuisine, the people who make it, and in slices of history, the people who helped make it — from the Aboriginal earliest inhabitants to the early settlers, determined to create an Antipodean England, to today when immigrants from all around the globe have put down roots here and added their touch of individuality.

Tasmanians drink more beer than anywhere else in Australia, and don’t drink as much wine (at least they didn’t in the 1995 National Nutrition Survey). But ate far more potatoes than everyone else in Australia. Food scientist Barbara Santich unearthed these statistics for her foreword to this delightful book. Tasmania still retains its own character, culture and distinctly different culinary history, all of which are featured.

Early advertisements are rivetting: “Lovely Women are Not Flat-Chested!’ trumpets one, offering Dr Falliere’s “Flesh-Food” to fill scrawny outlines. Early prices are tempting: Purity Food Markets (remember them?) offering Edgell’s Green Beans at 1/9d a tin and Bushell’s sweetened coffee and chicory for just 2/5d a bottle. Historical snippets from all eras add up to a highly entertaining as well as informative book. You don’t have to be a ‘foodie’ in the modern sense to eat it up.

Undoubted highlight is the series of Paul County photographic portraits, in “the spirit of visual puns, quirky juxtapositions and historical conjunctions” to quote the inside jacket blurb. Enjoy.

And for a taste of the quirky photography in this delicious book you have to view Paul County’s portfolio. PH