The fight for the white stuff

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Go west

This fever dream of an afternoon is a standard Sunday at Broken Heel, the drag festival in the desert where queer culture meets outback Australiana. Held over a long weekend in September, Broken Heel is a five-day extrava- ganza hosted by Broken Hill’s Palace Hotel – the pub that makes a cameo appearance in Stephan Elliott’s iconic 1994 film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Conceived as a tribute to Priscilla, which was largely filmed and partly set around Broken Hill, Broken Heel was launched by Palace owner Esther La Rovere in 2015 to coincide with the film’s twenty-first birthday. Nine years later, the drag festival had become an annual institution, attracting thousands of punters from around Australia and overseas. Thirty years after Hugo Weaving stopped traffic on Argent Street with a pink thong dress and matching wig, this storied mining town with a pub on every corner welcomed a veritable deluge of men in muumuus.

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Easter cakes

MemoirI find I cannot cry on the day of the funeral or for many nights after the news of Ellen’s death and it is as if I am stunned by this loss, as if I am too close to this absence for it to mean anything yet, until two weeks later when I take the handle of the mould in my hands and lay the flat back of it against my cheek, and I cry and I cry.

Recipe for success

EssayFans used to approach my grandmother, Margaret, at events or book signings, professing their adoration and proudly presenting their 1969 yellow-bound original of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook. They’d tell stories about the book’s place in their hearts – it had been given to them when they moved out of home, or when they’d married, or it had been passed through two generations. Margaret would smile sweetly and flick through the pages as though looking for something. Then, often, she would close the book firmly and look mock-crossly up at them (I say ‘up’ because she was usually seated, but was also only just over five-foot-tall). ‘You’ve never cooked from this book. Where are the splatters, the markings of the kitchen, the stuck-together pages?’

Tastemakers

IntroductionI’m still pleasantly mystified by our obsession with food – our need to talk about it, remember it, photograph it and analyse it, to eat our feelings and compare our lives to buffets and boxes of chocolates.