‘Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown’: Lamb or Kangaroo, Which Should Reign Supreme? The Implications of Heroising a Settler Colonial Food Icon as National Identity

Abstract

Lamb has long been promoted in Australia as a celebratory food—particularly for the national Australia Day holiday in January each year—that champions and is representative of the country’s inclusive and multicultural society. In this chapter, historian and gastronomer Dr Jacqueline Newling questions whether a native alternative such as kangaroo, which acknowledges Australia’s pre-colonial heritage, would be a more appropriate choice. Through this lens, the chapter considers Australia’s culinary identity in the contexts of the nation’s settler colonial heritage and changing multicultural diversity, and the uncomfortable truths of dispossession of the country’s First Peoples. Drawing on historical references, period cookery texts and current scholarship concerning settler colonial Australia’s relationship with native foods, particularly kangaroo, and recognition of First Nations’ rights and sovereignty, this work argues that presenting lamb as the national celebratory meat supports a broader legacy of self-indigenisation and cultural ‘whitewashing’.

This work was prepared on Wangal Country. I pay my respects to Australia’s First Peoples, their Elders past and present, and acknowledge their deep and ongoing connection to their ancestral lands.