A riff on meat pies
As teenagers we were strictly forbidden to eat in the street, though perhaps the ban only applied to us girls. It was seen as rude, even faintly obscene: maybe that open mouth was an exposure of an inner part of the body that was properly kept invisible, decent. It was also forbidden to remove our navy terylene school gloves once we were outside the school gates (another inside/outside distinction). Given this prohibition, eating in the street would have been sticky and impractical as well as outrageous. These mores, internalised, persisted into adult life – but it was the sixties, soon to be the Age of Aquarius, the age of freedom. So, one day in 1971 when I stood on a corner of Bourke Street in Melbourne, eating a scalding hot meat pie in my hands, I felt a frisson of naughtiness, joy and liberation. And it also seemed only just that the hot gravy dribbled a little uncontrollably, and stained as it dripped.
The hot meat pie: the traditional fast food of Australia for generations. My uncle Norman (born somewhere around the 1910s) cited it as one of his key reasons for never travelling to England: ‘Warm beer and cold pies!’ he would exclaim, and shudder theatrically. He was a most kind man of few words. He and my aunt caravanned around Australia several times – they must have been among the earliest of the ‘grey nomads’ – and sported a bumper sticker: ‘See Australia First’. This was surely disingenuous, as I suspect they really meant ‘first, last and always’.
When we were children, my father regularly drove the family in our Morris Minor along the Pacific Highway from Port Stephens to Brisbane. He commented on every town we went through – ‘very cold place’ or ‘been bushfires through here’. As we neared Brisbane he would notice the little town of Yatala (pronounced ‘yattle-uh’): ‘Yatala pies’ he would say, and I don’t remember whether we ever stopped there, or had a pie. Maybe it happened once. Generally, though, we churned on past the wooden old-time structure with its rust-red roof and its large painted sign. Later we drove past in the two-tone FC Holden from Ipswich to the Gold Coast for family holidays (ah – cheap, cold watermelon from the roadside stalls), and most recently from Yeerongpilly, and then Moggill, down to the Broadwater every week in a series of Toyotas and Nissans. (I’ll tell you about Norm’s Chrysler Valiant another time). And every week without fail he would comment: ‘Yatala – good pies’. At some time the road was turned into a highway and only the turnoff sign to Yatala (‘Famous for its Pies’) could be seen.
So, on our way back from Mt Tamborine, Andrew and I decided to celebrate a lifetime of not stopping, by pulling in to see if the pie shop was still there, and if the pies really deserved to be still ‘famous’. It looked the same: colonial dark red tin roof and ochre wooden walls. The car park was much larger, and of course we had to get right off onto the old road to find it. But – not to beat about the bush – it was a total delight and a wonder. The clientele hadn’t changed much and neither had the atmosphere: it was still a place where a practical man, or a local tradie, or a travelling family could get a hot pie in a paper package. And such pies! The pastry was a marvel – the first bite carried me back to the pies of childhood. It tasted precisely right: light and savoury and fresh, not too crumbly or flaky but not soggy either. It was as if the memory of the perfection of childhood had been incarnated in a present reality. Furthermore there was now a variety of choices of pie, and a fridge full of milk shakes and soft drinks, to cope with the much larger throughput of modern pie-eaters. There was even a drive-through option, for pie-eating on the go. But perhaps the best part was that they hadn’t diversified into too many other dishes, or set out to be anything other than what they really were. The building felt just like the old one, though it is probably new, as there is plenty of space to sit at tables to eat, whether indoors or out, and on the walls there is a fascinating collection of photos of the pie shop in earlier days: inundated by the 1947 floods, for example. Sadly we could only try two of the fillings (I had the steak and kidney, Andrew had the steak and mushroom): what do you take us for? Gargantua? One of these pies will keep you going for a long afternoon of hard work, and there is no question of dripping gravy. They are properly filled with a solidity of meat. But we did take one home (their stock standard ‘meat pie’) for Dad to have for lunch the next day. Even reheated and a day old it was still terrific, he said.
Now I think we may have to plan to be on our way through Yatala at lunchtime more often, and to take Dad with us.
blazoning Yatala pies to the world
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