A Trifle Underdone
Sun Herald
Saturday October 4, 1997
A Year at Bullo
by Sarah Henderson.
Pan Macmillan Australia; hardcover $39.95.
The face on the dust cover would be familiar even without the Akubra, the dog or the roaring fire. This could only be Sarah Henderson: the face of a national breast cancer detection campaign; professed role model and inspiration, businesswoman, author and motivator. And now, it seems, country kitchen whiz.
Henderson first made headlines as the 1991 Businesswoman of the Year, having reversed the fortunes of her ailing cattle station after the death of her husband. It was a story movingly told in her best-selling autobiography From Strength to Strength.
Now comes A Year at Bullo in which she attempts to paint Bullo River Station through a month-by-month account of daily life there.
The promise is a collection Henderson describes as "events, stories and memories drawn from many years and brought together to make an interesting read".
A Year at Bullo is a sort of Margaret Fulton meets Miles Franklin concoction. Appetising to some, others might find it not to their taste: too light on the prose, too heavy on the palate.
In January, for example, Henderson kicks off her reminiscences with a tale of the big wet. It is a well-written, easily digestible outback tale with images of "great swathes of stars" and all the Aussie trimmings but in the end it leads no further than a recipe for steamed crayfish, rock lobster or crab. While A Year At Bullo is touted as "overwhelmingly a celebration of life on the land", it is more a cookbook than anything else.
In another instance, the December chapter walks the reader through an engaging description of the morning after the first storm of the season; the hordes of mozzies, the crocs, what it means to people on the land.
Henderson paints the atmosphere well but just as the reader is hooked she leaps from calves and foals to cold desserts. As with most of the stories, it is a tenuous link and the clear impression is that more attention has been lavished on the "melt the chocolate and 100 grams butter in a heatproof bowl" sections of the book than on the "cockatoos can destroy a whole paddock of crops" sections.
That is a pity, because Henderson can spin a good yarn. A Year at Bullo is beautifully illustrated and the recipes are country fare at its best. "After 30 years of cooking three meals a day for over 20 men," says Henderson, "I think I can safely speak with authority on the subject of food." Indeed she can but she should call a cookbook a cookbook.
© 1997 Sun Herald