Australia’s most stubborn icon, the Chiko Roll, turns 75 (with some chicks in its armour)

September 28, 2026 — 3:30pm

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The Chiko Roll turns 75 this year along with Geoffrey Rush, Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Daryl Somers. I’d call this an impressive birth year group. However, there’s a difference between this set. The Chiko Roll is the only one that’s barely changed.

Australia certainly has. In 1951, takeaway food was usually a choice between corned beef sandwiches and the odd battered something from the local milk bar. Twisties, just a year old, were the flavour of the month at a time when no one stood in the aisle of Flemings reading the back of a yoghurt carton contemplating what it might do for their gut bacteria. This was the year that The Goon Show premiered, conscription for the Korean War was introduced and Australians voted against banning the Communist Party.

It was in the year before, 1950, that boilermaker Frank McEncroe found chop-suey rolls on sale outside a VFL match (40 years before it became the AFL) at Richmond Cricket Ground in Victoria. Yet these........

© Brisbane Times