One hundred years ago Don Dunstan was born and 50 years ago, in October 1976, the then South Australian premier published a cookbook. It sounds like a charming eccentricity of the era. It was actually a small expression of a much larger political idea.

Don Dunstan’s Cookbook provides an unexpected window into a conception of social democracy that has largely disappeared from Australian politics. The author was concerned not simply with increasing incomes, consumption or economic activity. He wanted to enlarge what people and society collectively were capable of doing.

That is why the cookbook belongs in the same political story as public housing, multiculturalism, environmental protection, cultural institutions and industrial democracy.

Peter Strawhan, whose doctoral research examined the importance of food and drink in Dunstan’s political and private life, tells us that the cookbook sold around 40,000 copies in two print runs within months. Its recipes ranged across Indian, Malay and European traditions. Dunstan grew food, cooked it, served it and regarded eating as both pleasure and social experience.

In 1976 this was more culturally significant than it sounds today. When Dunstan demonstrated stir-frying on television, his editor did not know what a wok was. Dunstan was telling an overwhelmingly Anglo-Australian audience that the knowledge migrants brought with them was not peripheral to Australian culture. It could transform it.

This was multiculturalism made tangible.

The book made it clear that migrants came with knowledge, skills and traditions that expanded the capabilities of the whole society. That Australian culture itself could become richer through encounter and exchange.

Look across the wider........

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