UNIVERSITY STRAWBERRY LAMINGTON

As readers of this blog may be aware, I do like to reflect on the ordinary moments of eating today. This is about the mundane, the close at hand, the banal, and all as a way to help us understand contemporary identity, place, and belonging. In Perth, the banal often means the suburban, which is the dominant lifestyle here. The suburbs sprawl from north to south, peeling along the coast for kilometres on end, hemmed in by the ocean to the west and the scarp to the east. This is the ordinary as it manifests here.

I think there are lots of reasons why the close at hand matters. It might not only be the challenge of thinking about what is immediately around us, but it might also have to do with what we can afford, the idea of the normal, and the celebration of those moments that go unnoticed. The glue of life, the substance that binds it together like flour or egg or sometimes rice, is the everyday, and, it is worth celebrating for that reason alone.

A lot of my everyday takes place at a local university, where I do some teaching in an arts department. I am on campus four days a week, and, besides my desk at home (where I am writing to you from) it is the place I am most often in. There are a number of food options that are on campus or nearby, including international food courts with Japanese, Malaysian (2 kinds), Lebanese, Italian, Chinese, fish and chips, and, an American burger place; cafes that look out across the river with birds flocking and boats crowding the immediate view; and there are places at the university itself. This last group includes a tavern, a number of food trucks, a couple of student dominated clusters, and, a club for faculty only. There is also a café at the library, where I often refuel, because of location and selection.

I will often catch up with students or staff at the library café, Quobba Gnarning. I do not drink coffee, and, I usually only have one cup of tea each day. But, I do not offer that digression up out of piousness, but simply to point out that when I ‘meet for a coffee’ I am often drinking something else. Quobba Gnarning has recently put milo on the menu, and, I think my students are pleasantly surprised when they discover that it is my hot beverage of choice. It helps them comes to terms with authority, which is, I think, one of the major changes between school and university. I am not there to discipline them, at least not in the way they have come to expect, but rather to educate them within a discipline, which is to say cultivate a way of thinking that comes with a sense of tradition.

The other day, there I was catching up with a prospective honours student, having ordered a milo. In his twenty two year old wisdom, he was having a long mac (no judgement). And, out of the corner of my eye I spied something that I had not seen in the cake cabinet before. As you will have guessed, this was a strawberry lamington. It must be said, that this is not my preferred flavour of lamington. That would belong to the classic chocolate one, but decked out with a thin layer cream and raspberry jam in the middle. Nevertheless, I persisted. I did what any university lecturer, and someone willing to lead by example, would do. I ordered the strawberry lamington to go with my milo. I had to show my student what was ahead of him if he continued to study at such a venerable institution.


The lamington itself was disappointing – the icing was a little chewy, and not in a desirable ‘this has Q’ kind of way, but more that it had been in the fridge a little long. The sponge was fair enough and the flavour rock solid gold. It succeeded in nostalgia factor despite making me a little sick and without the need to get another one for a long while. And yet, it brought with it a certain comfort, if not joy, that in the small break in the day one could holiday in the return of youth and celebrate something so ordinary. That is not a bad outcome for $2.90 not matter the day.


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