In the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 Winter 2020 semester class on Food, Gender, and Environment taught by Dr. Alex Ketchum, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, sexualized, and racialized within the global context. As part of the course, students visited McGill’s archives and special collections to have a hands on experience with historical cookbooks (more on that here: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2020/02/field-trip-to-mcgill-rare-books-and.html). The Special Series of Student Posts is a collection of student reflections on what information we can glean from cookbooks.
Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s cookbook was one of my mother’s “go-to” cookbooks when I was growing up. My Mum came from England and moved to Australia shortly after she married my Australian father in 1993. Consequently I’m sure the purchase of this book was my Mum’s nod to attempting ‘classic Australian fare’. Anytime we wanted to cook an ‘Australian’ recipe it was a longstanding statement in our family to ‘go and fetch Flo’.
The cookbook Classic Country Collection (published in 1996) was a combination of three books by Lady Flo: Classic Country Cooking (1992), Classic Country Baking (1993) and Classic Country Wisdom (1994). These publishing dates may seem fairly recent, but the cookbook not only a collection of recipes, but a reflection on the place and times that Flo and her readers lived in. Flipping through the pages is like going back in a time machine to rural country Queensland. To understand the setting of Lady Flo’s cookbooks one has to understand the complex political history that both she and her husband, Sir Joh, were part of.
A very brief history of Queensland from the 1970s to the 1990s
Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland’s (south-eastern state of Australia) longest serving premier, who began his reign of oppressive right-wing control in 1968. He ran the state very undemocratically, gerrymandering to overrepresent the rural districts and ensure his re-election into parliament (Smee, 2019). Additionally, his reign was one of terror with direct and sometimes violent opposition to many social and environmental concerns (Sparks, 2020). The Queensland police force were used to subdue any dissenters who took to the streets; public protests were banned in 1977 and there was complete disregard for police corruption (Sparks, 2020). This came to a head when media outlets in May 1987 exposed Queensland’s illegal sex trade, linking it with government staffers and millions of dollars in police bribery (Silva and Bavas, 2018). At the end of 1987 Bjelke-Peterson resigned amidst a tumultuous cabinet and ‘accusations of bribery and corruption’ (Sparks, 2020). After the landmark Fitzgerald Inquiry into these accusations which lasted two years (a judicial inquiry into both police and political corruption), Sir Joh, ‘was charged with perjury for evidence given…although his trial was aborted due to a hung jury’ (Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland, 2019).
The celebrity status of Lady Flo
By the 1990s Lady Flo had become a celebrity figure, ingrained into the psyche of Queenslanders as the long-standing premier’s wife and the creator of the famous pumpkin scone recipe. She is a personable grandmotherly figure who opens Classic Country Collection by thanking her many friends and fans in Queensland. The book’s audience would be traditional families in Queensland, cooking in a time where family and religion were still central tenets to rural life. The Bjelke-Petersens were devout conservative Lutherans, and as an extended family had a heavy influence on the formation of the Queensland rural identity. This was by not only espousing their religious values through their various political roles in the Country Party (now known as the Nationals), but also through the rhetoric of Flo’s publications and traditional role in the media of the time. Anecdotally, some may even say that Lady Flo, who only died in 2017, was regarded as an Australian substitute for the Queen in some households.
Reading Classic Country Collection one certainly gets the feeling that Flo was a no-nonsense woman. Her own bio in the book is three short lines containing the dates of her birth and marriage, the time she served in the Australian Senate as a federal senator of Queensland, and a description of her current life (at the time of writing) on a rural property in Kingaroy living with her extended family. Written against the backdrop of conservative Queensland, this brief bio alone shows not only her values, but what has defined her career. The foolproof, no frills recipes that follow are perfect for households living rurally with little spare time and access to staple, widely available ingredients. All the recipes are short with most having less than 8 ingredients. The book is embellished with very minimalist hand-drawn pencil sketches and simple, easy to follow instructions. My mother assures me that due to this simplicity, all of the recipes work first time.
The famous pumpkin scones
The recipe I decided to make from the book is pumpkin scones, an Australian twist on a typically British recipe that Flo was famous for. She inherited the recipe herself from her mother. The scone recipe was baked for royal visitors and was what one online newspaper referred to as, ‘a hearty way to connect to the people most important to her – Queenslanders’ (Fraser Coast Chronicle, 2017). Flo’s handwritten pumpkin scone recipes were auctioned off for charity multiple times. This generosity reflects her standing as a figure of great Christian virtue, a value that is still an integral part of mainstream white rural Australia.
This famous scone recipe is lovingly nestled in the book between ‘sweet scones’ and ‘lemon buns’. To me, it is thought-provoking when beating all the ingredients together, to reflect on what Flo’s life would have been like living in the shadow of her infamous husband, despite being a senator herself. The Bjelke-Petersen name to many people in Queensland is one that brings up feared memories of oppression and hatred towards anyone seen as ‘different’: queer people, Indigenous people, anyone with an opinion that did not fit within far-right conservative ideals. At the same time, Flo is the tenuous link that sweetens Joh’s behaviour with a pacifying scone. These scones were even mentioned by Prince Charles when attending a State Reception in the 1980s, commenting that he wondered whether Sir Joh’s long stint as Premier of Queensland was ‘due to the pumpkin scones that his mother had told him about’ (Bjelke-Petersen, 1996 p.113).
Reflections and scones
As I follow her instructions and roll out the dough onto a floured board I consider the generations of women in Australia who have made these scones to pacify the household and fit the mould of a good housekeeper as espoused by Flo, just as she is the supportive figure in her family despite her corrupt, problematic husband. Her cookbook contains a paragraph on cooking in which she mentions the scones again and says she is ‘lucky to have the time to cook [them]…for Joh on our day off on Sundays’ (Bjelke-Petersen, 1996 p.8). Prince Charles mentioning the scones in a State Reception not only speaks to the fame of the recipe but reinforces Flo’s position as being there to cook food for others – a homemaker if you will, despite her long political career.
This cookbook is a significant part of my childhood and, strange as it sounds, putting the scones into the oven makes me feel connected to my Australian roots – despite being halfway across the world right now in Montreal. I can almost imagine my mother gathering us around the table with jam and thickened cream to enjoy them on a sunny Sunday. Instead I eat them with the cheapest jam I could find in a supermarket, and tinned pumpkin (far from the fresh hand-mashed pumpkin I’m sure Flo would have used) on a chilly Sunday night with my friends and tell them the story of the complicated Australian political figures that they are connected to.
Lady Flo died in 2017 after falling ill but her legacy of the archetypal rural housewife will live on throughout country Australia. Whilst I reject many of the values that she lived by, and even championed in her public life, I certainly recognise that this cookbook is a valuable link to a time that allows us to understand the history of my country and my own place within that.
Bibliography
Bjelke-Peterson, F 1996, Classic Country Collection, Reed Books Australia, Australia.
Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland. (2019). The Fitzgerald Inquiry. [online] Available at: https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/about-us/our-history/fitzgerald-inquiry [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Fraser Coast Chronicle. (2017). Lady Flo’s famous pumpkin scones recipe. [online] Available at: https://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/pumpkin-scones-recipe-made-famous-by-lady-flo-bjel/3295552/ [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Jackson, J n.d., A postcard featuring Lady Florence Bjelke-Petersen's famous recipe, image, startsat60, viewed 15 February, https://startsat60.com/discover/food-and-drink/recipes/lady-flo-bjelke-petersens-famous-pumpkin-scone-recipe
John Oxley Library 1991, Sir Joh and Lady Florence Bjelke-Petersen, image, State Library of Queensland, viewed 13 February, http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/jol/2017/12/21/lady-flo/
Silva, K. and Bavas, J., (2018). 1987 Queensland cabinet documents shed light on Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's political demise. [online] ABC News. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-01/sir-joh-bjelke-petersen-qld-30-year-cabinet-documents-released/9270744 [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Smee, B. (2019). Thirty years after the Fitzgerald inquiry, 'corruption remains rife' in Queensland. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/03/thirty-years-after-the-fitzgerald-inquiry-corruption-remains-rife-in-queensland [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Sparks, K. (2020). Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson | Australian politician. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Bjelke-Peterson [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Flo’s Pumpkin Scones
by Erin Kirsch
Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s cookbook was one of my mother’s “go-to” cookbooks when I was growing up. My Mum came from England and moved to Australia shortly after she married my Australian father in 1993. Consequently I’m sure the purchase of this book was my Mum’s nod to attempting ‘classic Australian fare’. Anytime we wanted to cook an ‘Australian’ recipe it was a longstanding statement in our family to ‘go and fetch Flo’.
The cookbook Classic Country Collection (published in 1996) was a combination of three books by Lady Flo: Classic Country Cooking (1992), Classic Country Baking (1993) and Classic Country Wisdom (1994). These publishing dates may seem fairly recent, but the cookbook not only a collection of recipes, but a reflection on the place and times that Flo and her readers lived in. Flipping through the pages is like going back in a time machine to rural country Queensland. To understand the setting of Lady Flo’s cookbooks one has to understand the complex political history that both she and her husband, Sir Joh, were part of.
 |
| Lady Flo’s Pumpkin Scones on a Postcard (Jackson, n.d.) |
A very brief history of Queensland from the 1970s to the 1990s
Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland’s (south-eastern state of Australia) longest serving premier, who began his reign of oppressive right-wing control in 1968. He ran the state very undemocratically, gerrymandering to overrepresent the rural districts and ensure his re-election into parliament (Smee, 2019). Additionally, his reign was one of terror with direct and sometimes violent opposition to many social and environmental concerns (Sparks, 2020). The Queensland police force were used to subdue any dissenters who took to the streets; public protests were banned in 1977 and there was complete disregard for police corruption (Sparks, 2020). This came to a head when media outlets in May 1987 exposed Queensland’s illegal sex trade, linking it with government staffers and millions of dollars in police bribery (Silva and Bavas, 2018). At the end of 1987 Bjelke-Peterson resigned amidst a tumultuous cabinet and ‘accusations of bribery and corruption’ (Sparks, 2020). After the landmark Fitzgerald Inquiry into these accusations which lasted two years (a judicial inquiry into both police and political corruption), Sir Joh, ‘was charged with perjury for evidence given…although his trial was aborted due to a hung jury’ (Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland, 2019).
 |
| Flo and Joh (John Oxley Library, 1991) |
By the 1990s Lady Flo had become a celebrity figure, ingrained into the psyche of Queenslanders as the long-standing premier’s wife and the creator of the famous pumpkin scone recipe. She is a personable grandmotherly figure who opens Classic Country Collection by thanking her many friends and fans in Queensland. The book’s audience would be traditional families in Queensland, cooking in a time where family and religion were still central tenets to rural life. The Bjelke-Petersens were devout conservative Lutherans, and as an extended family had a heavy influence on the formation of the Queensland rural identity. This was by not only espousing their religious values through their various political roles in the Country Party (now known as the Nationals), but also through the rhetoric of Flo’s publications and traditional role in the media of the time. Anecdotally, some may even say that Lady Flo, who only died in 2017, was regarded as an Australian substitute for the Queen in some households.
Reading Classic Country Collection one certainly gets the feeling that Flo was a no-nonsense woman. Her own bio in the book is three short lines containing the dates of her birth and marriage, the time she served in the Australian Senate as a federal senator of Queensland, and a description of her current life (at the time of writing) on a rural property in Kingaroy living with her extended family. Written against the backdrop of conservative Queensland, this brief bio alone shows not only her values, but what has defined her career. The foolproof, no frills recipes that follow are perfect for households living rurally with little spare time and access to staple, widely available ingredients. All the recipes are short with most having less than 8 ingredients. The book is embellished with very minimalist hand-drawn pencil sketches and simple, easy to follow instructions. My mother assures me that due to this simplicity, all of the recipes work first time.
The famous pumpkin scones
The recipe I decided to make from the book is pumpkin scones, an Australian twist on a typically British recipe that Flo was famous for. She inherited the recipe herself from her mother. The scone recipe was baked for royal visitors and was what one online newspaper referred to as, ‘a hearty way to connect to the people most important to her – Queenslanders’ (Fraser Coast Chronicle, 2017). Flo’s handwritten pumpkin scone recipes were auctioned off for charity multiple times. This generosity reflects her standing as a figure of great Christian virtue, a value that is still an integral part of mainstream white rural Australia.
This famous scone recipe is lovingly nestled in the book between ‘sweet scones’ and ‘lemon buns’. To me, it is thought-provoking when beating all the ingredients together, to reflect on what Flo’s life would have been like living in the shadow of her infamous husband, despite being a senator herself. The Bjelke-Petersen name to many people in Queensland is one that brings up feared memories of oppression and hatred towards anyone seen as ‘different’: queer people, Indigenous people, anyone with an opinion that did not fit within far-right conservative ideals. At the same time, Flo is the tenuous link that sweetens Joh’s behaviour with a pacifying scone. These scones were even mentioned by Prince Charles when attending a State Reception in the 1980s, commenting that he wondered whether Sir Joh’s long stint as Premier of Queensland was ‘due to the pumpkin scones that his mother had told him about’ (Bjelke-Petersen, 1996 p.113).
Reflections and scones
As I follow her instructions and roll out the dough onto a floured board I consider the generations of women in Australia who have made these scones to pacify the household and fit the mould of a good housekeeper as espoused by Flo, just as she is the supportive figure in her family despite her corrupt, problematic husband. Her cookbook contains a paragraph on cooking in which she mentions the scones again and says she is ‘lucky to have the time to cook [them]…for Joh on our day off on Sundays’ (Bjelke-Petersen, 1996 p.8). Prince Charles mentioning the scones in a State Reception not only speaks to the fame of the recipe but reinforces Flo’s position as being there to cook food for others – a homemaker if you will, despite her long political career.
 |
| My friends enjoying the scones in chilly Montreal (Kirsch, 2020) |
This cookbook is a significant part of my childhood and, strange as it sounds, putting the scones into the oven makes me feel connected to my Australian roots – despite being halfway across the world right now in Montreal. I can almost imagine my mother gathering us around the table with jam and thickened cream to enjoy them on a sunny Sunday. Instead I eat them with the cheapest jam I could find in a supermarket, and tinned pumpkin (far from the fresh hand-mashed pumpkin I’m sure Flo would have used) on a chilly Sunday night with my friends and tell them the story of the complicated Australian political figures that they are connected to.
Lady Flo died in 2017 after falling ill but her legacy of the archetypal rural housewife will live on throughout country Australia. Whilst I reject many of the values that she lived by, and even championed in her public life, I certainly recognise that this cookbook is a valuable link to a time that allows us to understand the history of my country and my own place within that.
Bibliography
Bjelke-Peterson, F 1996, Classic Country Collection, Reed Books Australia, Australia.
Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland. (2019). The Fitzgerald Inquiry. [online] Available at: https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/about-us/our-history/fitzgerald-inquiry [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Fraser Coast Chronicle. (2017). Lady Flo’s famous pumpkin scones recipe. [online] Available at: https://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/pumpkin-scones-recipe-made-famous-by-lady-flo-bjel/3295552/ [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Jackson, J n.d., A postcard featuring Lady Florence Bjelke-Petersen's famous recipe, image, startsat60, viewed 15 February, https://startsat60.com/discover/food-and-drink/recipes/lady-flo-bjelke-petersens-famous-pumpkin-scone-recipe
John Oxley Library 1991, Sir Joh and Lady Florence Bjelke-Petersen, image, State Library of Queensland, viewed 13 February, http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/jol/2017/12/21/lady-flo/
Silva, K. and Bavas, J., (2018). 1987 Queensland cabinet documents shed light on Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen's political demise. [online] ABC News. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-01/sir-joh-bjelke-petersen-qld-30-year-cabinet-documents-released/9270744 [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Smee, B. (2019). Thirty years after the Fitzgerald inquiry, 'corruption remains rife' in Queensland. [online] The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/03/thirty-years-after-the-fitzgerald-inquiry-corruption-remains-rife-in-queensland [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].
Sparks, K. (2020). Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson | Australian politician. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Bjelke-Peterson [Accessed 16 Feb. 2020].