Australian Regional Foodways

Regional

⚠ A CONTINENT, SO THE CLIMATE DOES THE DIVIDING. TROPICAL NORTH — far north Queensland, the Top End, the Kimberley: mango, banana, sugarcane, barramundi, mud crab, and a wet-and-dry rather than four-season year. THE SOUTHEAST — New South Wales and Victoria, temperate and where most people live, with the Hunter and Yarra wine districts and the market gardens of the Sydney basin. TASMANIA — cool-climate, and the best of the seafood, dairy, apples, pinot and whisky. SOUTH AUSTRALIA — Mediterranean-climate and the wine heartland: Barossa (German-settled), Clare, McLaren Vale, Coonawarra, Adelaide Hills. WESTERN AUSTRALIA — Margaret River wine, rock lobster, and the wheatbelt. THE RIVERINA and the MURRAY-DARLING — irrigated rice, citrus and stone fruit, and ⚠ the most contested water in the country, whose over-allocation is a documented and unresolved food-system crisis. THE OUTBACK — cattle stations the size of small countries, and the fifteen-hundred-kilometre supply chains that feed remote communities, where fresh food costs multiples of the city price. That price gap is a documented driver of diet-related disease.