Pre Week 10 Final Draft

Good afternoon. If you want to understand a country, watch how it feeds you. Today I compare China and Australia through cuisine, using the lens of single-culture versus multicultural countries. China is often experienced as a single, long-running culinary civilisation: one national food “grammar” that stitches together many regional dialects. A shared table of dishes, chopsticks, and a logic of balancing flavours and textures can make a meal feel recognisably Chinese even when the staples shift from wheat noodles and lamb in the north to rice, pork and seafood in the south. In that sense, China’s internal diversity is enormous but its culinary identity often feels coherent—and that coherence helps explain why Chinese flavours are recognisable far beyond China. At the same time, as a culturally unified country, China has exerted significant influence abroad through its food culture. Chinese cuisine has left clear traces in many Asian countries. For example, elements of Chinese culinary traditions can be seen in Korean kimchi, Japanese hot pot styles, Thai fried rice, and Vietnamese pho, all of which reflect historical cultural exchanges.The global spread of Chinese cuisine is often understood as a form of cultural diffusion: it retains its core structures and flavour principles, while being accepted and reinterpreted in different regions, yet still maintaining a recognisable “Chineseness.”Australia, by contrast, is structurally multicultural: the Australian Government’s multicultural statement describes a nation built by contributions from “more than 300 different ancestries” (Australian Government, Department of Home Affairs, 2017).[9] National population estimates show how large the migrant share is: at 30 June 2024, Australia’s overseas-born share was 31.5%, and in the 2021 census-year breakdown it was 29.3% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2025).[10] The cuisine you encounter in Australia therefore tends to be an ecosystem rather than a single canon: older Anglo-Celtic foods and local produce sit alongside the everyday imprint of Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and many more food traditions. Instead of “one cuisine with many regions,” Australia often becomes “many cuisines inside one daily routine”: a normal lunch break might mean sushi, pho, dumplings or kebabs as easily as a meat pie. This is why researchers and chefs often describe “Modern Australian” cooking not as an inheritance to protect, but as a multicultural practice—learning techniques and flavours across kitchens, then recombining them around Australian ingredients and eating habits (Link, 2012).[11]

When we shift to an external comparison, Australia’s story becomes especially clear: immigrant cuisines do not just “arrive”; they are localised through naming, scaling, ingredient substitution, and—most powerfully—through new eating contexts such as the pub, the football crowd, the fish-and-chip shop, the market stall, and the food-court counter. Consider the dim sim: ABC reporting and City of Melbourne cultural documentation trace it to Melbourne in the 1940s, where restaurateur William Chen Wing Young adapted Cantonese siu mai into a bigger, sturdier dumpling that could be produced at scale, renamed in local dialect, and sold as convenient snack food (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2016; City of Melbourne, 2025).[12] The same “design it for Australian public eating” mechanism appears again in the Chiko Roll: the Museum of the Riverina describes its inventor, Frank McEncroe, deliberately creating a hot snack that could be eaten with one hand at race meetings, country shows and football matches, first sold at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show in 1951, then frozen for wider distribution—so that by the mid-1950s even milk bars and fish-and-chip shops could quickly fry and bag it (Museum of the Riverina, n.d.).[13] Pub culture creates another channel of localisation. ABC’s food-history reporting notes the earliest reference to chicken parmigiana in Australia in 1980 and suggests it became a pub meal during the 1980s; in the process, a parmigiana concept is translated into an Australian plate format—large crumbed schnitzel, tomato sauce and melted cheese, plus the now-default side of chips and salad (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019).[14] Kebab-shop culture and digital naming then help generate new “local Australian” foods from migrant business infrastructure: SBS Food describes how the halal snack pack became a kebab-shop staple, and in 2016 “halal snack pack” was voted the People’s Choice Word of the Year by the Macquarie Dictionary—an example of language turning a convenient mash-up into a nationally recognised symbol (SBS Food, 2016; Macquarie Dictionary, 2018).[15] Place-based repetition matters too. Northern Territory tourism promotion describes laksa as a Darwin icon and points to the Darwin International Laksa Festival, showing how a Southeast Asian noodle soup is locally owned through markets, competitions and repeated public celebration (Northern Territory Government, n.d.).[16] Finally, Australia localises Japanese cuisine into a very specific “grab-and-go” form: an Australian food magazine notes that a standard “Aussie sushi” stop commonly sells rolls with fillings such as teriyaki chicken and salmon with avocado, while an Australian food-history timeline records a Melbourne food-court stall in 1995 adapting sushi rolls to Australian tastes with cooked chicken, beef and canned tuna (McDonald, 2023; Australian Food Timeline, n.d.).[17] Read together, these examples show a consistent mechanism: multicultural Australia produces national foods not by freezing authenticity, but by translating dishes into Australian rhythms of work breaks, sport, takeaway packaging and local vernacular—while China’s culinary influence beyond its borders is more often discussed as diffusion and recognition rather than formal localisation.

References

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2016, February 8). Dim sims: The history of a Chinese-Australian icon. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-08/dim-sim-invention-a-story-of-chinese-australian-history/7148450

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2019, July 4). It’s a pub staple across Australia, but how did the chicken parmigiana end up on the menu? ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-05/where-the-chicken-parmigiana-come-from/11277414

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025, April 30). Australia’s population by country of birth, June 2024. Australian Bureau of Statistics. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release

Australian Food Timeline. (n.d.). 1993 Takeaway sushi. Retrieved March 3, 2026, from https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/takeaway-sushi/

Australian Government, Department of Home Affairs. (2017). Multicultural Australia: United, Strong, Successful (Australia’s multicultural statement). https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/mca/Statements/english-multicultural-statement.pdf

City of Melbourne. (2025). The Dirty Dozen: Stories behind the foods that made Melbourne (Exhibition catalogue). City Gallery, Melbourne Town Hall. https://citycollection.melbourne.vic.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/CGal_DD_Catalogue_compressed.pdf

Link, C. A. (2012). Challenges to flavour: Influences on the cultural identity of cuisines in the Australian foodscape (Doctoral thesis, University of Western Sydney). https://researchers-admin.westernsydney.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/94917592/uws_18117.pdf

Macquarie Dictionary. (2018, January 23). Word of the Year 2016. https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016/

McDonald, E. (2023, November 17). Australian-style sushi is a thing and the internet is only just learning about it. delicious. https://www.delicious.com.au/food-files/article/australian-style-sushi-rolls-thing/9n4ttjrn

Museum of the Riverina. (n.d.). The Gold Chiko Roll. Retrieved March 3, 2026, from https://museumriverina.com.au/learn/collections/highlights/the-gold-chiko-roll

Northern Territory Government. (n.d.). Laksa. Retrieved March 3, 2026, from https://northernterritory.com/things-to-do/food-and-drink/laksa

Northern Territory Government. (n.d.). Amye (The Laksa Queen). Retrieved March 3, 2026, from https://northernterritory.com/articles/amye-the-laksa-queen

SBS Food. (2016, May 9). Unpacking the halal snack pack. https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/unpacking-the-halal-snack-pack/stedyxkcy

[1] [2] [6] [8] [12] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-08/dim-sim-invention-a-story-of-chinese-australian-history/7148450

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-08/dim-sim-invention-a-story-of-chinese-australian-history/7148450

[3] [4] [9] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/mca/Statements/english-multicultural-statement.pdf

Click to access english-multicultural-statement.pdf

[5] [17] [22] https://www.delicious.com.au/food-files/article/australian-style-sushi-rolls-thing/9n4ttjrn

https://www.delicious.com.au/food-files/article/australian-style-sushi-rolls-thing/9n4ttjrn

[7] [15] https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/unpacking-the-halal-snack-pack/stedyxkcy

https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/unpacking-the-halal-snack-pack/stedyxkcy

[10] [19] [21] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release

[11] [23] https://researchers-admin.westernsydney.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/94917592/uws_18117.pdf