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We set up the picnic tables with tablecloths, laid out home-made baked goods, fired up the hiking stoves, and brewed ourselves a good Australian Breakfast tea with Ashgrove milk. Thus we had gathered a group of discerning gentlefolk in their best Steampunk attire at the Cascade Gardens, below the impressive colonial façade of the Cascade Brewery. The tournament was ostensibly held in honour of the quarter century celebration of the year 1989: the year of the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the fall of the Berlin Wall and – coincidentally – my birth year. On this particular occasion, being the first known Tasmanian Tea Duelling tournament, we had only managed to supply the Queensland and Tasmanian/Victorian versions of the biscuit. While in South and Western Australia, the biscuits look similar to their Victorian cousins, but taste sweeter. In Victoria and Tasmania, they are bigger, softer and sweeter. In New South Wales they are small, thick and hard, with a light colour. So now in Queensland, Ginger Nuts are thin and sweet, with a dark colour. Non-New-South-Welshmen protested vigorously, and Arnott’s decided to maintain the four recipes, even when baking them in a single bakery and giving them identical packaging (apart from nutritional information).Īccording to the Arnott’s Facebook page (or at least a friend’s reproduction of this passage, as I can’t find the original!): Then, disaster! The four bakeries, running out of different states, all using different recipes for Ginger Nut Biscuits, trialled baking them to the New South Wales standard. (Even our place names are an Australianised Britain.) His sons continued to run this bakery in New South Wales, until amalgamations and acquisitions of interstate bakeries in the 1960s led to the national company. You see, back in the Victorian era, William Arnott, a Scottish immigrant to Australia, set up a bakery in New South Wales. Or, in this case, several varieties of the same great Australian biscuit. So it should come as no surprise that a competition involving dressing up in Victorian period costume and dunking biscuits into tea, a seemingly necessarily British activity, should incorporate a great Aussie bikkie* in the antipodean version. And then there’s our flag, which is basically the Union Jack with the The Southern Cross stuck on the corner. For that matter, breakfast is brekky, barbecue is barbie, afternoon is arvo. Most of those Australians with British ancestry have a British name, but we tend to rampantly turn them into diminutives: David is Davo, John is Johnno, Shane is Shazza. British traditions in Australia have had, for many decades now, a fierce Australian-ness to them.