Rewriting the village: geographies of food and belonging in Clovelly, Australia

Abstract

This essay focuses on intersecting meanings of food and femininity, place and time, as an excavation of their ‘secret geographies’. Drawing on women’s narratives of mundane rituals and practices associated with food shopping, cooking, eating and ‘eating out’, the article traces moments of looking backwards and of looking forwards towards remembered and imagined landscapes of consumption. In the process, the ‘village’ of Burnie Street, Clovelly (a beachside suburb in Sydney, Australia) becomes a spatial metaphor for examples of ‘local’ changes in domestic food cultures and their material structures since the mid-1940s. This image of the village also allows the argument to chart some intriguing shifts in social relations (particularly of gender, class and ethnicity). The article concludes that useful public narratives for tracing geographies of the urban are not necessarily to be found in attempts to rework the past or the present in mythic terms, as either bad times or good. Instead, subtle rewritings of the village vested in everyday belongings hint at more productive analytical directions.