The Bemboka Banquet

The town of Bemboka, at the foot of Brown Mountain in the lush Bega Valley, is tiny. I knew it was tiny, with only 350 residents, but I am still surprised by how tiny it looks. You can drive the entire main street, made up of the credit union, the post office, the Bemboka Pie Shop, a beautiful white Catholic Church, a tourist shop selling the intriguing combination of crystals and teddy bears, and the Bemboka Hotel, in just a few minutes.

Which is incredible considering the feat the small NSW south coast community has pulled off. For six months the townsfolk have been busy raising pigs, lambs, ducks, and chickens, catching silver perch, bass, yabbies and eels, growing fruit and vegetables, brewing lager, and making cheese for the inaugural Bemboka Banquet (held on Saturday, February 6). While the 100-mile diet is gaining momentum internationally, with 95 per cent of the food for the banquet from within 15km of the post office, they may have set a world record.

Not that they are thinking about this now, when there is still so much to do. The majority of the diners are from elsewhere – Coffs Harbour, Cootamundra, Merimbula, Tathra, Wollongong, and Canberra. There is even a Victorian couple, Nancy and Geoffrey Mortimer, who lost their St Andrews home in the Black Saturday fires and couldn’t bear to be in Victoria for the anniversary. "And we liked the idea of this being local and sustainable," Nancy Mortimer tells me.

Locals are here too, but they are busy showing diners to their tables, preparing and cooking the food out back, waiting on tables, manning the bar, and entertaining. I find banquet organiser and former Canberra chef Patrick Reubinson out the back putting the final touches on the entrées. He gestures proudly at the food. "This all came from Bemboka residents, all this."

 Then someone yells that one of the platters doesn’t have the meat terrine so he disappears. Reubinson wanted to raise money for the Bemboka Show, with diners pledging upwards of $100 for a spot ($12,000 was raised). But the banquet also raised the spirits of a community experiencing extended drought.

Fifth generation south coast dairy farmer and Bega mayor Tony Allen says he is inspired by the camaraderie and by the local, sustainable element. "It’s back to basics isn’t it, back to the old ways, and appreciating the ability we have to provide for ourselves, as distinct as just walking into a shop and buying everything in a bag. I think it’s marvellous."

So does everyone else at our table. Retired Merimbula couple Pam and Bruce Eaton are friends of Alan Mogridge, also from Merimbula, who printed the banquet "passports" (before my parents and I are allowed to enter we are checked at "immigration" and the conditions of the "temporary visitor permit" read: "single entry"; "work prohibited"; and "must enjoy oneself").

Alan says when an envelope from Bemboka arrived in the post, it had been "tampered with" and only two passports were inside instead of the three, so he had to be sent a new passport. "So there is maybe an illegal immigrant trying to get in with the passport that never arrived," he says, finding this enormously funny.

Retired Canberra couple Heather and Patrick Doyle pledged because Heather was a student of Reubinson’s at CIT. "I was a mature student," she says, her short blonde hair bobbing and her blue eyes wide.

Another younger Canberra couple Justine and Matthew Power tell me solemnly they "really enjoy food". Matthew, a large man with a booming voice, says that he and his wife’s goal is to eat at the top 10 restaurants in the world. Justine nods her curly head in agreement. So far they have been to the Fat Duck in London, Tetsuya’s in Sydney and hope to go to El Bulli in Catalonia in July.

It was Matthew’s mother who pledged for two tickets to the Bemboka Banquet as a Christmas present. "But she said, 'I’m giving you this present but I don’t know if I’ve been successful yet'," Matthew says. "It’s not one of the top restaurants obviously but I think the food will be amazing," he adds.

And it is. The entrées, including game terrine with baby salad leaves, and baked beetroot mousse with herb and yoghurt dressing, come out on a beautiful wooden tray shaped like a pig. Everyone is silent for a few minutes while they eat.

Then Justine says of the caramelised tomato tart with goat’s cheese and basil oil: "It’s got a real sweetness to it, it’s lovely." Bruce nods and says: "They’re locally grown tomatoes. That’s why they’re so sweet."

Matthew is trying out something that isn’t on the menu, some sort of pie. "What is it? It’s not on the menu. It must be quince," he says finally. Heather says, "Quince? Did you say quince?" Matthew replies: "Mm, yes, and fig, I think." Everyone is enraptured with the parsley and roasted garlic panna cotta with crispy bacon leaves, which is so creamy it slips down the throat, and the zucchini and parmesan soup.

Meanwhile Bemboka Primary School teacher Keith Law and his sons Andrew, 20, and Gareth, 18, all wearing waistcoats and fedoras, have leapt on stage and are strumming their guitars and belting out a few Simon & Garfunkel tunes. It’s a good thing the entertainment is well under way because the main course ends up being served an hour later than scheduled. "I thought that would happen," Patrick says cheerfully. "Nothing in the country ever runs on time."

Keith Law says entertaining was a real buzz. "It’s taken so long to get together and to finally see this all come to fruition – the pinnacle was seeing people having a good time."

His sons joke that Bemboka’s population has "quadrupled" with the banquet but they are all proud of the way the small Bega Valley community has come together to put Bemboka on the map.

"If it is a world record [holding a banquet with food from within a 15km radius] wow … that can send a message to any kid in a little country town that you don’t have to be a city dweller to be a world champion," Keith says.

They joke that there are downfalls to living in the country though, like the time Keith ran out of toilet paper (while on the toilet) and sent Gareth off to find some. "But the next door neighbour is 500 metres away and Gareth being very polite, had a cup of tea, he was social like I always said he should be in the country. I think about an hour and 10 minutes later he came back."

David Corbett, from Tathra, and Jim Kemp, from Bega, are waiting outside the hall, not for toilet paper, but the coiled sausage the Bemboka Banger. Young men with walkie talkies assure them the banger is "on its way" (food is being stored in the pie shop). Corbett and Kemp are in blue tartan kilts and are members of the Batemans Bay Soldiers Club Pipe Band. They will strike up the bagpipes when Reubinson wheels in the Bemboka banger, which the audience has to guess the length of (19.37 metres).

"What’s the time? Have you got a watch?" Kemp asks. I don’t. "Scotsmen are too frugal to buy watches," he jokes. Then when I take their photograph with the flash they blink rapidly. "Reminds me of the lightning we had last night in Tathra," Corbett says, winking at me.

Also outside is German-born Helmut Eder, who is waiting for the 70lt of lager he made, which will be served with the banger. "The trick is to pour it slowly to make sure the sediment doesn’t go in, but still fast enough there’s a bit of head on it." He made the lager in three batches over two months. "But my wife did a lot of the work," he admits. "She cleaned all the long neck bottles."

When Reubinson does finally wheel in the sausage, people ooh and ah and crowd around him, snapping pictures. It is a big hit at our table, as is the Ooranook fish pie, the baked loin of lamb coated in leek and bacon duxelles and wrapped in brandied puff pastry. The braised pork loin with fennel, chilli and garlic "melts in the mouth", but the roast chicken with chickpea salad and a capsicum coulis is not so popular.

"The chickpeas are flavourless," Matthew says quite simply and he tells this to one of the chefs too. And he would know. He describes himself as a "pure separatist" when it comes to eating. "I eat everything individually. My wife’s grandmother eats everything on one fork, like one pea, one carrot."

But we’re lucky there are even chickpeas, or just vegetables in general, according to retired farmer Kevin Maddern, who was the vegetable coordinator and directed about 40 growers. He says it was a "very difficult season" but he was impressed with the way people bought water from contractors "for months" and coaxed fruit and vegetables out of their "little backyard gardens".

Beans, beetroot, potatoes, onions, and zucchinis did "wonderfully well", but because of the chilly days in October and November, the cucumbers and rockmelons "refused to move".

Maddern himself learned to grow celery ("that was an experience") and while he was never "big on herbs" he now has plenty of dill, basil, thyme, chives, and French tarragon growing on his property. "I’m happy with them."

He would do it again in a second. "Oh yes. There are new people who’ve come to the district with wonderful talents, and well, everybody gets together on this project and gets to know each other, so it’s only good for the community, and I’m all for pride or progress."

Sandra and Andrew "the hook" Judge, who run the post office, would as well. Andrew was the dam fish coordinator ("the damn fish coordinator") and struck gold when one small, low dam yielded three fish weighing a total of 7kg. "When they came to up to breathe and to feed there was so little water they were just swimming around on top of the water so you could them clearly, and we just walked in and netted them."

But they couldn’t catch any trout. "They were big and old because they were too smart to take lures or baits or flies," Sandra laughs.

While Sandra’s job as dairy coordinator was relatively easy ("the eggs just rolled in" and Reubinson made most of the cheese), she was blown away when the chairman of Bega Cheese offered to send a tanker out to Bemboka, buy milk from Bemboka farmers and take it to the Bega Cheese factory, where it would be kept separate and made into butter by their prize-winning butter maker. "At no cost," Sandra says, still amazed.

 Some waitresses brush past, including Karlee Barber, 12, who helped raise the meat chickens, and Jacinta and Natasha Alcock, 13 and 11, who helped raise the pigs and whose mum Karen was the meat coordinator. When I ask the girls if they were sad about their animals just being eaten, they look at me like I’m crazy. No, they’re all "kinda used to it" living in the country.

As coffee and desserts are served, the music is wilder and louder and people are drunker. The lavender panna cotta on cream cheese sable biscuit is my favourite, but Justine likes the rhubarb, straweberry and apple crumble with mascarpone cream ("It was just the right texture, and was tart and sweet").

But everyone else at the table is in ecstasy over the almond spice cake with grilled stone fruit and crème fraiche; the mascarpone tartlet with poached pears; and the baked plum and port cheesecake.

By the time the cheese platter of farmhouse cheddar, soft blue, camembert, crottin, and quark fruit log, is served, everyone at my table is quite full and mournfully stares at the mounds of cheese that remain and are eventually whisked away. After the energetic auction (Matthew successfully bids on some whiz-bang washing up gadget which is a good purchase if you enjoy food as much as he does) people start to drift out, still laughing and chatting.

I finally catch Reubinson. He's saying something but I can't quite hear him over the boisterous guitar and singing and then he's interrupted by people saying what a wonderful time they've had and would he please do it again.