KATE Shelton grew up on a farm 160km from Moree,  NSW with chooks and animals all around her. Like many Australian families hers asked “how can we improvise with distance?” In Shelton’s view, much of rural Australia still lives that way.

Now she has released a very personal book, “Love of the Laminex Table: a sustainable food journey”, the work of a lifetime to the owner and director of Benedict House, the old convent in Queanbeyan that has become a hub of arts activity in  the last few years.

The 320 page hardback, which includes 60 homely recipes, uses documentation photography spanning 40 years is a reflection of Shelton’s journeys in food and life.

According to Tommy Murphy, the award-winning Queanbeyan playwright who has long been supported by Shelton and who launched the book before a large crowd on November 12 at Benedict House:  “this book is about the inheritance we owe to those who nourish our lives…it documents a process in Australia beyond colonial traditions towards an invitation to a feast, enriched by many cultures.”
Initially in the postwar era of her childhood, Shelton’s was a closed society with homeschooling and entertaining in district halls, to which you took cakes in the back of the car. She records the experiences of farm women who ran huge households. The second of six daughters, she was a part of a culture where “women served the men”. She didn’t learn about feminism until much later.

In the meantime, there was schooling at Loreto convent in Sydney and Auntie Kit in John Howard’s old suburb, Earlwood, who was a whiz with mince on toast. She also enjoyed some exotic experiences travelling to and from school by the Northwest rail.

After training as a teacher, she found herself teaching in Griffith, where she befriended Italian families with a different way of cooking.

Later in London she found herself living in the home of the Wolfensohn family (of World Bank frame), upper crust

Jewish people, though the only recipe that she can identify in her book that she calls Jewish is “hoummos” (try telling any Lebanese that’s Jewish).

She hitched a ride to Greece, was stunned by the arid landscape that reminded her of home, finding the Greek’s philosophical and political. Cooking the Greek way was like living on the land in Australia, as the people ate what they grew and caught and grew — fish and salad for instance.

Returning to Australia, Shelton went back to Moree at the height of the dinner party era with all of its competitiveness. She left and opened an art gallery in Sydney, then, with her husband moved to Bellingen and worked at a radio station, eventually arriving in Canberra in 1990 to study painting at the School of Art.

Neighbours in Curtin taught her the Sicilian way of cooking. She took in Asian and African students and learnt new ways. To the African students, in particular, Australians seemed incredibly wasteful — grass could be otherwise employed.

After selling the house in Moree, they bought Benedict House Queanbeyan, once bought by Paul Keating and Geoffrey Tozer with the idea of turning it into a music school, but now a centre of craft and local Queanbeyan performance arts.

Her book is jampacked with lively anecdotes, recipes for everything from preserves to pancakes and cream, salmon cakes and stuffed capsicum and it is, to  Shelton, “not a literary work, but a conversation.” A conversation over the laminex table that’s still there in a back room, used for less glamorous purposes than before.

“Love of a Laminex Table: a sustainable food journey” by Kate Shelton, 326 pp, RRP: $55.