Associate Professor Adele Wessell has worked at Southern Cross University for about 20 years and has a number of roles at the university but her special area of interest is food history. It's a fascinating topic and discipline that has allowed her to re-examine the history of the North Coast from a new perspective.

I first started getting into food history in the 1990s while I was doing my PHD on the history of Columbus Day and Australia Day. One of the things that really interested me was that the motivation for Christopher Columbus's voyage was actually the spice trade - pepper and all of that sort of stuff. It seemed to me that food had been really overlooked as a force in history. It was kind of seen sometimes as something that reflected what was going on or as a way of differentiating one era from another or different cultures from one another but in itself it wasn't seen as something that actually helped to shape history in a powerful way.

Then somebody gave me a book in 2000 - I think it was Barbara Santich's In the Land of the Magic Pudding - tracing the history of Australia through food menus and recipes and literature looking at food. It was such a revelation to me that you could actually do food history. I went to the library and looked at a few things, and there weren't that many people doing food history in Australia at that stage - it had just started growing in the US and Europe - and so I wrote a unit on food history to teach here at Southern Cross, learning as I was going at the same time.

The course was lots of fun. Each week, everyone would have to bring something to eat and we would talk through the sorts of meanings that came from the food. We always started the class having conversations about what people had for dinner the night before and then about what that said about labour and about your economic position and the dynamics of power in a particular family, technology, what was available, what people knew and understood about ingredients and how to combine them and so on. So from that time I was just really hooked.

I realised you could actually really tell a history just completely through food. The interesting thing about it is that it's also an area that's quite accessible. People are generally kind of interested in what you do as a food historian.

To a lot of people it sounds like a bit of a lark. They imagine that you just sort of eat all the time and have a lot fun, but it's just as rigorous and just as complex as other areas of history really.

So I kind of stuck with it. I didn't have a clear direction at the beginning, because it was such a wide field, there were a lot of people writing fairly general kind of histories, but it has become a little bit more specialized.

Mostly now I work on cookbooks as historical documents and have written a range of things, like how ideas about love and sexuality have changed by looking at recipes for romance. I've written about wedding cakes and what they say about colonialism and post colonialism and ties with Britain and all of that sort of stuff.

The other interest I have in terms of food history is the history of food production. It's good to have a research base that also connects you with the local community and Lismore has got a really interesting food history.

The dairy industry is a really obvious example, that a lot of people would be familiar with, of food influencing local history. On the one hand, there's the lives of individual farmers and their own kind of biographies and so on but you can also look at the local situation in relation to much broader historical changes.

The area was promoted for dairy farmers and there was a whole migration that connects the North Coast to other areas. Much later there was a restriction placed on liquid milk production, so this area was quite distinguished in only being a cream producing area which meant that it was also a lot poorer than a lot of other dairy areas as well. So that kind of connects to the national economy and the sorts of regulations that are around milk.

On an international level, if you're looking at economic forces, at one stage in 1897, a huge proportion of the butter that was imported into Britain came from the North Coast and not necessarily from other areas in Australia, which connected us to all of those kind of global forces around the economy. So then when Britain joined the EU, that also had an impact on the local area.

The Aquarius festival and the kinds of changes that people talk about coming from the 1970s, and that whole kind of back-to-the-land movement, in a sense was also facilitated by dairy farmers needing to find other incomes, whether that was kind of renting places out or selling their own land. So that's another large impact.

Interestingly, a lot of the farmers who could be seen to be conventional farmers, those old dairy farmers in the 1960s or 1970s, have a lot in common with the alternative people that came in and got involved in different kinds of food production as well. They're working with the same kind of challenges on the same land with the same kind of rainfall and issues around soil and the same weed issues and all of those sorts of things. So there's a lot of continuity I think.

We tend to separate the history of the local area sometimes in terms of indigenous history and then those older settlers and the Aquarians and then the sea change or tree change people. But in fact, there is a lot of continuity when you look at it from the perspective of the land itself.

At the moment, I've just finished a paper about the history of native foods in the Northern Rivers because I think it’s a topic that has been neglected. Macadamias come from here and are one of the more successful, long-term established native foods that are exported in Australia so I started looking at the macadamia industry.

I also went through explorers' notes and early newspapers and agricultural records and found a lot of early interest in other native foods that I don't think has been recognized. The early settlers were producing cordial from finger limes, for instance. People talked about how refreshing and delicious they were.

A lot of the settlers to the area, because they didn't acknowledge that Aboriginal people were actively cultivating foods and involved in the production of foods, they didn't then really care for them in a way that allowed them to be able to reproduce, and the loss of a lot of those sorts of trees was not something that was expected. So something like finger limes, which are an understory crop, the trees were being lost as the Big Scrub was being cleared, and they weren't being replaced. The availability of those foods to Aboriginal people at the time was really severely curtailed.

While at one stage the settlers would have had some reliance on the native foods for consumption, before they established a lot of the exotic food crops we have now, because they became less reliant on them, I guess they weren't thinking about them or recording them necessarily either. So there's a lot that was really kind of taken for granted.

I think I do choose research subjects that I'm personally interested in but that also mean something in the local community as well. There are lots of ways in which researchers are required to be pragmatic about their choices, but I think I've been really lucky to be able to do something that does connect me with the local community, where I can interview farmers and do those sorts of oral histories. So I’m glad I can make that kind of contribution.

And I think that the history of this area has broader interest as well. It's not just of interest to people who live here, but there are patterns and responses and ways of doing things that are useful to examine and apply to other places too.