Fish and Seafood

When our family arrived in Australia we literally devoured the landscape. My parents settled in Corio, a working class suburb of the industrial city of Geelong, an hour west of Melbourne. The family home is not far from the shores of Port Phillip Bay and is surrounded by the Barwon River catchment. (As I grew up I learned these were the traditional hunting grounds of the Wathaurung Aboriginal tribe.)

After a lifetime of living under the authoritarian rule of Franco, my father and mother celebrated their new-found freedom in Australia by catching and cooking every water creature they recognized. On weekends our family became hunters and gatherers and caught the same shellfish, crustaceans and fish that the traditional Aboriginal people caught in the waterholes, rivers and shores that surrounded my childhood home. I have memories of almost endless supplies of seafood that we caught ourselves.