Feeding the Poor in the Land of Sunshine

Appears in
Tried, Tested and True: Stories and Recipes Celebrating the Traditions of Australian Community Cookbooks
Tried, Tested and True

By Liz Harfull

Published 2018

  • About

The Blossoms Cookery Book, 1931.

Wilfred Magorwas no stranger to the everyday life and struggles of the working class. The grandson of a Cornish miner, he grew up in the South Australian copper-mining town of Moonta, where he started his first job underground when he was only twelve.

Sometimes he worked standing in freezing water, and sometimes in stifling and dangerous conditions, more than 600 metres below the earth’s surface, stripped to the waist and covered in grime. As a young man he moved to Broken Hill in New South Wales, where it was so hot in the mines that the perspiration ‘bubbled out through the lace holes of the men’s boots’.