The coastal town of Cygnet is about 50 minutes south of Hobart in the Huon Valley.
The Huon River is the chief natural feature and the river’s mouth is a gorgeous abstract sculpture of peninsulas and bays, Port Cygnet being just one.
The D’entrecasteaux Channel, formed by Bruny Island just off the coast, makes the river mouth a well-protected navigable area for boats.
Matthew Evans, star of SBS’s Gourmet Farmer TV series, moved to Cygnet in 2009 and through the show is helping to put the Huon Valley, and Tasmania generally, firmly on the food travellers’ map.
The Gourmet Farmer story is based around a city lad, Evans, with no idea about farming, moving to a small rural holding where he tries to be more or less self-sufficient in “real food” in a world of mostly bland industrial produce.
There are striking resemblances to the British TV River Cottage series where chef, food writer, and free-range food advocate Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall moves to a Devon smallholding and does much the same thing.
Evans’s property is about nine hectares of rather challenging country.
Most of it is fairly steep and timbered, largely unsuitable for food production.
There are a few acres of flat pasture in a little valley next to the house, but the clay-based soil is on the sour side and sometimes waterlogged.
The house and vegetable garden are on the southern boundary, where there is a gentle north-facing slope, looking out over the pasture and the timbered hill beyond.
Unfortunately the timbered hill blocks a lot of sun, especially in winter.
Yet for all its faults it is a pretty block of land with a nice house and I can see why Evans, a complete novice to food production, took it on.
He, with his partner Sadie and their young son, have a few pigs, sheep, chooks, a bee hive, and a jersey house cow and calf (with another calf about to be born when I was there a few weeks ago).
The animals, mostly rare breeds like Wessex saddleback pigs, were introduced a bit too quickly for comfort, but the schedule of the TV series more or less dictated “doing in one year what I would have liked to have taken five to do,” Evans said.
But how did all this come about in the first place?
Evans was born in Canberra, trained as a chef, did odd jobs, and eventually became the Melbourne Age’s cafe reviewer.
More recently he was The Sydney Morning Herald’s food critic for about five years.
But it slowly dawned on him that the posh restaurants he was reviewing were not being truthful when they said they offered the best produce on the planet.
“They would charge you $11 for a coffee but couldn’t even be bothered knowing where the milk came from,” he said.
His search for the best produce resulted in his book The Real Food Companion, his move to Tasmania, and Gourmet Farmer (a name given to the show by SBS, Evans was keen to point out).
As it happened Evans had some mates in Tasmania anyway, chief among them Nick Haddow, who runs the high-end Bruny Island Cheese Company.
(Haddow features regularly on Gourmet Farmer and is a partner with Evans in a food shop soon to open in Hobart’s Salamanca food-market district.)
Evans is probably first and foremost a food writer (his new book Winter on the Farm, published by Murdoch Books, is about to come out), then a cook and provedore (the new shop and a stall at the Tasmania Farm Gate in Melville Street, Hobart, on Sundays), then the face of Gourmet Farmer, and overarching everything, a small landholder who tries to produce a fair bit of quality food for his family.
“The best potatoes are the ones we pick at 7 o’clock and cook straight away.”
His motivation for all these things comes back to his reason for moving to Tasmania in the first place – the journey to find quality (“real”) food where “consistency [as demanded by the industrial food system] is the enemy of greatness”.
The best turkey, he says, is more likely to come from a small farmer a few valleys away that we will never hear about rather than some high-profile commercial operation.
Which is where the local “food circles” that he is involved with come into play.
Rather than each small farmer in Cygnet trying to produce all their own food, local landholders will swap or barter their excess.
So when Evans’s Barnevelder chooks are off the lay – as they were when I was there – a neighbour’s eggs will likely fill the void.
All you have do to source quality local food is use these food circles (ever-widening as things become scarce) to feed yourself.
Of course it pays to know your food-producing neighbours, some of whom moved to the Cygnet area for the same reasons that Evans did – to downshift, to live in a pretty rural area on a modest income with a healthy lifestyle, where “people have never lost contact with the land”.
As I say goodbye, I notice the leg of prosciutto curing on the back verandah.
Always taken from a sow for the best flavour, the leg takes about 12 months to cure.
The ham is symbolic of what Evans is trying to achieve – control of his food from breed selection, birth, growth, death and processing to achieve the best that nature and human ingenuity can offer, without the compromises that the industrial food complex imposes on what we can eat.
And with his house cow, he no longer has to wonder where the milk comes from.
For fans of Gourmet Farmer, Evans has just finished filming a second series.
He says the show will provide updates of life on the farm, but with more adventures featuring food producers in the surrounding districts.
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