Eat possum: Meet the chef and author redefining sustainability Down Under

Analiese Gregory talks to Ella Walker about diving, cooking and beekeeping in the wilds of Tasmania

Life in the raw: Gregory at home (PA)

It’s 7pm in Tasmania and I’m with chef Analiese Gregory. There’s a huge bowl of cherries beside her, a glass of wine in her hand and a day behind her spent cooking, foraging and being in awe of her new hive of bees.

She says: “They like it when it’s sunny and they’re not so into thunderstorms or rainy weather. I’ve discovered this – just so you’re aware – it makes them grumpy.”

Having worked in top restaurants in London, France, Spain, Australia, Morocco and more, Gregory landed in Tasmania four years ago and her new book, How Wild Things Are, captures how she lives and eats.

It’s divided into two sections: recipes – the kind of food she’d throw together for a friend – and a sketch of her (deeply enviable) life in the Aussie island state where she’s learned new skills, such as cooking possum and wallaby. The latter is a sustainable meat here and is lean, a bit like veal crossed with venison, she says and adds: “It’s surprisingly delicious – once you get over the mental block.”

Born in New Zealand, Gregory was raised on Chinese food (her mother is Chinese-Dutch) and she, “grew up in one of those houses where we didn’t really go to McDonald’s or buy cakes at the supermarket”.

She remembers, fondly: “If you made something, then you could eat as much of it as you wanted,” such as the banana cake she made aged five and scoffed. When it came to leaving school, “people said, ‘Do something you love, because then you’ll never work a day in your life,’ which is really not true at all, because then you take the thing you love and turn it into your means of earning an income. That changes everything.”

It was, however, “still a good idea,” she admits – and that good idea has led to her tending two acres in the Huon Valley, “on a dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere”. She tends chickens, pigs destined for salami and charcuterie, those sometimes-grumpy bees and is building a vegetable garden. Her miniature goats – that are absolutely not for eating but are, “part of the family” – weed and keep unruly blackberries under control.

When she’s not tending her menagerie, Gregory can often be found hanging up rubbery strands of seaweed to dry, or chucking on her diving kit. Prior to moving to Tasmania she’d only been diving a couple of times but the lure of ridiculously fresh, hand-plucked seafood cooked on the beach, coaxed her into the cold water.

Now she stashes her dive gear in the car, so at a moment’s notice she can, “jump in the ocean and see what’s here”.

Different strokes: Gregory keeps hens for eggs only (PA)

The water sounds otherworldly.

She says: “I’ve never seen a single piece of rubbish in the ocean in Tassie. I’ve come to realise that that’s almost abnormal in the world these days.” The experience of being submerged in it is something she’s found akin to meditation: “It’s very calming. When I was working heaps of hours and was really stressed from the restaurants, it was the antithesis of that for me.”

Besides collecting abalone (scallops, she says, make for a reasonable ingredients swap), her dives are also spent on the lookout for seahorses: “There’s some really crazy ones in Tasmania.” And she watches manta rays and gummy sharks scoot past while she attempts to catch crayfish, “which I’m still struggling to get because they’re a little bit fast for me”.

Even if we weren’t in lockdown and starved of travel, Gregory’s life would probably make you want to pack a bag, buy a beekeeping veil and rescue a couple of goats. She says: “A friend was making fun of me. He was like, ‘Oh, you have to go forage wild fruit and make shrubs. Your life is so hard!’ [But] I’ve made this my job!

Rod for her back: Gregory says there are downsides to natural living (PA)

“There are very good moments, where I go and dive and then cook abalone on the beach. Life is great, life is amazing but also I live in a 1910 unrenovated house with no heating and my goats escape and terrorise the neighbours and one of my pigs keeps biting me and now I have to get a tetanus shot.”

She makes a good case for the downsides but can’t mute the sense of adventure that emanates from her stories and the book itself. You can definitely see why Australian TV channel SBS Food has been following her for a new series, A Girl’s Guide To Hunting, Fishing And Wild Cooking. She says it’s more like an intrepid, “Tasmanian River Cottage,” that has her floundering after dark and hunting for food.

“I would never just hunt for fun,” she says. “That’s not what it’s about for me. We’re not talking fox hunting. We’re talking: you hunt animals and then they get used.”

Waste is not an option, so much so that, “a friend of mine just started tanning the pelts of the animals that we hunt,” she says with a certain amount of pride. “There was a deer we broke down and made salami and stuff with and the next time I went over to his house, he had made a rug out of the skin. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is the next level’. I was sitting on the rug of the animal eating the salami made from it.”

She is adamant she needs to feel good about the meat she eats and where it comes from. “I do think you can be a meat eater and be an ethical meat eater,” Gregory notes. She even eats the male roosters produced by her chickens. “I had this crazy year, where the chickens had 40 babies and there were roosters everywhere,” she remembers. “Now amongst my group of friends, there’s heaps of demand for it.”

Eating wallaby may not be on the horizon for most of us, nor hand-dived abalone, but consider the book an opportunity for armchair travel, she says. A chance to see, “how ridiculously beautiful and varied Tasmania is”. That we will happily take, right now.

‘How Wild Things Are: Cooking, Fishing and Hunting at the Bottom of the World ’by Analiese Gregory, photography by Adam Gibson, is published by Hardie Grant on 4 March, £22