Australian food
Meat is plentiful, cheap and excellent: steak forms the mainstay of the pub counter meal and of the ubiquitous barbie , or barbecue - as Australian an institution as you could hope to find. Even if no one invites you along to one, you can still enjoy a barbie: free or coin-operated electric barbecues can be found in car parks, campsites and beauty spots all over the country. As well as beef and lamb, you may also find exotic meats , especially in the more upmarket restaurants. Emu, buffalo, camel and witchetty grubs are all served, but the two most common are kangaroo, a rich, tender and virtually fat-free meat, and crocodile, which tastes like a mix of chicken and pork and is at its best when simply grilled. At the coast, and elsewhere in specialist restaurants, there's tremendous seafood too: prawns and oysters, mud crabs, Moreton Bay bugs and yabbies (sea- and freshwater crayfish), lobsters, and a wide variety of fresh- and seawater fish - barramundi has a reputation as one of the finest, but is easily beaten by sweetlips or coral trout.

Fruit is good, too, from Tasmanian apples and pears to tropical bananas, pawpaw (papaya), mangoes, avocados, citrus fruits, custard apples, lychees, pineapples, passion fruit, star fruit and coconuts - few of them native, but delicious nonetheless. Vegetables are also fresh, cheap and good, and include everything from European cauliflowers and potatoes to Chinese choi sam and Indian bitter gourds. Note that aubergine is known as eggplant, courgettes as zucchini and red or green peppers as capsicums.

Vegetarians might assume that they'll face a narrow choice of food in "meatocentric" Australia, and in the country areas that's probably true. But elsewhere most restaurants will have one vegetarian option at least, and in the cities veggie cafés have cultivated a wholesome, trendy image that suits Australians' active, health-conscious nature.

Ethnic food
Since World War II wave after wave of immigrants have brought a huge variety of ethnic cuisines to Australia: first North European, then Mediterranean and most recently Asian.


Infamous Australian foods and "Esky"
Chicko Roll Imagine a wrapper of stodgy dough covered in breadcrumbs, filled with a neutered mess of chicken, cabbage, thickeners and flavourings, and then deep fried. You could only get away with it in Australia.

Damper Sounding positively wholesome in this company, "damper" is the swagman's staple - soda bread baked in a pot buried in the ashes of a fire. It's not hard to make after a few attempts - the secret is in the heat of the coals and a splash of beer.

Lamington A chocolate-coated sponge cube rolled in shredded coconut.

Pavlova (pav) A dessert concoction of meringue with layers of cream and fruit; named after the eminent Russian ballerina. Made properly with fresh fruit and minimum quantities of cream and sugar, it's not bad at all.

Pie floater The apotheosis of the meat pie; a "pie floater" is an inverted meat pie swamped in mashed green peas and tomato sauce; found especially in South Australia. Floaters can be surprisingly good, or horrible enough to put you off both pies and peas for life.

Vegemite Regarded by the English as an inferior form of Marmite and by almost every other nationality with total disgust, Vegemite is an Australian institution - a strong, dark, yeast spread for bread and toast.

Witchetty grubs (witjuti) About the size of your little finger, witchetty grubs are dug from the roots of mulga trees and are a well-known Australian bush delicacy. Eating the plump, fawn-coloured caterpillars live (as is traditional) takes some nerve, so try giving them a brief roasting in embers. They're very tasty either way - reminiscent of peanut butter.

Esky Eskies are insulated food containers varying from handy "six-pack" sizes to cavernous sixty-litre trunks capable of refrigerating a weekend's worth of food or beer. No barbie or camping trip is complete without a couple of eskies. The brand name "Esky" has been adopted to describe all similar products.

Bush tucker
The first European colonists decided that the country was not "owned" by the Aborigines because they didn't systematically farm the land. As many frustrated pastoralists later came to realize, this was a direct response to Australia's erratic seasons, which don't lend themselves to European farming methods with any degree of long-term security. Instead, Aborigines followed a nomadic lifestyle within extensive tribal boundaries, following seasonal game and plants and promoting both by annually burning off grassland.

Along the coast people speared turtles and dugong from outrigger canoes, caught fish in stone traps, piled emptied oyster shells into giant middens, and even co-operated with dolphins to herd fish into shallows. Other animals caught all over the country were possums, snakes (highly prized), goannas, emus and kangaroos. These animals were thrown straight onto a fire and cooked in their own juices, and their skins, bones and fat were sometimes used as clothing, tools and ointment respectively. More meagre pickings were provided by honey and green ants, water-holding frogs, moths and various grubs - the witchetty (or witjuti) being the best known. Foot-long ooli worms were drawn out of rotten mangrove trunks and tiny native bees were tagged with strands of spider web and then followed to their hives for honey; another sweet treat was mulga resin, picked off the tree trunk.

Plants , usually gathered by women, were used extensively and formed the bulk of the diet. The cabbage palm, sea almond, mangrove seeds, pandanus and dozens of fruits, including tropical coconuts, plums and figs, all grew along the coast. Inland were samphire bush, wild tomatoes and "citrus", grasstree hearts, cycad nuts (very toxic until washed, but high in starch), native millet, wattle seeds, waterlily tubers, nardoo seeds (a water fern), fungi, macadamia nuts, quandongs, and bunya pine nuts - the last had great social importance in southern Queensland, where they were eaten at huge feasts. In Queensland's far north you'll find one of the few surviving traditional styles of cooking, the Torres Strait Islander kup maori - meat and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in an underground oven.

It's tempting to taste some bush foods, and a good few city restaurants, as well as the Bushtucker Café in the Grampians, are now experimenting with them as ingredients; otherwise you'll need expert guidance, as many plants are poisonous. A few tours and safaris (particularly in the Northern Territory) give an introduction to living off the land; for further reading, try Bush Tucker: Australia's Wild Food Harvest by Tim Low (Angus & Robertson Aus).

Places to eat
Restaurants are astonishingly good value compared with Britain and North America, particularly as many restaurants are BYO (bring your own): you buy your own wine or beer and bring it with you - you're rarely far from a bottle shop (the Australian term for an off-licence or liquor store). There may be a small corkage fee, but it's still better than paying inflated restaurant prices for your drink: even many licensed restaurants also allow you to BYO. You should have no problem finding an excellent two- or three-course meal in a BYO restaurant for $22 or less, though a main course at a moderate restaurant is around $15-19. There are also lots of excellent cafés and coffee shops - Italian ones, continental patisseries/bakeries, and places that serve English-style Devonshire (cream) teas and cakes. In the cities and resorts, cafés will be open from early in the morning until late at night, serving food all day; in the country, they may stick more or less to shop hours.

The hotel counter meal is another mainstay, and at times may be all that's available: if it is, make sure you get there in time - meals in pubs are generally served only from noon to 2pm and again from 6 to 8pm, and rarely at all on Sunday evening. The food - served at the bar - will be simple but substantial and inexpensive (usually around $10 or less): steak, salad and chips, and variations on this theme. Slightly upmarket from this is the hotel bistro or restaurant in a motel, where you sit down to be served much the same food; these places often have a help-yourself salad bar, too, which is always a good alternative for vegetarians. Usually the most expensive thing on the menu is a huge steak for $12-15.

Fast food is widely available, with all the usual burger, pizza and chicken places offering a quick bite for as little as $5. Fish (usually shark or snapper) and chips can be excellent in coastal regions. In cities and bigger resorts you'll find fantastic fast food in food courts , often in the basements of office buildings or in shopping malls, where dozens of small stalls compete to offer Thai, Chinese, Japanese or Italian food as well as burgers, steaks and sandwiches. On the road, you may be reduced to what's available at the roadhouse, usually the lowest common denominator of reheated meat pies and microwaved ready meals.

Drinking
Australians have a reputation for enjoying a drink, and hotels (also sometimes called taverns, inns, pubs and bars) are where it mostly takes place. Traditionally, public bars are male enclaves, the place where mates meet after work on their way home, with the emphasis more on the beer and banter than the surroundings. While changing attitudes have converted many city hotels into comfortable, relaxed bars, many Outback pubs are still pretty spartan and daunting for strangers of either sex, but you'll find barriers will come down if you're prepared to join in the conversation.

Friday and Saturday are the serious party nights , when there's likely to be a band and - in the case of some Outback establishments - literally everybody for a hundred kilometres around jammed into the building. Opening hours vary from state to state; they're usually 11am to 11pm, but are often much later, with early closing on Sunday. Some places are also "early openers", with hours ranging from 6am to 6pm.

For take-out sales, liquor stores or off-licenses are known as bottle shops . These are usually in a separate section attached to a pub or supermarket - in some states, you can't buy alcohol from supermarkets or grocery stores. There are also drive-in bottle shops attached to pubs where locals can load bulk purchases directly into the boot of their car; these solve the question of parking, though aren't totally the lazy option as you normally have to get out of the car to make your selection.