Melbourne Rare Book Week

The Australian Women’s Weekly’scookbooks were (and still are) remarkably popular. The Weekly, Australia’s most popular women’s magazine, started publishing a range of cookbooks from the late 1930s, but it was during the 1970s when their cookbooks became incredibly popular. Many of the Weekly’s cookbooks, whether the Children’s Birthday Cake Book or the Chinese Cooking Class Cookbook, have become ‘bibles’ in the Australian kitchen. This talk will investigate how these books came to be, why they were so popular, and how they helped shape Australia’s food culture.