Naked City: Broken Biscuits and Australia Day
Over the past two or three decades Australia Day has been reshaped, reconstructed and restyled to mean many things to many different Australians. It’s still a somewhat nebulous celebration of our identity, dogged by long running political controversy over ‘Invasion Day’, but as a shameless public holiday it now seems to work pretty well.
The outburst of jingoism, that once saw flag draping hoons banned from the Big Day Out, appears to have dissipated, replaced by harmless face painting and mini flags for the kids. In Sydney there’s a mass of activity all over the city and suburbs, most of it for free and it’s become the quintessential family day out.
It’s a minor event in the grand scale of things but in Macquarie Street, Arnotts Biscuits are celebrating 150 years of Saos, Milk Arrowroots, and latter day Tim Tams. That they are now owned by the US Campbell Soup Company is an unfortunate irony, but who cares when the freshly baked Tiny Teddies are for free.
It’s perhaps a good time to ponder a less sophisticated and less prosperous time during the Great Depression and immediate post war period when corner stores sold broken biscuits for a few pennies a bag. These days they probably end up as pig food but in a bygone era the collateral damage from the big biscuit bakeries was packaged into tins and supplied to grocers to sell as fractured rejects.
Aesthetics aside they still tasted the same and in the 40s and 50s every school kid with a sixpence to spare would invest in a big brown paper bag of the sugary crumblies. These days no self respecting child or adult would accept a biscuit that was shattered into half a dozen pieces and was almost unrecognisable from the original product. Hopeless for dunking of course but tainted with the stigma that you were receiving some kind of inferior product.
That was not the thinking back a half century ago when bags of broken bickies held their own almost visceral pleasure as you scrambled for the last bits of the unknown at the bottom of the bag. And once the bag was emptied there was the added attraction of inflating it and popping it in your school mate’s ear. Try doing that with a plastic shopping bag!
Yes it may seem like a very minor curiosity of the past but the fact that broken biscuits were actually packaged for resale says a lot about the thrift of a bygone era, as opposed to the rampant waste that exists today where Coles and Woolies skips are overflowing with damaged goods and products just out of their used by date.
Broken biscuits are unlikely ever to return as a commercial product but for those who occasionally like to wallow in the past, grab an old style brown paper back, fill it with a good old style Arnotts selection (no Tim Tim Tams please) and gently mash. You’ll be in heaven!
