Was the BBQ invented in Australia? No.. The USA!

Australian backyard BBQ

in the Australian Women’s Weekly, 1953

I was always certain that the BBQ was an Australian invention. So now I have to rely on Alexander Lee instead.

The Spanish word barbacoa was first used by a Caribbean ex­plorer historian. On returning to Eur­ope after 9 years in the New World, Fernández de Oviedo published a history in 1535 and introd­uc­ed readers to tobacco, pine-apples and the barb­acoa/grill, learned from the locals in Hispaniola, Jamaica and Cuba.

Not until mid C17th did the word BBQ come to be closely assoc­iated with a cooking method in European texts. The earliest refer­ence app­eared in Beauchamp Plantagenet’s 1648 pamphlet, Desc­rip­t­ion of New Al­bion. Describing native peoples in North America, he noted that the Chesapeake Bay Indians loved dry smoak fish. Edmund Hickeringill (1631-1708) was an Englishman who lived in Jamaica, noting that whenever they killed one of the wild hogs on the island, they would slice, cook and eat it.

African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (c1745-97) reported that dur­ing his travels in Honduras, he witnessed some Miskito peop­le kill an alligator and cook its meat over a coal-filled hole in the earth. Since it made even the toughest meat tender, virtually every part of an animal could be eaten. It required little fuel and it made for a tasty meal.

Yet barbecuing remained the preserve of natives, or slaves. There was little evidence of col­onists barbecuing meat, except on jour­neys into the interior with native guides. If there was enough fuel and money to aff­ord the better cuts, why not simply oven roast?

As late as the mid-C18th, Europeans look down on the indig­enous peoples of the Caribbean and Central America as unciv­il­ised; and while colonists and travellers were willing to eat BBQ meat when there was no alternative, they still saw it as crude. That writers Aphra Behn and Alexander Pope associated it with acts of barb­ar­ity & glut­tony was indicative of the disdain in which it was held. See Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of English Language 1755: ba’rbecue: a term used in the West-Indies for dressing a hog whole; which, be­ing split to the backbone, is laid flat upon a large grid­iron, rais­ed 2’ above a charcoal fire, with which it is surrounded.

After winning independence from Britain in the 1770s, the former colonists were an­xious not only to safeguard their freedom against foreign threats, but also to expand their territory westwards. These twin goals exacerbated their long-running conflict with the native American tribes, many of whom had allied with the British. Over the decades, a series of brutal wars were fought, resulting in forced removals so severe it was classed as genocide.

But as the prosperity and self-confidence of Britain’s North Am­er­ican colonies grew in the later C18th, BBQs became more com­mon: not just among slaves from the Caribb­ean, but also among the colonial elites. In Massachusetts and Virg­inia there were accounts of BBQs held by wealthy landowners. In 1769, George Washington recorded that he had gone up to Alex­andria for a BBQ and stayed all night.

Yet irconically, it was in perpetrating these horrors that American settlers gained a full understanding of native society. They real­ised that smoking was a method well suited to the hardships of frontier life; and by the time of the Texas annexation (1845), the smell of barbecued beef became a familiar feat­ure of pioneer towns.

Southern Barbecue, 

wood engraving from a sketch by Horace Bradley,

in Harper’s Weekly, July 1887.

credit: Smithsonian

From the Atlantic to the Gulf, bordered by the western outposts of Texas and Kansas City, the area of the U.S known as the Barbecue Belt housed four distinct barbecue traditions: Carolina, Texas, Memphis and Kansas City.

Australia The BBQ cooking method was certainly known in Britain well before the First Fleet departed for Botany Bay. But it was little used in Australia till the mid-1800s. Huge public feasts including whole roasted bullocks certainly seemed popular. William Wentworth celeb­rated the dep­art­ure of the unpopular Governor Darl­ing with a huge roast at Vaucluse House in 1831. In 1884 Mudgee citizens celebrated their railway’s arrival with a bull­ock roast, a civic reception, torchlight parade and ball. The Waverley Bowls Club’s had a Leg o’ Mutton BBQ in 1903. In 1920, a public BBQ in Martin Place promoted Peace Bonds.

It took decades to move from the public to the private, from the whole beast to chops and saus­ages. But by the 1950s the BBQ idea had taken hold, eventually becoming an ingrained part of Aust­ral­ia’s national psyche. Mothers chopped the salads, fathers cooked the meats.

Australian Women’s Weekly’s outdoor living feature in 1953 gave in­structions for building a brick BBQ at home. Then, in the mid 60s, the gas BBQ arrived. If smoke was the essential el­em­ent of a BBQ, purists would not accept the new fake machine. But gas-fuelled BBQs popped up in parks all over Australia, hardware shops opened saus­age sizzles and election-day voting booths were promoted overseas by Paul Hogan bunging another shrimp on the barbie.

Since the BBQ boom of the 1950s, it spread to the UK and flour­ish­ed, was popular in Germany and became a nat­ion­al religion in Aus­tralia. But it was still unmistak­ably American - taken from ind­ig­enous Amer­ic­ans, nurtured by immigrants and spread around the world.