Let me start by saying "I love prawns".
"I love 'em all" having established that and for readers other than those seeped in the Australian culture, Prawns are of the generic name decapod crustaceans and encompass many other names including shrimp, scampi, langostino and can also refer to Lobsters, crayfish and crabs.
So what you say, I simply wish to point out these delicious creatures are known and loved the world over and are a mainstay in most international cuisines in one form or another.
As any Australian will know they form a rich heritage of food styles in our sea surrounded land.
Our seas and lakes are stocked with prawns of all types from the ocean going Tiger prawn to the lake loving Tuggerah Greasy Back prawn.
Like I said before,; I love 'em all" When I was a little tacker my Dad went through a very rare and short lived purple patch in his business and as we lived in Sydney he decided (probably not with my mother's entire support) to buy a fisherman's shack or rather two shacks on the same property on the Hawkesbury River some fifty kilometres from Sydney.
The Hawkesbury River is an extension of the Nepean River or the other way round depending if you are going upstream or down.
The wonderful Colo River runs into the Nepean as well, as do other tributaries whose sources are in the Blue mountains of NSW.
The part of the Hawkesbury River we are concerned with today is the Saltwater section which is the mouth of this very picturesque waterway.
The Estuary wanders from Broken Bay as the Tasman Sea is known at this point on the Coast between Barren joey Point and the truly magical Hamlet of Pearl beach.
The wide bay is home to a small island in the Shape of a recumbent King of the Jungle as is aptly named.
Across from Lion Island and little further along what is becoming a river is the town of Brooklyn which is just past Hangar Island, famous for its fishing and the fact that the last river postman plied his merry way along the river route.
The Town is the place where the new Hawkesbury River railway bridge was finally completed in 1955.
I can remember as a child listening to the old steam trains of that era go thundering past in the night.
We lived about two and a half miles from the tracks in Eastwood when I was a boy.
The sound of that old steam engine puffing up the steep slope between Eastwood and Epping Stations invokes in the little Roger dreams of places far away and the Hawkesbury was a very long was away in those days.
Brooklyn was also the place to leave the car when we went to our new weekender on Milson's Point which is a few miles upriver from Brooklyn and opposite the establishment called Milsons Island which was for Developmentally Challenged People in those days at least.
Milson's Island is actually joined to the headland by a causeway road and can be seen by looking west (left) as you cross the Hawkesbury River Bridge on the Pacific Hwy going North.
Milson's Point was a collection of old fishing shacks and wonky jetties pointing crookedly into the mighty Hawkesbury River.
Our particular pair of shacks boasted a forty four gallon drum for rainwater collection via a rusty pipe loosely hanging from the holey old gutter above it.
On weekends we my two elder Brothers and I would pile into the old Vanguard Ute Dad used for his painting and decorating business, sometimes our Mother would brave the wilds of the weekender weekends and other times would prefer to bask in the stillness of a Saturday afternoon at home without boisterous boys banging about.
We always plonked ourselves into the high sided Ute and revel led in the fresh air afforded by the top speed of about forty five miles an hour about 75 kph today.
This is completely against the law nowadays but we never did fall out and if we did anything too stupid we would have to face the wrath of our Dad.
We didn't do anything too stupid.
These are called natural checks and balances.
So off to the the shack we would go, along the windy old Pacific before expressways and huge mountainside cutting where in the back of the Ute we could feel and smell last years bushfire and see the blackened arms and trunks of the gum trees as they were covering themselves in green like hope renewing.
Arriving in Brooklyn and parking as close to the wharf as we could we then got into our wonderfully leaky old cutter, well cutter was a very posh name for it but for the purposes of this story cutter will do.
We certainly cut our splashy way to Milsons Point ready to cut down a tree or two before we wet a line and cooked some poor unfortunate fish.
If they were not biting Baked beans on toast was the menu favourite.
Now this stretch of water is those days was the main thoroughfare for fishing boats and more importantly Prawners, and in the early hours they would steam past our jetty on their way to unload in Brooklyn so trucks could rush the produce off to the markets.
If you were quick you could flag down a Prawn trawler and Buy a couple of pounds of the best prawns you ever ate.
The fishermen were always cheerful and I nearly always had my hair ruffled or my ear tweaked by these exotic slightly gamey smelling gents with strong brown hands.
We cooked them up in an old four gallon drum with the paint scraped out, remember Dad was a painter and we had drums aplenty.
Fill it up with Hawkesbury water and get it on the boil, tip in the poor still wriggling schoolies, they stopped wriggling in about one and a half seconds so we felt they were mercifully dispatched and that suited our saliva glands as we waited impatiently at five in the morning for a 'feed of Prawns' that seems to be some sort of collective noun thing, I know they are a 'school' of prawns but when you eat them they are always a 'feed' of prawns.
So when you are seven years old and drinking slightly rusty water from an old forty four gallon drum and gorging on prawns with the prospect of baked beans for dinner HHMMM!!! life can be sweet.
We also ate wonderful fresh prawns every now and then at home, and there was, like with so many things in families, a ritual that accompanied the Great Prawn Feeding Frenzy.
This was yet another activity my mother preferred to leave to the males in her family.
She was the only lemme in a rather male dominated environment and that is always a little sad.
These things don't often occur to one when he is seven years old.
The great Prawn Feeding Frenzy was held on Fridays even though we were not Catholic in religion or nature we usually had fish and chips on Friday and on some occasions Prawns and the ritual began.
Dad walked in the door booming "I've got prawns" my brothers and I would spring into action like a well oiled machine.
One got the two soup bowls, mother called them coupe's and filled one with vinegar and the other with mayonnaise from the jar in the fridge.
Another would get bread and butter out and we would spread half a loaf with chunky smears of 'marg', salt and pepper were also in appearance.
All this was placed on the abundant newspaper wrapped around the succulent little bodies of decapod crustaceans all red and ready for greedy hands too shell and chew.
There was always plenty of paper as I am sure Dad asked for extra as this is a finely tuned ritual and some things must be done just right.
When the prawns had been unwrapped and the bread butter, vinegar, mayonnaise, salt and pepper were plonked higgley pigglely on the newspaper which had been spread out in the middle of the living room, we three brothers and one father sat equidistantly around the feast on the floor and at the word go we descended on the prawns in an absolute gusto of gorging.
The theory is that we were all different sizes from dad down to me and our level of dexterity was diminished the younger we were.
This works well as the bigger you are the more you need to fill up and so it was here.
I was the smallest and got the least.
There was also another survival technique going on here.
Be quick Be accurate Be satisfied.
Sometimes there was not time to dip into the vinegar or mayonnaise and salt was sprinkled en masse to save precious time.
The only slight drawback about the Great Prawn eating Frenzy was I was ever so slightly allergic to the high levels of cholesterol in prawns (we didn't know that then) and they sometimes cause a little itch to develop on the skin.
Not enough to worry a hungry kid but still a little itchy.
Three boys and one Dad would emerge from the lounge room with smeary prawn smiles and the devastation wrapped firmly in the same newspaper and say " geeze I hope the fish and chips are still hot"
"I love 'em all" having established that and for readers other than those seeped in the Australian culture, Prawns are of the generic name decapod crustaceans and encompass many other names including shrimp, scampi, langostino and can also refer to Lobsters, crayfish and crabs.
So what you say, I simply wish to point out these delicious creatures are known and loved the world over and are a mainstay in most international cuisines in one form or another.
As any Australian will know they form a rich heritage of food styles in our sea surrounded land.
Our seas and lakes are stocked with prawns of all types from the ocean going Tiger prawn to the lake loving Tuggerah Greasy Back prawn.
Like I said before,; I love 'em all" When I was a little tacker my Dad went through a very rare and short lived purple patch in his business and as we lived in Sydney he decided (probably not with my mother's entire support) to buy a fisherman's shack or rather two shacks on the same property on the Hawkesbury River some fifty kilometres from Sydney.
The Hawkesbury River is an extension of the Nepean River or the other way round depending if you are going upstream or down.
The wonderful Colo River runs into the Nepean as well, as do other tributaries whose sources are in the Blue mountains of NSW.
The part of the Hawkesbury River we are concerned with today is the Saltwater section which is the mouth of this very picturesque waterway.
The Estuary wanders from Broken Bay as the Tasman Sea is known at this point on the Coast between Barren joey Point and the truly magical Hamlet of Pearl beach.
The wide bay is home to a small island in the Shape of a recumbent King of the Jungle as is aptly named.
Across from Lion Island and little further along what is becoming a river is the town of Brooklyn which is just past Hangar Island, famous for its fishing and the fact that the last river postman plied his merry way along the river route.
The Town is the place where the new Hawkesbury River railway bridge was finally completed in 1955.
I can remember as a child listening to the old steam trains of that era go thundering past in the night.
We lived about two and a half miles from the tracks in Eastwood when I was a boy.
The sound of that old steam engine puffing up the steep slope between Eastwood and Epping Stations invokes in the little Roger dreams of places far away and the Hawkesbury was a very long was away in those days.
Brooklyn was also the place to leave the car when we went to our new weekender on Milson's Point which is a few miles upriver from Brooklyn and opposite the establishment called Milsons Island which was for Developmentally Challenged People in those days at least.
Milson's Island is actually joined to the headland by a causeway road and can be seen by looking west (left) as you cross the Hawkesbury River Bridge on the Pacific Hwy going North.
Milson's Point was a collection of old fishing shacks and wonky jetties pointing crookedly into the mighty Hawkesbury River.
Our particular pair of shacks boasted a forty four gallon drum for rainwater collection via a rusty pipe loosely hanging from the holey old gutter above it.
On weekends we my two elder Brothers and I would pile into the old Vanguard Ute Dad used for his painting and decorating business, sometimes our Mother would brave the wilds of the weekender weekends and other times would prefer to bask in the stillness of a Saturday afternoon at home without boisterous boys banging about.
We always plonked ourselves into the high sided Ute and revel led in the fresh air afforded by the top speed of about forty five miles an hour about 75 kph today.
This is completely against the law nowadays but we never did fall out and if we did anything too stupid we would have to face the wrath of our Dad.
We didn't do anything too stupid.
These are called natural checks and balances.
So off to the the shack we would go, along the windy old Pacific before expressways and huge mountainside cutting where in the back of the Ute we could feel and smell last years bushfire and see the blackened arms and trunks of the gum trees as they were covering themselves in green like hope renewing.
Arriving in Brooklyn and parking as close to the wharf as we could we then got into our wonderfully leaky old cutter, well cutter was a very posh name for it but for the purposes of this story cutter will do.
We certainly cut our splashy way to Milsons Point ready to cut down a tree or two before we wet a line and cooked some poor unfortunate fish.
If they were not biting Baked beans on toast was the menu favourite.
Now this stretch of water is those days was the main thoroughfare for fishing boats and more importantly Prawners, and in the early hours they would steam past our jetty on their way to unload in Brooklyn so trucks could rush the produce off to the markets.
If you were quick you could flag down a Prawn trawler and Buy a couple of pounds of the best prawns you ever ate.
The fishermen were always cheerful and I nearly always had my hair ruffled or my ear tweaked by these exotic slightly gamey smelling gents with strong brown hands.
We cooked them up in an old four gallon drum with the paint scraped out, remember Dad was a painter and we had drums aplenty.
Fill it up with Hawkesbury water and get it on the boil, tip in the poor still wriggling schoolies, they stopped wriggling in about one and a half seconds so we felt they were mercifully dispatched and that suited our saliva glands as we waited impatiently at five in the morning for a 'feed of Prawns' that seems to be some sort of collective noun thing, I know they are a 'school' of prawns but when you eat them they are always a 'feed' of prawns.
So when you are seven years old and drinking slightly rusty water from an old forty four gallon drum and gorging on prawns with the prospect of baked beans for dinner HHMMM!!! life can be sweet.
We also ate wonderful fresh prawns every now and then at home, and there was, like with so many things in families, a ritual that accompanied the Great Prawn Feeding Frenzy.
This was yet another activity my mother preferred to leave to the males in her family.
She was the only lemme in a rather male dominated environment and that is always a little sad.
These things don't often occur to one when he is seven years old.
The great Prawn Feeding Frenzy was held on Fridays even though we were not Catholic in religion or nature we usually had fish and chips on Friday and on some occasions Prawns and the ritual began.
Dad walked in the door booming "I've got prawns" my brothers and I would spring into action like a well oiled machine.
One got the two soup bowls, mother called them coupe's and filled one with vinegar and the other with mayonnaise from the jar in the fridge.
Another would get bread and butter out and we would spread half a loaf with chunky smears of 'marg', salt and pepper were also in appearance.
All this was placed on the abundant newspaper wrapped around the succulent little bodies of decapod crustaceans all red and ready for greedy hands too shell and chew.
There was always plenty of paper as I am sure Dad asked for extra as this is a finely tuned ritual and some things must be done just right.
When the prawns had been unwrapped and the bread butter, vinegar, mayonnaise, salt and pepper were plonked higgley pigglely on the newspaper which had been spread out in the middle of the living room, we three brothers and one father sat equidistantly around the feast on the floor and at the word go we descended on the prawns in an absolute gusto of gorging.
The theory is that we were all different sizes from dad down to me and our level of dexterity was diminished the younger we were.
This works well as the bigger you are the more you need to fill up and so it was here.
I was the smallest and got the least.
There was also another survival technique going on here.
Be quick Be accurate Be satisfied.
Sometimes there was not time to dip into the vinegar or mayonnaise and salt was sprinkled en masse to save precious time.
The only slight drawback about the Great Prawn eating Frenzy was I was ever so slightly allergic to the high levels of cholesterol in prawns (we didn't know that then) and they sometimes cause a little itch to develop on the skin.
Not enough to worry a hungry kid but still a little itchy.
Three boys and one Dad would emerge from the lounge room with smeary prawn smiles and the devastation wrapped firmly in the same newspaper and say " geeze I hope the fish and chips are still hot"
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