Aussie Bloggers

Hi, I’m Gillian Polack and I’m guest blogging today. There’s a reason for me being here, apart from the obvious one of the hosts being incredibly nice and generous people. I’m an Aussie blogger with a lot of US readers. If you check out my Food Historyblog, you’ll find it has a US look to the page and that I blog with a US blog network. My other blog is on Live Journal.

For the purposes of this post, that second blog doesn’t count, in fact, because there is no balancing act involved. I post about my life in Canberra a lot there and what I’m writing about and what I’m reading and what I’m thinking and how I feel that morning. It’s the kind of personal blog you’d expect from a fiction writer. This makes sense, given I am indeed a fiction writer.

I’m also an historian. I express some of my historianness (historianicity?) in my personal blog because – as I like to tell people – the Middle Ages intrudes everywhere – but most I use my Food History blog to talk about food and history and cultural change over time and recipes.

This is where it gets interesting.

I want to get people thinking about history and enjoying history. I want to help readers engage with history and help them pursue their own family history and culinary pasts. I also want to talk about wider issues. All this I do. It’s fun. I get people involved in history through talking about things they’re familiar with. Right now I’m doing it with election cakes – a traditional US recipe quite suited for their election year.

It remains fun as long as I stay on my tightrope. I have to retain my Australian identity (helped by my grandmother’s 1950s handwritten recipe book and by a stalwart group of Canberra locals involved in my various activities) and I have to communicate to the rest of the world. The rest of the food history world comprises readers from at least eighty-five countries. Numerically, though, 53% of my readers are from the United States.

It’s not always easy to keep the balance between celebrating my own culture and luring people into the past, but mostly I seem to succeed. Sometimes, the balance is easier because of the fiction writer. Why? Well, this year I will have a whole series of posts that will appeal to US readers plus have an immediate appeal to Canberrans. I and my team are designing a Prohibition banquet for the Conflux science fiction convention in October. This is the third banquet I’ve done: the first was Medieval and the second, Regency Gothic.

If I weren’t a fiction writer and historian I’d never have the opportunity to design these banquets – but that’s an entirely different balancing act. I have yet to have any of my historical recipes sneak through a publisher and into a novel or short story. That will happen, mark my words.

First let me get the blog balance sorted, then I’ll get the novel/cookbook one under control. After that my main concern will be the balance of the scales: there’s an awful lot of food involved in my blogging!