Common Grounds

By Haley Cohen Photos Included

Whether you’re hankering for a soy mocha with extra foam, a half-caf iced latte (hold the ice) or just a classic cappuccino, in the coffee-crazed cities of Sydney and Melbourne, you won’t have to walk half a block to find it.

However, it was not until recently that smaller Australian towns joined their cosmopolitan counterparts and jumped on the café caravan. With tourism to smaller towns in Australia on the rise, chic coffee shops are popping up in some unlikely locales.

One such establishment is the sophisticated Wharfside Café, appropriately located on the main wharf in Eden, an industrious fishing town of 3,000 500 kilometers south of Sydney.

Wharfside Cafe

Owned and managed by Eden local Diana Stojanovic, the Wharfside Café offers up rich flat whites and foamy cappuccinos in a relaxed but polished environment.

The Wharfside was not always so sleek – until 9 years ago when Stojanovic purchased the space with her husband, it served as a take-away joint serving fried fish, chips and lollies. However, Stojanovic and her husband, an interior designer, had different plans for the café. They completely redecorated the storefront – adding floor-to-ceiling windows, sponging rich navy paint on to the walls, and inserting small nautical-themed details such as decorative lights shaped like portholes – to give it what they hoped was a “retro-maritime” feel.

The Wharfside's Chic Interior

Stojanovic also stopped offering a take-away option and filled her menu with more up-market dishes such as fresh mussels steamed in tomato broth ($25) and tuna nicoise salad ($22). But perhaps most importantly, Stojanovic introduced high quality espresso to Wharfside’s repertoire.

“Prior to Wharfside, no one in Eden served espresso of the caliber you can get in the cities. Some little bakeries may have offered coffee but it wasn’t good coffee. We’re trying to offer Eden locals and tourists the same standard of espresso they would find in a cafe in any big city in the world.”

Stojanovic admits that the bulk of her clients are tourists but adds that the Eden locals are slowly becoming receptive to café culture. “It’s going to take time but café society is building among the local populace,” she explains as a young female police officer orders a flat white at the counter. “Its just a new idea to them. Most locals are used to drinking coffee at home, or at a friends house where it’s free.”

Graham Hinkley (correct), owner of Twinkle’s of Omeo, reports that his business is similarly tourist-based thanks to his café’s location on the scenic Great Alpine Road and his quality menu that includes fresh soups, omelets, sandwiches and of course, coffee. Like Stojanovic, Hinkley also founded Twinkle’s to fill what he perceived as a gap in the Omeo culinary and caffeine markets.

“We’ve got a bakery and a few take-away joints with fried foods but before I founded Twinkle’s 2 years ago, there was nowhere in Omeo that travelers could find the higher standard of food and coffee that they were used to.”

Situated in a quaint wood cabin with a rustic interior, Twinkle’s is also a great place to enjoy views of Omeo’s rolling golden cattle fields where the majority of Omeo’s 452-person population make their livings.

Twinkle's of Omeo

Though Hinkley is not optimistic about sit-down coffee shops becoming more popular with Omeo’s diminutive population, he does think that café culture will catch on in other small Australian towns.

“As people from small towns start to travel around Australia more, and become more educated about coffee, they’ll come to expect higher quality and café culture will expand.”

Hinkley’s prediction seems to have come true in Cobargo, a small farming and artisan community in the southeast of New South Wales where partners Kerryn Davey and Erin Tatnell operate the Valley Edge Café.

“While it’s gradual, coffee culture in Cobargo is definitely increasing. In our first year we were surprised to see the local farmers in here enjoying coffee and cake. Now, its not surprising at all. We get as many, if not more, locals in here as tourists,” Davey comments, motioning to the filled wooden chairs in her café.

In addition to its convenient location on Cobargo’s main street, Davey believes that Valley Edge owes its local following to the public becoming more knowledgeable about food quality.

“As they’ve started coming to us, locals have started to realize that its worth it to pay a couple dollars extra for high-caliber food and coffee instead of paying a little less for stale food and bitter coffee. Now that they know what quality tastes like, they’ve come to require it.”

The rise of coffee in Australia can be attributed to a few forward looking Italian immigrants who imported the first espresso machines in 1956 in preparation for the Italian team’s arrival in Melbourne for Olympics. Since then, café culture has taken Australia’s cities by storm. To qualify just how popular coffee shops have become: the Yellow Pages currently lists around 2000 cafes in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Just as coffee has become inextricably linked with the cultures of Australia’s larger cities, the development of café culture in small town Australia is not likely to be a passing trend. The way things are going, very soon you’ll be able to get your paws on an soy mocha with extra foam, a half-caf iced latte or plain cappuccino just as easily on Dalrymple Creek Road in Allora (population 923) as on George Street in Sydney (population 4,284,379) - news that is sure to perk up caffeine-addicts all across Australia.

Eden: Wharfside Cafe Shop 3 253 Imlay St Eden 2551 NSW Phone: (02) 6496 1855 Hours: Daily 8am -4pm, with extended hours during the summer Located directly on Eden’s stunning operational wharf, the Wharfside is a great place to enjoy a salad or grilled fish while watching the fishing boats tow in their catches. Specialty coffee: Muggachino, the Wharfside’s version of a Cappuccino Specialty meal: Catch of the day topped with coconut shrimp and garnished with rice

Omeo: Twinkle’s of Omeo 174 day Ave Omeo Victoria 3898 Phone: 03 5159 1484 Hours: from 7.30am 7 days a week, as well as dinner from 6pm on Friday and Saturday nights and long week ends. Groups catered for, some meals are available for takeaway. Specialty coffee: Cappucino topped with chocolate stars unique to Twinkle’s Specialty meal: Homemade pumpkin soup and any of the Foccacias

Cobargo: Valley Edge Café 59 Princes Hwy Cobargo 2550 Phone: 02 6493 6007 Hours: 9am to 4:30pm Specialty coffee: Cappucino Specialty meal: Homemade Paninis

Garden (and Wharf and Cemetery) of Eden

June 16th

We began today with a breakfast of champions. No not Wheatties, a cemetery! Thankfully, we did not have an interlocutor to the underworld and were allowed to quickly walk through instead of having to hear about the stonemasonry of each and every gravestone.

 Then it was on to Eden’s Killer Whale Museum: a beautiful museum that boasts a stocky lighthouse and permanent exhibitions on orcas and whaling. There was also a temporary exhibition commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the closure of Eden’s cannery: an event that put a vast number of locals out of work.

Eden Killer Whale Museum

Part of the Cannery Commemoration in the Museum

Part of the Cannery Commemoration in the Museum

 The display sparked me to poke around town after lunch looking for ex-cannery workers to see if they thought Eden had recovered since the closure. I tracked down few ex-workers that would talk to me but their responses were somewhat mixed. Some said the town had fully recovered and some said you only had to look at all the vacant shops on Main Street (and I can attest that there are many) to see that Eden was obviously still struggling.

Ex-Cannery Workers and current Bi-Lo employees Sheryl and Nicole

After talking to the ex-cannery workers I made my way down to the Wharf to talk to the fishermen about whether fishing as an industry was indeed in decline as many townspeople had claimed. 

Butch and Rob, fishermen

Their answers were more definitive with all of them agreeing that the fishing industry in Eden is floundering (sorry, I had to). I’m trying to hone in on a sharper angle or perhaps divide what I learned today into two separate articles: one on the ex-cannery workers and how they personally have recovered after the cannery closing and the second on why the government has rescinded almost 60% of fishing licenses in Eden over the past few years. They government claims its for conservation purposes but one burly old bloke I talked to, appropriately named Butch says “fishsticks!” Well actually he didn’t say that, but he could have. In any case, it might make an interesting piece to figure out whether the scaling back (jeeez, I just can’t stop) of fishing in the area was at all related to the closure of the cannery. The contemporaneity would suggest that the two events were in fact connected and that perhaps the repealing of the fishing licenses was an attempt to prevent the re-opening of the cannery by depriving it of stock. Very fishy…

In addition to being an interesting journalistic endeavor, walking around the Wharf was a pretty uncanny experience. First of all, I was the only female on the entire Wharf – a fact that immediately aroused curiosity and a whole ton of confusion. I amusedly watched the mystified fishermen watch me and I could almost see their thought bubbles “What the hell is that sheila upto? Must be bonkers.”

After I finished talking to the fishermen and tugboat operators I lingered on the dock snapping photos. There is something very mystical about winter sunlight in Australia and the effect was heightened by the bay and presence of a light fog. The way the golden rays bathed the boats lent the dock a romantic air. Suddenly, the stank odor of fish was no longer vomit-inducing but invigorating in its raw authenticity. The light transformed the horrifying sight of the fishermen beheading their catches into a scene of artists skillfully practicing their trade. The Wharf seemed an industrial paradise: totally peaceful but all the while efficient.

Wharf

Tug Boat on Wharf

Another Tug Boat on the Wharf

Then the sun set and the wretched stench of fish guts nearly bowled me over so I said my goodbyes to my new pals and made the long trek up the hill to “Eagle Heights” the motel units where we’re staying.

June 17^th

^{This morning it was off to Ben Boyd national park where we visited Boyd’s tower and Davidson’s Whaling Station. As I looked up at Boyd’s dilapidated tower, I was reminded of “Ozymandius” the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that goes:}

“I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Boyd's Tower

Here was the tower at Ben Boyd had intended to serve as the center of Boydtown – a development he believed would eventually surpass Sydney in importance. In reality, Boydtown never grew to be more than a small village with a Hotel, Church and a few cottages. Now all that remains of Boyd’s grand vision is the crumbling tower he built for his crew of whalers to keep watch for the prized Baleen whales they hunted.

No Thriving City Here  (Beautiful Beach Though)

Next we visited Davidson’s Whaling station – the longest running of all Australian shore based whaling stations. From the 1860s through the Depression years of the 1930’s, successive generations of the Davidson family used the station to slice the blubber off of the whales and eventually boil it down to oil. The Davidson’s were also renowned for having especially good relationships with the Killer Whales in the area. The orcas reportedly forced passing Baleen whales into the bay, harassing them unitl the whaling crews arrived. They were then rewarded with the lips and tongue after the whalers had successfully killed their prey.

After lunching at the Seahorse Inn, a boutique hotel in Boydtown that began as part of Boyd’s development before it was abandoned, I spent the remainder of the afternoon on the Wharf  searching for more information that might help me develop the article I intended to write on the closure of the wharf and its possible connection with the rescinding of fishing licenses. However, after talking to a few fishermen who informed me that the fish they caught around the bay (mostly breem and flatheads) were not the types they used in the cannery (Bluefin tuna and salmon) and therefore there could be no connection. With that story shot, I poked around for a new one and found it in the form of an outlandishly swanky café located on the end of the Wharf.

Sandwiched between two take-out clam shacks, the “Wharfside Café” is oddly cosmopolitan. The interior design is stunning. Rich navy walls and ceilings, complemented by pop art paintings of fish and lights shaped like portholes create an ambiance of retro-maritime chic.  In addition to cheaper Eden standards like fried shrimp and fish and chips, the menu also offers higher-end fare such as fresh mussels and grilled fish topped with coconut shrimp.

 

Wharfside Cafe

Lights shaped like Portholes

 Bar at Wharfside Cafe

Intrigued by how such a sophisticated eatery ended up on Eden’s utterly untouristy Wharf I sat down with the Wharfside café’s owner and chef, Diana Stojanovic. Diana explained that the café owes its fashionable décor to her husband, an interior designer who helped her refurbish the space when she opened “Wharfside Café” 9 years ago. Though she insists that her café offers something for everyone, she founded Wharfside with the  intention of attracting tourists (including drivers passing by Eden as few people actually stay overnight in the town except en route to go elsewhere). In any case I think I have enough info from her to do a fluffy restaurant profile/review. As I mentioned before reviewing is the form of travel writing that I’m least interested in but as far as reviews go I think this one will be fairly engaging to write just because of how incongruous the café is with its environment.

The more people I talk to and the more towns I visit, the more I become convinced that I want to pursue travel journalism in some form. Increasingly I feel like I’m able to connect with the places I travel to, and get the inhabitants to open up. What form of travel journalism I aspire to (writing, broadcast or a combination of the two) remains to be seen but I’m becoming ever more resolved to do it in some manner. I’m drawn towards writing because I love to write and I think that people are more articulate and open without cameras and a camera crew around but by the same token, video captures things that writing can’t and allows people to see exactly what the travel journalist is experiencing. Ideally I’d love to do both but they’re both such difficult fields to break into that I may have to become more realistic at some point. But for now, a girl can dream.