Home truths
Food adventurer Maeve O’Meara reveals the life or death moment that shaped her destiny as Samantha Trenoweth joins her for a family feast.
The last thing Maeve O’Meara did before leaving town on her most recent Food Safari through Corsica and Sardinia was visit her mum. Family means the world to Maeve and it’s almost a truism to say that she has made the world her family. We are sitting at an immense dining table encircled by chairs that belonged to her grandmother and Maeve is speaking about her mum, Maev Snr, who was a journalist, an inspiration, and who is now confined to a nursing home. I remind Maeve she once said that, if she had just $50 left in the world, she would spend it on flowers for her mother. There’s a moment’s silence, then: “Gosh, I’m glad I said that … Now, in the shadows of Alzheimer’s, we always have classical music playing and we fill her room with flowers.”
So, on the 20th birthday of her food adventure business, Gourmet Safaris; on the eve of the ninth series of Food Safari on SBS; and while we wait for the family to gather for lunch and for a visit from the newest light in her life, one-year-old granddaughter, Arabella, Maeve chats with The Weekly about family and food and high adventure.
“Food wasn’t Mum’s thing,” she smiles, though Maev Snr was renowned for her bread and butter pudding. “Words were Mum’s thing. She grew up in Orange, came to the city, became a journalist. She travelled through Spain in a London taxi with a group of actresses, including Ruth Cracknell. She led a really interesting life. Mum had a sense of the wider world. She loved poetry and music.”
She met Maeve’s father, John, who was a compositor, when they both worked at Fairfax newspapers. So Maeve grew up with more than a little newsprint in her veins.
“There was a book of photographs that we had at home – the work of the Magnum photographers. From an early age this was my view into other worlds – Indian temple ceremonies, African families, people riding elephants – things you didn’t find on the lower north shore of Sydney. It showed me that this was a beautiful, big world.”
So after an Arts degree, Maeve set off to see that world for herself. “I was 20,” she says, now 58, with just a little retrospective horror. “I said to Mum and Dad, ‘I’m off on my own adventure and I may not be back.’
I was away for a year, and it was a very formative year.”
Backpacking through London in 1981, Maeve was walking past the army barracks in Chelsea when an
IRA nail bomb exploded. Two people were killed and Maeve was among the 40 injured, taken to hospital with shrapnel wounds to her back and severe bruising. “It shocked me to my absolute core,” she says.
Even so, Maeve was not about to give up on her adventure. She travelled on to Greece, meandering slowly through the islands, sunshine and aquamarine water healing body and soul. Coincidentally, many years later, when she took her first tour group to Greece, it was the day after the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and again Greece was “a wonderful haven where you didn’t feel the world was a strange, dangerous, dark place”.
Maeve also travelled through
Tunisia where she had, she says,
“one of the great epiphanies of my life. I spent time with a Tunisian family in a small mud-brick village, cooking couscous and pounding spices. It was everything I’d dreamed of, flipping through those Magnum photographs in a white-bread suburb. The food was delicious, and I was spending time with local women and learning from them. Afterwards, back in Greece, I was sitting on the Acropolis, looking out over Athens, and I remember thinking, ‘I never want two days of my life to be the same.’”
As far as possible, they haven’t been. “Beyond that,” she says, “there hasn’t really been a plan. Some of my friends did law and planned their life out in stages. I didn’t do that. The nuns at school told me I had no common sense, and they were probably right, but I’ve never seen that as a negative. Mine has been a very instinctive life.”
For the most part, that approach has panned out well. “Of course,
sometimes it doesn’t work,” she adds, laughing, “but in those times you learn and grow. You dust yourself off, have a glass of wine and go, ‘What’s next?’”
With a little help from her mother, Maeve wrote up a report of the Chelsea bombing and applied for a cadetship back in Australia. That led to a decade working as a journalist and eventually to a 12-month “life swap”, in which she exchanged jobs and addresses with a reporter on a current affairs program in Dublin.
Maeve hails from solid Irish Catholic stock on both sides of her family. Her father’s forebears were Tipperary farmers; her mother’s were Dublin lawyers and politicians and composers. “I didn’t feel the grey skies were part of my DNA,” she admits, but in Ireland she fell in love with the music, the poetry, the rolling green hills and a young abstract artist called Ben Stack.
They met at a dinner party hosted by Maeve’s cousin. “We talked right through the night,” she remembers. “We were sitting at a big table in an old Irish farmhouse and the sun came up and we heard the sound of peacocks greeting the day.”
Ben moved to Australia – he still lives and paints in Sydney – and he and Maeve began a family. Their firstborn was Connor, now 23, then Kitty, 21, and Scarlett (or Carli) who is 18.
Maeve was keen to impart a little of the freewheeling adventure of her own childhood to her kids, even in the techno-focused 2000s. “I was an adventurous child,” she explains, “and I had a very happy childhood. I grew up on the edge of the bush. We had go-carts. We watched Phantom Agents on the TV and tried to jump backwards into trees. There were death-defying feats – balancing, climbing. I hung out with my younger brother and the local kids and we collected mulberries. I baked on Saturday afternoons with my grandmother, Kathleen.”
Kitty remembers a childhood filled with Maeve’s spontaneous schemes for no-frills family activities: there was tennis and barefoot bowling and the time they all held hands on a sand dune at Kangaroo Island and leapt from the top into thin air.
It was while the kids were still small that Maeve’s career in food broadcasting really hit its straps, first at Better Homes & Gardens, then with fellow foodie Joanna Savill at The Food Lover’s Guide on SBS and finally Maeve went solo with Food Safari.
Carli can’t remember a time when her Mum wasn’t on TV. “When I was little,” she says, “I used to get really confused about how I could be sitting on Mum’s lap and she could be on the TV at the same time. I thought it was wizardry. She was always magic.”
Maeve and Ben were together for 10 years. They parted ways when Carli was just four but Maeve says Ben has been a magnificent father. “The kids would have weekends with him in his studio and they would come back completely paint spattered.”
The separation wasn’t easy, but Maeve’s parents “helped me hold up the world and helped look after the kids. At one stage I had three small children and three different jobs, but together we got through it.”
Maeve and TV producer Toufic Charabati had been working together for roughly three years when they looked across the editing suite and realised there was more to this than a professional relationship.
“We had been friends for a long time,” Maeve recalls. “Scarlett would come in to work in her baby capsule and sit under his edit desk.” So he had been part of the children’s lives as well. “Being with Touf, being happy, inheriting a wonderful Lebanese food-loving family which has all the traditions from the village – it has been a lovely part of my life.”
Toufic, who has come home for the family lunch, is sitting in a patch of winter sunshine on the back porch. He confesses that he began to fall in love with Maeve back when he was producing The Food Lovers’ Guide for SBS.
“We would have a weekly meeting,” he recalls, “which was always a little bit intense, but whenever Maeve came in – she was doing Better Homes & Gardens as well, so she was always running a little bit late – the energy in the room just lifted. Suddenly everyone became more creative, more enthusiastic. You see it on the Gourmet Safari bus tours to food destinations in the suburbs; you see it when she takes tour groups
“She makes the people we film feel extraordinary. How can you not fall in love with that?”
overseas. Everyone feels as if they’re the most important person on the tour. Everyone is excited. She makes the people we film feel extraordinary. It’s her genuine enthusiasm and love of meeting new people and experiencing new things. How can you not fall in love with that?”
Toufic’s family fell in love with her too. “My Auntie cried,” he says with a grin. “She told Maeve, ‘I’m so happy that you’ve come into our lives.’ Like I said, what’s not to love?”
This 58-year-old mother, grandmother, journalist, adventurer, celebrator of Australia’s multicultural culinary heart is carrying plates to the table now and waiting for the last of the family to straggle in. The food is a feast of colours and cultures.
“I’ve been lucky,” she says, “to have made connections in so many different parts of the world. The world is a warmer and smaller place when you know someone is there and they’ll prepare lunch for you.” And with her tours and her television series, Maeve has “become a bridge” between those worlds.
“Food is a great way of bringing people together, opening doors and building communities,” she says, “and we’re so lucky. Nowhere on earth has the same mixture of cuisines and cultures that we do. Even in little villages, like Dandenong and Campsie, there are really interesting food places and my heart beats faster when I go there. I tell stories through food and I’m humbled by the access I’ve been given by people who may not speak perfect English but can sense that I’m going to be very much on their side and am wanting to learn.”
The last of the family has trailed in: Connor, his partner, Mae, who was born in Ghana, and their one-year-old daughter, Arabella, whose smile lights up the room.
“Perhaps she’ll walk today,” Maeve suggests and Connor chuckles. “Mum’s big on being around for the firsts,” he says. “She wants to take her for her first swim too.”
Maeve casts her mind back again to Saturdays spent with her grandmother, Kathleen. “I remember her warm, little kitchen and the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg,” she says. “I remember her light hand with pastry and cakes. These are great, lasting memories and now I’m a grandmother, I want Arabella to have those memories too … I love the idea of grandmother time and being able to pass on those things that don’t happen with your own parents, who are always that bit busier. When your kids are growing up, it’s full on, keeping worlds afloat. My grandparents on both sides were really special.”
The family is called to the table. In primary school, Kitty was asked to draw a picture of her happy place and this was it, this immense oval-shaped table around which the family has gathered for almost as long as she can remember. There have been celebrations, such as when Mae’s family came to dinner for the first time last year. And there have been struggles: “Maeve wants the best for her kids and sometimes the kids have their own ideas and their own lives to lead. So there can be tension,” says Toufic, “just like any family.” But mostly, with dishes piled high with food Maeve has collected or learned to cook on her wanderings, this table is where the world finds its place in Maeve’s home.
Food Safari: Water starts on SBS at 8pm Thursday August 2; Maeve’s new book, Food Safari Elements – Earth, Fire, Water, is published by Hardie Grant, available in October.