AGED 83 AND STILL GOING STRONG, AUNTY BERYL VAN-OPLOO’S LIFE HAS BEEN DEDICATED TO PREPARING, SHARING AND TEACHING ABOUT FOOD
Twenty years ago, Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo retired from her TAFE job teaching home and work skills to young Aboriginal women. After a lifetime caring for family and friends and sharing her experience in preparing nutritious, affordable meals for her community, it would’ve been entirely reasonable for her to put her feet up and enjoy a bit of a break. But that’s not how Aunty Beryl, a respected Gamilaroi Elder, teacher, mentor, businesswoman and passionate foodie, rolls.
After just nine days off, she was approached by Sydney’s Redfern-Waterloo Authority to set up a job-ready hospitality program for young Indigenous people at Carriageworks in Darlington. Aunty Beryl did take a holiday — a seven-week camping trip across the Nullarbor and back with her Netherlands-born engineer husband, Andrew. However, as soon as she got back, she rolled up her sleeves and started work at the Yaama Dhiyaan Hospitality Training College. The college’s name translates to “welcome friends and family” in the Yuwaalaraay dialect of the Walgett region of northern NSW, and it combines a catering service, function centre and training facility.
The facility has since moved to the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) in Redfern, but Aunty Beryl is still manning the stoves, catering for events on-site and off, serving meals to community elders and kids in after-school care programs, as well as teaching young mums about healthy eating on a budget. In her “spare” time, she’s written a memoir and cookbook, reflecting her lifetime’s journey with food.
Aunty Beryl’s Cookbook is a collection of recipes that are familiar and comforting, yet incorporate native foods for a delicious twist. Ingredients such as lemon myrtle, finger lime, quandong, bush tomato, native thyme, pepperberry, wattleseed and saltbush are readily available from speciality stores and online, and Aunty Beryl’s recipes (extract from the book follows) incorporate them to give a distinctly bush accent to dishes ranging from goulash and chicken pies to cheesecake and rice pudding. The book is superbly illustrated with photographs as well as artworks by her niece Lakkari Pitt, who has taken inspiration from the footprint of her maternal totem, the emu, and the Namoi and Barwon Rivers of her home Country. In her signature style, Aunty Beryl, who is now a spritely 83-year-old, lets drop that on the day they did the photography for the book, the NCIE kitchen was a “bit busy” as they also catered for a funeral with 200 guests.
Aunty Beryl spent her early years on an Aboriginal reserve at the confluence of the Namoi and Barwon Rivers, on the outskirts of Walgett. She had cooking lessons on an open fire before her family moved into town. The eldest of 10 children, she helped in the kitchen as soon as she was tall enough to reach the stove. She also assisted with the washing, ironing and cleaning, looked after her younger siblings and taught them to swim and fish in the rivers. Aunty Beryl’s responsibilities multiplied at the age of 12 when her mother passed away tragically following childbirth and the family moved in with her Aunt Rose, who had seven kids of her own.
“The older kids looked after the younger ones,” she recalls. “But everyone had jobs, whether it was peeling vegetables or setting the table, washing up or helping with bathtime and getting the kids ready for bed. We fed the little ones first as they ate the least and then it went up the ladder from there. It was my early lesson in portion control and making the most of what we had. The food was simple, but we were never hungry.”
Formal education was patchy, as Aunty Beryl recalls the teachers at the local school either “talked over the kids at the front or ignored the kids at the back”. However, being raised with a deep respect for elders proved a secret weapon as she learnt to listen and learn regardless.
At the age of 16, Aunty Beryl followed her cousins and went to work in Sydney. At first, she took whatever jobs she could get, at the Arnott’s biscuit factory or IXL jam factory and waiting tables after hours. But then she gained employment as a live-in nanny, working for a Hungarian business couple who lived first at Pagewood and then Bellevue Hill.
“My food journey really took off when I was introduced to dishes like goulash and osso buco,” she says. “The children became my second family and the parents were like my foster parents. They came to my wedding, and these days the boys live on the other side of the world, but we stay in touch. I regard this as the start of my formal education.”
In 1969, Aunty-Beryl married the love of her life, Andrew, two years after meeting through a mutual friend. They began a union based on deep love, mutual respect and good communication that thrived until his death in 2024. They raised three children — Ricky, Andrew and Cassandra.
By this stage, Beryl had started work at a preschool for Aboriginal kids run by the Sisters of Mercy in Redfern. She cooked for them and taught their often young mums to prepare good home-cooked meals. “I wanted to learn more about nutrition and commercial cookery, so I started night classes at TAFE,” she recalls. “Then at the age of 31, I found out that the Education Department was looking to train a group of Aboriginal people as teachers. Encouraged by the nuns, I applied and was accepted.
“Those were probably the hardest days of my life, working and studying and looking after a young family. But I had Andrew’s support and together we got through it. We both worked extremely hard to ensure our kids got a good education, so they had choices in life. And we’re very proud of what they have achieved.”
Having graduated with a Bachelor of Education from the University of Technology, Sydney, Aunty Beryl gained a teaching job at TAFE, a role she continued for more than 20 years. Along the way, she and some of her students worked from a caravan kitchen associated with the Reverend Bill Crews’ Exodus Foundation, serving meals to homeless people. For a couple of years, she also ran a cafe celebrating bush foods with her nephew Colin Gordon at the Gardener’s Lodge in Victoria Park near The University of Sydney.
During her time at Yaama Dhiyaan, she became friends with Carriageworks stallholder and chef Kylie Kwong, who remains a good friend today and wrote the foreword to her cookbook.
She was also introduced to the Slow Food movement and, in 2008, was invited to attend the Terra Madre Slow Food expo in Turin, Italy. “It was a food celebration attended by thousands of people from all over the world,” she says. “It was also the first time I’ve been overseas, but I’ve been to lots of Terra Madre events since, including as a speaker in 2011 at the first Terra Madre dedicated solely to Indigenous people at Jokkmokk, a Lapland market town in Sweden.”
In exciting recent news, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has just announced that it has commissioned an artist to paint a study of Aunty Beryl, one of the few new portraits that will be hung this year. The painting will be revealed in May.
Aunty Beryl says she has no intention of slowing down, so long as her health and energy levels permit. “I love passing on my knowledge and showing young people the joy of cooking and sharing food,” she says. “I teach them a few manners along the way and tell them gaining an education gives you choices and a voice. Nothing makes me more proud than when I hear about former students starting their own businesses or raising families and buying houses.” AC
