Camp Oven Cooking: The Complete Aussie Guide

Camp Oven Cooking is a unique recipe collection collated from contributions to The Great Coronavirus Camp Oven Cookoff Facebook page. Launched in March 2020, the membership grew to 12,500 people from across Australia in only three months. Each week a new theme was set and cast-iron cooking enthusiasts prepped, cooked and plated their creations for the group to enjoy. The rules were simple: post your prep pics (ingredients), photos of the camp oven on the cook and then a plated-up frame of your finished creation. The challenge became a way to break the monotony of lockdown and share great camp oven food with likeminded folk. The coals are still burning hot and the page is going strong. Photo-journalist Peter Lorimer, his son Jack, and iconic Australian bush poet and entertainer Murray Hartin have compiled this recipe book for anyone who wants to have fun with food and get the whole family involved with cooking on a fire or gas burner.

Peter Lorimer has been a photo journalist since age 17 when he completed a cadetship at the country newspaper The Namoi Valley Independent. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Peter has worked for Australia’s leading newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald and is also a regular contributor to Woman’s Day. He has won numerous national press photographic awards including a Nikon Walkley Award and has also had a picture published on a stamp (Faces Of Australia). Jack Lorimer is a diesel mechanic who works for Many Fabrication in a coal mining town. Jack is in charge of a team of workers who maintain the washery facility at Boggabri Coal in north west NSW. His interests include golf and campfire cooking, Murray Hartin is considered to be one of the best Australian rhyming poets of the modern era. His haunting verse Rain From Nowhere (2007) has been recited in State and Federal Parliaments, printed in newspapers and magazines across the Nation and is recognized as being one of the most powerful pieces of Australian poetry written for many years. His hilarious yarn Turbulence (1998) is arguably the most popular piece of Australian bush poetry since the Paterson era. Both were awarded the Australian Bush Poetry Association’s Poem of The Year.