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For Corey Grech, nothing punctuates the end of a journey like savouring home-cooked food. When Grech, a Kamilaroi-Wanaruah man with Maltese heritage was growing up in Sydney's Newtown, his family regularly made the long trip to Coonabarabran, his grandmother's country. She'd greet them with a pot of her fiery curry. It's a tradition that’s lived on.
"We would travel home to Coonabarabran quite often, and the trip wasn't always easy – it was eight hours and then sometimes we jumped on the train and bus and it turned into a 12-hour trip," he tells SBS Food. "By the time we got to nan's, she always had a pot of curry on and I remember it being super spicy. Now my cousins and I laugh because when we take our [families] home; nan's curry causes a bit of a fight at the table. But the kids can't handle it. And we wonder how we did."
By the time we got to nan's, she always had a pot of curry on and I remember it being super spicy.
Memories of big family meals have shaped Grech's trajectory. First at Purple Goanna, the Redfern cafe, founded by his sister Suzanne, offers dishes like kangaroo burgers and crocodile risotto. Next, at Kool Purple Kookas, a cooking school for kids that he was involved in for five years. "We offered cooking lessons in communities where we knew that food education was low," he says.
Then in 2016, when Grech was working full-time in community development, he started making kangaroo-Worcestershire and crocodile-lime-and-chilli sausages. He sold them over weekends at markets and festivals. "Selling raw product at festivals is a tough gig because you have to have a lot of certification," he says. "So, we pretty much turned to pies."
That's when his 100 per cent Aboriginal-owned food business, Meat Brothers, was born.
"We make a kangaroo chilli pie, a chicken lemon myrtle pie and a nan's curry pie," says Grech, who, in the early days of Meat Brothers, sold his pies at farmers' markets and Indigenous rugby league games around New South Wales. "They went down a treat because it's not often that you can get a native-ingredient flavoured pie. We started in a three-by-three marquee but were lucky enough to receive some money from Indigenous Business Australia, which was enough to get us into a food truck. I purpose-built a van with pie warmers and was brewing lemon myrtle ginger beer. It was a decent gig. I enjoyed it."
Grech says Meat Brothers has had several incarnations. When the pandemic cancelled festivals around the country, he transformed the food truck into a shipping container café, feeding up to 400 workers on a Sydney construction site. "We started off on the site with the van and swapped it for a shipping container," she says. "We were still in the game, still working."
This spirit of resilience and invention took on a new meaning during the March 2022 floods in Lismore, where Grech had close friends who were part of his community. "I said to my bakers, 'Is there any chance who can knock up some pastries for me? I'm going up there'," says Grech, who now prepares his pies at commercial bakery The House of Pie in Sydney's southeastern suburb of Matraville. "I said. 'I'll just serve them out of a trailer'."
They went down a treat because it's not often that you can get a native-ingredient flavoured pie.
They ended up taking 1,200 chicken and lemon myrtle sausage rolls and 25 kilos of coffee. They visited homes with people who hadn't eaten a hot meal in days because there was no electricity. "We would say, 'Here are 20 drinks and 20 sausage rolls. They're hot. Take them'. It's the least we can do."
For the next few years, Grech says that Meat Brothers will be based on a construction site as part of the new Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek.
"I agreed to it because I'm going to be able to provide employment, employ six people from the Aboriginal community," says Grech. "I'm proud that I'm going to be able to make decisions about employment for people in the area. I've been asked if I would take people out of corrections and the answer is, 'Yeah, of course!' They deserve a chance to bounce back from their situation."
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There's a small trade-off. He's had to make some adjustments to his menu.
"Sometimes workers don't want a kangaroo burger, that's not what they are thinking about eating at lunchtime," he says. "So, our chicken burger comes with lemon myrtle mayonnaise. And we make a bush tomato chutney that goes on our beef burger. And then if you want to have a conversation about it after that then you get to find out."
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