We know who the Australian team is in Tokyo but do we know what our national cuisine is? It’s a vexed question that often tells you more about the person you’re asking than ever providing any real answer. Perhaps I can change this…

The knee jerk response is often “the meat pie”, or “meat and three veg”, but that’s as dated as the cream Fletcher Jones pants and calf-length pleated skirts that our team marched out wearing at the opening ceremony of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. 

While meat pie and chops ’n’ veg are still very much part of Aussie dinners, in these veg-loving days it could easily be “three veg with meat” rather than meat and three veg.

If you turn to what recipes Aussies are searching for online, the answer is a lot more cosmopolitan, with butter chicken, frittatas, stir-fries and carbonara among  old winter favourites such as pumpkin soup, pork with crackling and shepherd’s pie.

Over the past year, there’s also been an increasing number of red meat-free dishes among the most downloaded here at delicious. Our coconut fish curry and Yotam Ottolenghi’s salmon and potato fishcakes outstripped the highest-ranking meat recipe of pork san choy bao with vermicelli noodles. Meanwhile, prawn aglio olio spaghetti, vegetarian lasagne, lemon chicken and a Greek spinach rice called spanakorizo are also garnering lots of fans. 

In recent months, we’ve also been enamoured of creamy dishes like garlic prawns or creamy mushroom and cheddar bake; we’ve seen the glorious return of beef stroganoff to the top of the most-wanted list; lamb ragu and massaman curry have been popular new searches, as has slow-cooker honey mustard chicken.  

This range of dishes reflect Australia’s population and our interest in sampling and celebrating the best food from around the world. While Australian cuisine can  be seen as a magpie of culinary culture, weaving the best ideas from here and overseas into our foodie tapestry, we have  to ensure that we have uniqueness there when we talk about our national cuisine. In large, this revolves around embracing those ingredients that are particularly or peculiarly Australian.

I’m not against the clumsy shoehorning of Indigenous ingredients into existing popularist dishes. If you want to make a roo mince bolognese, grill some emu sausages with a quandong chutney or make some char siu possum, good onya – but I’d kick against this being seen as our national cuisine. 

When asked recently to pick a dish that captured the unique essence of Australia for me, I settled on local oysters – such as Sydney rock or angasi oysters – served  with a pinch of finger lime or native pepper. Easy and relaxed, for sure, but also classily understated, uniquely Australian and all about the beach that plays such a large part in the perception of our country overseas – and for many of us who see ourselves as more beach bunnies than bush babies. 

While oysters are the perfect start to a truly Australian meal, they’re not enough for dinner, even if we also throw in a big bucket of local prawns, some just-grilled Queensland bugs or spanner crab, and perhaps some sashimi, made from the best tuna, wild-caught off Eden or  ranched at Port Lincoln.

The main course could continue the theme with mud crab from the Northern Territory, crumbed flathead from Victoria or Tasmania, or whole coral trout with Cantonese, Singaporean, Spanish or Italian flavours. All world-class and super local.

We’d want to include some local mussels, too. As with oysters, there’s more than 9000 years of archaeological evidence  that these were some of the earliest cooked dinners in the Southern Hemisphere, if not the world – that’s almost defining  our national cuisine right there. Today, we might want to cook them on the barbecue and serve them with a salty pop of local sea succulents – like a marine flora seasoning.

Surely the scorched mussel shells that were discovered in those ancient middens confirm that cooking over fire outdoors, and thus the barbecue, should be seen as our national way of cooking – whether we’re grilling roo souvlakis, or some of our impeccable local lamb or beef to serve with Warrigal greens and sweet roasted yams (ideally the native murnong, aka yam daisy, if you can find them). 

The beauty of the barbecue is that it embraces the heritage of so many Australians, new and old. Any definition of national cuisine has to be inclusive and reflect all who have come here or call this land home. You can put your own cultural  spin on a barbecue, regardless of your background, cultural heritage or culinary beliefs – from barramundi cooked in paperbark to lamb on a spit, or skewers  with an Indian, Japanese Indonesian  or Malayasian spin.

Alternatively, we could just decide that Australia’s national cuisine is a packet  of Twisties dipped in Vegemite with a parma and a pot and be done with it, because Australia’s national cuisine is really just what you think it is.