New Zealand claims it invented the sausage sizzle, Aussies are saying "yeah nah" - News + Articles

May 21, 2026

Grab your tongs, Australia – we ride at dawn.

We’re a pretty easygoing bunch here in Australia. A nation fuelled by sunshine and ‘she’ll be right’, we’re always ready to shout a mate a beer, and we won’t even raise an eyebrow if you pop down to the shops in your budgie smugglers. We roll with the punches. But when someone comes for our democracy sausage, they’d better be ready for one hell of a blue.

You see, it appears that New Zealand – not content with claiming that it invented the pavlova, the flat white and the lamington – is now saying that it is the original home of the sausage sizzle. What’s next? The platypus? The bin chicken? The Great Barrier Reef? This is just getting… exhausting.

But let us humour our lesser sizzlers on the other side of the ditch, and let them have their say.

Who invented the sausage sizzle?

According to New Zealand publication The Spinoff, the claim that New Zealand invented the sausage sizzle all comes down to when the term ‘sausage sizzle’ was first reported in the media.

The Spinoff says that the first documented sausage sizzle event in Australia was in NSW in 1946, when the Forbes Junior Country Women’s Association held a ‘Full Moon Sausage Sizzle’, at which people could donate non-perishable foods to be sent to England as part of the post-WWII recovery effort. In exchange for donating goods, people got a sausage.

Another ‘sausage sizzle competition’, also in NSW, was also reported by a local paper in 1941. However, as this wasn’t a charity event, this apparently doesn’t count. Right guys. Whatever you need to tell yourselves.

Why Australia invented the sausage sizzle

The first documented sausage sizzle in New Zealand was in 1939, although it wasn’t called a ‘sausage sizzle’. A group of 200 young rugby players were attending the second annual North Auckland Primary Schools’ rugby tournament, The Spinoff reports, and the organisers had planned to feed the hungry hordes with US-style hot dogs. But there was a shortage of buns, so they used bread for their hot dogs instead.

While this is kind of a sausage sandwich, there is one key missing ingredient here that no one seems to have mentioned – a sausage.

The Spinoff then goes on to cite several newspaper reports of New Zealand sausage sizzles from 1945 and 1942. This included a ‘popular girl sausage sizzle’ held in 1942 by an 18-year-old girl from Hamilton, who was competing in a contest to be crowned ‘Hamilton’s most popular girl’. There are just so many things wrong with that sentence it’s not even worth unpacking.

So anyway, as everyone but The Spinoff can clearly see, their article proves that the first documented ‘sausage sizzle’ was in Australia in 1941. Ergo, by their own logic, the sausage sizzle is undoubtedly from Australia.

This, of course, doesn’t count Western Australia, which calls the actual sausage sandwich itself a ‘sausage sizzle’, and serves it in a bun instead of on bread. They obviously have some issues they’re still working through. Please just slide their little bread boats over to them and then back away slowly.