Kenny Weir, Journalist

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Resident of Yarraville, Dad, food blogger, journalist, passionate lover of musical rabbit holes

Creator of western suburbs Facebook food blog Consider The Sauce.

I’m a Kiwi who grew up in the deep south, Dunedin, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The contrast of that mostly whitebread upbringing with living in Melbourne’s western suburbs is vast.

Maybe that’s why I moved here in the mid-‘80s. At the time, it seemed like I was getting away from a relationship gone wrong – even though it’d been over for ages, I couldn’t get over it. Seems silly to say it now, and no doubt there were other reasons.

Whenever I feel a twinge of homesickness for New Zealand, my mum says ‘You’ve lived half your life in Melbourne, get used to it!’

I became a journalist straight out of school – at the time it seemed like the least worst option and such jobs were, then, easy to come by.

I’d actually inherited a small, underground newspaper – music and leftie politics – that was distributed right throughout NZ and which I published while at high school and after.

I chose Melbourne quite deliberately. I didn’t want to be part of the sort of Kiwi subculture that exists in other part of Australia. And Melbourne seemed to me than to have a good mix of arts, culture, newspapers, food and music.

The original aim was to work for The Age. But the guy who interviewed me closed the interview off after a few minutes because I didn’t have a university degree – seems like I was too much of a bogan journalist for them!

I ended up working there anyway, and eventually worked for all the big metro Melbourne papers one way or another. That all seems like a bygone age – I barely know a handful of people still working for those publications now. I’m so out of tune with where they’re all at – working for Star Weekly is a great thing these days, and it works in with my food blogging activities.

At high school in NZ, we’re taught about an insidious thing called ‘the drift to the north’ – in which all the talented young, South Islanders eventually ended up in Wellington or Auckland. But that wasn’t as treasonous as ‘the drift across the Tasman’.

And now I’ve done both! No regrets about that, though – Melbourne is amazing, and in the western suburbs I’ve found a home.

Consider The Sauce came about in 2011 when the whole big-deal newspaper scene started to change and fall apart from a personal and family point of view.

I’d hit the ground running right from the start of my Melbourne life in terms of exploring all sorts of aspects of the food scene – so it was easy. I saw it as potential source of livelihood. It has generated some income.

However that has turned to be the least of Consider The Sauce – the spiritual wellbeing I derive from doing it has been immense and I am very grateful for the opportunities it has presented and the people we have met. My 16-year-old son has virtually grown up with Consider The Sauce as a backdrop, so from a father-son perspective it has been amazing!

I can’t actually recall where the name ‘Consider The Sauce’ came from, but it has worked well.

In some ways, it has made it a bit harder. If I’d called it ‘Western Suburbs Food Blog’ or some such, Mr Google would’ve liked us a lot more. People, however, like it. And it’s made me work harder to gain a following and respect for what we do.

Working and writing for the big newspapers is one thing – but it can seem a bit abstract. Doing a blog, the immediacy is such that you can see straight away that dozens, hundreds and even thousands of people are reading what you’ve published. The feedback – from readers and the places we write about – is 99% terrific.

Here’s a funny thing – if I use the words Williamstown, Newport, Spotswood, Kingsville, Yarraville, Seddon or Footscray in a headline for one of my food stories, people read them.

If I used the words Werribee, Point Cook, Derrimut, Deer Park, St Albans, Tarneit or Truganina in the headline, the story dies in the arse.

I don’t care. I’m bloodyminded and stubborn enough that that sort of non-reaction just makes me more determined to cover the greater west, and not just the inner-west suburbs.

It sometimes seems like there’s a fence that there’s an invisible wall that runs roughly along Millers Road and Ashley Street, beyond which the hipsters and the gentrifiers will not venture. It’s bloody silly!

The more readers refuse to accept the middle and outer-west restaurants, the more I will profile them.

I mean, why wouldn’t anyone want to try Latin Foods and Wines in Deer Park or Fusion Ceylon in Werribee? There’s a new Indian place we want to try that is in the wilds of Truganina – surrounded by paddocks. They do Indian-style sandwiches – we want to try them!

I just love getting out and seeing what we can find! This year, I’ve even been some rugby league games – the Werribee Bears Rugby League Sports Club Inc and the Altona Roosters Rugby League Club. They always have a great bacon-and-egg roll at the games.

In the six years or so Consider The Sauce has been running, coverage of western suburbs food in the mainstream media – the big papers and the boutique lifestyle sites – has gone backwards.

They’ve got to do what works for them. But it annoys and disappoints me that the west is routinely accorded only token gesture coverage. And that all those outlets – and most bloggers – will only cover a westie place if it has a hipster sheen or has a chic café look or something like that.

We like those places, too, but we’re for sure mostly about the food and the people who make it – and we absolutely don’t mind if that means fluoro lights and formica.

As far as I know, I’m the only blogger in Melbourne, in Australia, who runs regular reader events. There’s been a lot – such a great a way to give extra exposure to the places we love and to meet people and our readers.

Some of them are fundraisers – I’ve done three for West Welcome Wagon, for whom I’d love to do another before 2017 is out.

Music is my other big thing. From the age of 10 or so, I’ve been up to my neck in it. Somehow – the gift of a banjo, early listening – I very early on gravitated towards American music, not pop and rock so much as blues, jazz, country, gospel, soul and so on.

Music wasn’t at all one of the reasons for moving to Melbourne, but once I got here, I found out what was going on here was amazing – even better than London, where I lived for a couple of years in the late ‘70s.

So I got immersed in that – writing, doing a show on PBS for many years. From the late ‘80s onwards, I made about a dozen or so trips to New Orleans and South Louisiana for music and food reasons.

I still dig all sorts of sounds, though these days it’s a private interest – my tastes are rather fringe and mostly vintage. And unlike writing about weird music, when I write about food, I’ve actually got an audience!

Thanks to the internet, I have friends all over the world who share the same musical interests, so I no longer feel such a need to find Melbourne pals of the same spirit. It blows me away that we are the first humans who have the privilege of being able to hear amazing stuff that was recorded 50 or even 100 years ago. It’s magic!

At one stage I was doing about five Consider The Sauce posts a week. I can’t maintain that pace any more and don’t feel the need to do so.

For starters, we’ve eaten in so many places! And we do get sick of eating out. Sometimes I just want a piece of toast. There are all sorts of ways and directions that Consider The Sauce could grow and develop.

However I’m also finding I’m very much at that stage of life where the cliché has it that simply stopping and doing absolutely nothing – outside of book on lap, music pumping – is a very precious and desirable thing.

The west is changing, as everyone knows. But many of those changes are good or fine.

I can’t imagine us living anywhere else. This is home.

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