Fine food, wonderful wine and a warm welcome – the southwest of Western Australia has wild flowers in spring, vintage festivals in autumn and fine wine and food all year round. Oh yes, and a good percentage of South African expatriates
 
f you were a cross-Indian Ocean swimmer who dived in at Port Elizabeth – or Cape Town, for that matter – and swam due east, you’d beach just off Perth in Western Australia. Many South Africans have made the one-way trip (none swimming!). Many of them turned left at Perth and headed for the southwest of the state. The rapidly growing town of Busselton is on the Indian Ocean beach about three hours down the highway. This is the home of Fat Hippo Produce and Cape Kitchen – gourmet foods that make expatriate South Africans misty-eyed about home and Grandma’s cooking. The town is also on the edge of one of Australia’s three premium wine regions. (The other two are in South Australia and the Yarra Valley near Melbourne, Victoria.)

The wine-growing hub of the west is Margaret River, about 45 km south of Busselton, but the region ranges from the coast to Manjimup, about 100 km inland. On the gently rolling hills another sea – of vines – hides high-quality winery restaurants and other delicate treasures. The reputation of the produce that visitors queue for is enormous, but the prices are not.

Tucked in between the vineyards you’ll find South African-style muesli, export-protea farms, a new turf farm, a successful travel company and a ground-breaking viticulture consultancy. The travel firm takes Aussies on a tour of a lifetime at an affordable price back west across the Indian Ocean. The viticultural firm has picked up South African expertise and applied it to the local agricultural and business conditions. It’s a region where you are likely to hear someone speak Aussie and Afrikaans and Zulu – and that’s only the school children.

The climate is mild, the business opportunities have turned out to be great for someone with the eye to see them and the tourists flock in from the east (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide) and from the north (Singapore and Hong Kong).

But back to the beginning. Once, up to about 140-million years ago, our mammal ancestors – that looked more like shrews than humans – could have walked from South Cape across Gondwana, the super-continent that comprised what is now Africa, Australia and Antarctica. The fossils of Gondwana’s dinosaurs turn up from time to time on all three continents, in testament to their earlier association, and the plants that have evolved over time from their ancestors are obvious to the casual observer. Local waratahs have a family resemblance to proteas and the boab (spelt baobab in south Africa) trees of Australia, Madagascar and South Africa are clearly close cousins. The great invasion of the sea that covered the southern half of Australia left massive limestones stuffed full of fascinating...
   

...marine fossils that include an ancient toothed platypus (the modern descendants are toothless). The limestones slowly degraded into the rich soils on which the massive forests, the rolling pastures – and the soft cheeses they help develop – and the vines depend.

At Busselton, I met Fiona Wood, the young, energetic owner of Cape Kitchen. In a ceaseless quest to find the best, Fiona and her husband, Ron, scour Australia and South Africa for high-quality foods that customers routinely travel an hour to buy. Her coffee is Yahava Koffee Works, famously roasted in the region. As an inveterate and unrepentant coffee snob, I was hooked. But the best surprise was yet to come.

Fiona’s sister, Elizabeth, arrived with a sample bag stuffed with chutneys, waatlemoen konfyt preserve, lemon syrup and wholemeal buttermilk rusks ready for dunking. Both girls, who arrived in Western Australia from the Cape region with their parents in 1984, had cooked with their grandmothers, learned their recipes and absorbed their techniques. Elizabeth’s Fat Hippo brand is only available at a few carefully selected outlets but, even so, she finds it difficult to meet demand. I tried creamy local brie topped with the watermelon-rind preserve on a cracker and I could see why.

Closer to Margaret River, in the towering Tuart forest, Jimmy Deale’s son, Leonard, operates the turf farm that supplies the rapidly growing housing developments south of Perth. But Jimmy himself, who ran several successful businesses in South Africa, now operates Travel Joy. Jimmy delights in showing...

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