Where the cheese was: The real story behind Australia's foul-mouthed polymath

Sydney Morning Herald

19 hours ago

Peter Russell-Clarke, the neckerchief-clad larrikin who became an unexpected fixture in Australian lounge rooms and taught a generation how to cook long before MasterChef, has died aged 89.
Russell-Clarke was the unruliest of media pioneers – a bona fide polymath whose flair for cooking was matched only by his biting political cartoons and a sharp tongue that went gloriously rogue in a now-legendary bloopers reel, long before the internet invented 'going viral'.
With a trademark beret, stained smock, and a tea towel thrown over one shoulder, he was never just a cook. He was a storyteller. A painter. A provocateur. A genuine original. The sort who could poach an egg and puncture a prime minister's ego in the same five-minute segment.
A familiar face on television throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Russell-Clarke fronted more than 900 episodes of Come and Get It on the ABC. He showed generations of Australians how to toast herbs and cook chops on residual heat, and became inextricably linked with dairy marketing via a single immortal phrase: 'Where's the cheese?'
Yet, to reduce his life to a catchcry would be like calling Michelangelo a ceiling painter. Russell-Clarke was nothing less than a renaissance man with an Australian accent and a foul mouth.
He was a culinary educator, but also a talented illustrator, prolific writer, advertising guru, political cartoonist, restaurateur and satirist. He was also a wine blender and a UN food ambassador. A man who once painted Dreamtime stories with Aboriginal elders in Far North Queensland and later cooked a jubilee dinner for the then Prince Charles.
Born in Ballarat in 1935, Russell-Clarke's early life was marked by instability. His father, a defrocked Anglican minister, and his dressmaker mother, sent him to a Catholic boarding school in Bowral, NSW, 'to get back at the Anglicans', but didn't bother paying the fees. His childhood, shaped by alcohol-affected parents and stints in foster care, was anything but linear.
At one point, he lived with a Chinese-Australian family who taught him to cook banquet-style meals and introduced him to Eastern flavours. He would later claim these early culinary lessons formed the backbone of his intuitive, nose-first approach to food.
It is difficult to know whether all his tales were true or had added garnish. He briefly lived on Melbourne's streets, scrounging behind Bourke Street institutions like Florentino. Even then, his standards were high. He once said he'd written a letter to the chef, complaining that a discarded fish had freezer burn.
'I'm buggered if I know how long I exis­ted like that, but it was a while. Good times, it made you lose weight!' he recalled in an interview years later.
That mix of refinement and irreverence would become his signature.
By his late teens, Russell-Clarke was working as a junior artist for one of Australia's top advertising agencies. His job, initially, was fetching lunches. But soon he was freelancing as an illustrator and food consultant – two disciplines he would blend with great success. He went on to become political cartoonist for the Melbourne Herald, where he drew the comic strip Ben Bowyang and skewered public figures with glee and accuracy.
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At the same time, he began illustrating for Shell, Mobil, Ford, and even Boeing – work that would take him across the globe and into the homes of corporate high-flyers.
But it was food, that always kept calling him back.
Russell-Clarke ran one of Melbourne's most popular restaurants, a no‑name, no‑menu venue in Carlton, often booked out 18 months in advance. Again, Charles came calling and, reportedly, he told him to 'bugger off' because he was fully booked.
'I cooked a Silver Jubilee dinner for him and the only reason they chose me is that they knew they could get away with not paying for the meal,' he once said. 'The place was well ahead of its time, like a modern pop‑up. You just came and got whatever there was. It's just too hard if someone orders off the menu.'
He wrote, illustrated, or ghostwrote 35 books – including 25 cookbooks and an encyclopaedia of food. He was also, at various times, food editor for New Idea, Woman's Day, The Age, and The Daily Mirror. For 27 years, he was the face of the Australian Dairy Corporation and the Egg Board, starring in TV commercials he often wrote and directed himself.
Those of a certain age will remember him best as the five-minute man on ABC. Come and Get It, which aired just before The Goodies or Inspector Gadget, delivered succinct recipes in an unmistakable Russell-Clarke tone: warm, matey, occasionally bemused.
'G'day!' he'd begin, and off he'd go – chatting about burnt herbs or properly cooking tomatoes ('you release a perfume') before wrapping up with 'you beaut!' and a cheeky grin.
Behind the scenes, he was anything but tame. The infamous blooper reel – first passed around on email and then eventually YouTube – revealed a man unafraid to unleash torrents of profanity, frustration, and wit. The contrast between the polished, public Russell-Clarke and the mercurial off-air version only deepened public affection.
Even in his later years, battered by health challenges – a heart attack, stroke, and cancer diagnosis – Russell-Clarke's energy remained fierce. Living with his wife of six decades, Jan, in Tooborac, north of Melbourne, he still cooked, still painted, and still spoke with vision-impaired cooking enthusiasts about low-heat techniques.
He insisted that blindness needn't be a barrier to kitchen excellence – 'It should make you a better cook,' he said. 'You do it gently, and slowly. Like making love.'
That gentleness wasn't always evident in his professional life. He could be abrasive, outrageous and contradictory. But there was wisdom in the way he treated food. A lamb chop deserved your attention. Herbs were to be toasted and respected. Food, for Russell-Clarke, was not just sustenance but story, art, politics, and theatre.
'There was nearly a war over Brussels sprouts, but the King of Brussels saved the day by telling the King of England how to cook them properly,' he once told a young reporter. 'I don't know if that story's true or not, but it sounds good.'
His art reflected that same narrative sensibility. He painted for commercial clients, for federal commissions, for himself. He exhibited widely around Australia and internationally, owning his own Soho Galleries on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula and completing a 10-storey mural series for a Lygon Street building – from rabbits underground to pigeons in the sky.
His cello paintings, inspired by musical theatre pieces he composed, portrayed instruments as people: sinuous, playful, human. In 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra requested a self-portrait for one of its exhibitions. He obliged with a piece that was part man, part mirth.
After losing his home in a devastating fire while overseas, Russell-Clarke did what he always did – started again. Fifty paintings were destroyed. Four finished books went up in smoke.
He said it was a blessing. 'The first book I've rewritten is much better,' he shrugged. 'I'm singing and dancing.'
He famously called himself a 'ratbag,' a label friends, fans and colleagues endorsed with affection.
He poked fun at TV chefs who embarrassed contestants, he mocked advertisers who softened his language, and he laughed when strangers asked him, decades later, 'Where's the cheese?'
Russell-Clarke didn't suffer fools, food snobs, or faddish TV formats. When asked to relaunch Come and Get It, he declined after a young producer told him they'd need to modernise the format.
'I told her to stick it and hung up,' he said flatly.
He was married to Jan, a former dancer and his best mate of more than 65 years. 'Without her, I'd be a bit buggered,' he said. 'She does all the bookwork; otherwise I'd be in jail.'
They had two children – Peter Jr, who for decades was a senior Apple designer in the US, and Wendy, a choreographer – and three grandchildren.
When asked recently how he'd like to be remembered, Russell-Clarke, ever the storyteller had one final punchline ready: 'Having a gravestone with your name on it is bullshit. Who gives a stuff whether you lived or died, really? You don't need to be read about on a piece of stone.'
'I won't have a funeral. I'll probably jump off the West Gate Bridge with a candle up my bottom!'
He lived as he cooked: with flair, feeling, and zero fear. He will be remembered not just as a chef, not just as a cartoonist, but as an Australian original whose voice – booming, bellowing, or softly humming over a stove – echoed far beyond the kitchen.