The kitchen of kindness

The Weekly meets Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo, whose compassion and vision have inspired Michelin-starred chefs and kids on the streets of Redfern.

- WORDS by SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

The weather has snapped cold overnight. A spring deluge batters the tin roofs of Redfern and makes puddles like dams on the doorstep to Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo’s legendary cooking school and catering company. Aunty Beryl, 82, navigates the storm with the same grit and grace as she’s approached every hurdle in her long, generous life. And once inside, she welcomes The Weekly team with warmth, just as she’s welcomed generations of young people off the streets of Redfern who, within these walls, have found acceptance and purpose, and very often a career.

For her pioneering work with bush foods, Aunty Beryl has earned the admiration of some of the world’s great chefs – her good friend Kylie Kwong, Neil Perry, René Redzepi, owner of the three-Michelin-starred Noma in Copenhagen, and Carlo Petrini, who she describes as “boss of the wash” of the Slow Food movement.

Here in Redfern, Aunty Beryl is “boss of the wash” herself. An adored and respected Elder, she can’t take three steps along Redfern Street without someone singing out “g’day Aunt” — as likely as not one of her graduates. Old friends from the halcyon days of the Aboriginal rights movement “know where to find me”, she chuckles, and still drop in for a cuppa. Her kitchen is abuzz with conversation and the rich aromas of food and life.

Redfern, she says, feels like home. “This is our safe place. It always has been.” She feels as comfortable in these wide, terrace-lined streets as she does out in northern NSW where she was born, at the junction of the Namoi and Barwon Rivers, in Walgett, on Gamilaroi country.

“I was raised on a reservation,” Aunty Beryl begins, and she takes us right back to her roots. Her mother, Doreen Peters, was born on Angledool Station. Her father, Arthur Walford, grew up at Lightning Ridge.