THE AUSSIE NUT

My earliest memory of eating macadamias is sitting on the back steps of my grandparents’ house with my brother and cousin. We’d have a pocketful of macadamias each and the hammer. We’d put the nuts on the concrete path then use the hammer to break open the brown shell.

Now you can buy fancy nutcrackers to break open a home-grown macadamia but we made do and even became quite skilful in cracking rather than smashing the nut. If we were lucky, Papa would take pity on us and crack them cleanly with the