Earlier in 2025, we met with Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo, a respected Gamilaroi Elder, to speak about her impact on the local community in Redfern, Sydney.
Her compassion and vision have inspired Michelin-starred chefs and the local community. Read on for that interview.
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.
Born on Gamilaroi country
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.
“My Elders,” she says, “were all station hands. That goes way back to my great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers, and my family before them. They lived off the land. When Europeans first came here, Aboriginal people were put onto stations to work. By the time I was born, in 1942, they’d been moved again, off the stations and into the township on the reservation. We didn’t have any choice.”
A childhood full of love
Aunty Beryl remembers a childhood full of joy, hard work, love, and feeling held in the arms of family and community, even when times were extraordinarily tough.
“We didn’t have proper housing like we’ve got today,” she remembers. “Instead, we had tin shacks, dirt floors. We were under the Aboriginal Protection Board, so you had to get permission to leave the reservation and to invite people over.” First Nations people also needed government permission to find work and to marry. Movie theatres, restaurants, hotels and other public places were segregated. “But all the families were on the reservation together and we looked after one another and did the best we could.”
Living off the land
Residents were provided with rations. “And the rations were a bag of flour, golden syrup, IXL jam – all the sugary stuff, which was wrong for us. But my father and uncles worked as shearers and stockmen, so they bought fresh meat from the farmers. They grew fruit and vegetables too – pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, spinach. We had orange and lemon trees, a grapevine growing over the carport and a chicken coop at the back. We had a good life, a happy life.”
The community also lived by the river, “so everything was done on the river,” Aunty Beryl explains. “We caught fresh fish, like yellow bellies and river cod and bream. Crayfish – they call them yabbies now. That was our thing. We went swimming in the river, we bathed in the river, we did our washing in the river, and we cooked on an open fire by the river. I remember my mum taking us down to the river to do the washing and me pushing the pram for her. I was the eldest, so I would help with the younger siblings.
“That’s how we grew up. We grew up with plenty of love, and good health because we lived off the land.”
Determined to learn
Education was also a do-it-yourself affair. The kids from the mission went to school in town but the teachers, Aunty Beryl remembers, “didn’t take much notice of us because they knew our parents didn’t read or write, so nobody would know whether we learnt anything.”
That wasn’t going to stop young Beryl. “I was determined to learn to read,” she says. “We had no electricity, but we had candles, and at night I’d get the jam tin and learn my letters from the label. I started with IXL, then I spelled out ‘jam’. And we used to play hopscotch. My mum taught me the numbers in the squares, and I taught the younger ones.”
Aunty Beryl had nine siblings – one passed away. She remembers a brother coming into the world at the height of the 1950 flood. “Mum was in labour and I’m sitting in a tinnie with her, holding her hand, and my dad’s rowing the boat, trying to get to the hospital.”
A sudden tragedy
Four years later, when Beryl was 12, her mother died in childbirth. Doreen’s sister, Rose, who had eight children of her own, took the family in.
“She didn’t want the welfare to take us away,” Aunty Beryl explains, “and when she heard they were coming, she’d send us all down the river, hanging out in trees and hiding in the long grass.”
Her aunt “was firm”, as she’d have needed to be with so many children in the house. She swept and cleaned fastidiously, and delegated chores. She was a stickler for manners, respect and hospitality. Her mother and her aunts “were ladies”, Aunty Beryl adds. They sewed their own clothes, and the children’s, and “they might only have had two cotton dresses but they made sure that, when they went to town, they had a clean dress on, and that we were clean and tidy too.”
By the time she was 14, Beryl had left school and was working as ‘domestic help’ on a nearby station. At 16, with the encouragement of her Elders, she boarded a train for Sydney, where her cousins had promised to look out for her.
“My oldies got me the ticket and gave me some money to get started,” she remembers, “and they said, ‘Get a job first, and then an education.’”
Finding friendship in Redfern
Beryl found work at the Arnott’s Biscuits factory and friendship in the Aboriginal community known as the Block. “I made friends with all the other girls who had come down from the country,” she says. “We were like family.”
Redfern matriarch Aunty Polly Smith took a liking to this whip-smart lass from Walgett. She found her a job as a kitchen hand in a nursing home, which was where Aunty Beryl’s professional interest in food began.
It was given another boost when she took up a position as live-in nanny to a Hungarian family who shared their treasure trove of European family recipes. When she moved in, Alex and Lucy Gemes’ son Alan was two, Ken was one, and an older daughter, Judy, was 12 and away at boarding school. The children loved Beryl instantly and they’ve remained close to this day.
Lifelong love
Meanwhile, through friends who lived nearby, Beryl met a handsome Dutch engineer, Andrew Van-Oploo. It began with a double date, then there were outings to the beach. One day, he came to call
at the Gemes’ house, and Alex said to Lucy, “Beryl’s going to marry that man”.
“Andrew’s parents were really lovely to me,” Beryl says. “They sat us down and did the talk about, ‘Do you think this is going to work?’ My oldies said the same thing. But we just said, ‘It’s our life. We’ll see what happens.’”
Beryl, who was raised Presbyterian, converted to Catholicism to marry Andrew. “I went to the presbytery and did the lessons, but I was a bit cheeky,” she admits. She told the priest that, despite the Church’s stance, she planned to take the contraceptive pill. “He didn’t know what to say,” but he confirmed her anyway.
“We were married at Holy Cross in Bondi Junction,” she says. “Alan and Ken were our pageboys.”
Feeding community
With the Gemes boys growing up, there was less to do for the family, so Beryl took a job back near Redfern, with the Sisters of Mercy, at Wunanbiri Preschool.
“We’d pick the little Aboriginal kids up in the morning and bring them to school,” she says. “I could see not all of them were getting the food they needed, so I used to cook them hot meals – breakfast and lunch. We’d give them clothes to go home with, and we’d take them out every Saturday to the beach with a picnic lunch. The things we used to do!
“Then I took myself off to East Sydney Tech at night. I wanted to learn about nutrition and cooking healthy food on a budget for these kids. That’s when I really got into food. I wanted to learn more.”
An opportunity soon presented itself. TAFE had introduced a scheme to encourage Aboriginal graduates to go on to teacher training. Beryl received a letter inviting her to interview for one of the first scholarship places.
“I showed it to Sister Cecilia and Sister Oliver at the preschool,” she remembers, “and I said, ‘I’m not an academic’. They said to me, ‘You mightn’t be an academic, but you’ve got common sense. The academic part comes later. So, fill it out and we’ll be here to help you.’”
Bringing food knowledge back home
The young wife and mother enrolled to study education at what is now the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
“It was hard,” she says, “because I was doing the chef’s course and the nutrition course at the same time. I was doing all these things, and [raising] a family, but I had a very good husband, so we balanced it.
“My dining room had paper everywhere. I’d get the dictionary if I didn’t know the meaning of a word, and write it out and learn it, and it worked.” She did so well that a fellow student accused her of sleeping with the lecturer. “I said, ‘That ugly old goat! I wouldn’t give him the time of day. Have you seen my husband?’”
Beryl graduated from her courses, then returned to study food science. “I taught at TAFE for 40-odd years,” she says, “but I’d always bring the education back to the community.”
The community classes began because, even with their brand-new cohort of Aboriginal teachers, TAFE was having trouble retaining First Nations students. Aunty Beryl got permission to take her teaching off-campus.
A legendary cooking school and catering company
She started with a course called Home and Work Opportunities for Aboriginal Women in Redfern.
“I wasn’t sure it would work,” she admits, “but I had 30 people come along on the first night, and they all stayed. I’m still in touch with some of them. Two went on to be artists. One got a job at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital … Some of the girls went off and worked in hospitality.
“Aunty Glendra [Stubbs, now Elder-in-Residence at UTS] used to bring kids down to the school and we’d keep them out of juvie by putting them in the course. A lot of them had nowhere to go. Aunty Glendra would find them somewhere to live, and I’d send them home with food … One boy turned out to be a chef; quite a few of them went on to work in hospitality.”
Surviving tough times
As the years unfolded, the school moved first to the Eveleigh railway complex and then the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence. Aunty Beryl also opened cafes, and Yaama Barrgay, her catering company, to provide work experience for her students and spread knowledge about native foods.
Today, Aunty Beryl has two sons (Ricky and Andrew), a daughter (Cassandra), seven grandkids and four great-grandkids of her own, as well as a whole community that knows her as family.
Her Dutchman, Andrew, was however felled by cancer in May last year. It was the first in a heartbreaking chain of losses from which she is only just recovering. Both a brother and a sister died soon after Andrew – all three from pancreatic cancer – “an evil disease”, she says. In all, she lost six close friends and family members in just three months. Then she was struck down with a lung infection that left her breathless, exhausted and struggling through grief.
“For a while, I couldn’t even walk up the hill to Redfern Street,” she says. “I’d see all these oldies going up slowly and I’d think, ‘Well, I am a little old lady now.’”
Back in the kitchen
Aunty Beryl has rallied however, with the help of friends and family.
Aunty Millie Ingram, one of the old gang, rides like a daredevil on her motorised wheelchair. “I say, ‘Don’t come flying down that hill!’” Aunty Beryl chuckles. Then she puts the kettle on and they have a cup of tea. “We all still get together,” she says.
But it’s the students – past and present – that bring Aunty Beryl back to this kitchen week after week.
“I often think about them all,” she says. “That first course I did was just a spearhead that allowed me to do all this. And when I see the fruits of it – all the kids and all the people from the community that I’ve helped – to see them go on their own journey, become who they are and have a better quality of life. When I see that, then I know I’m doing my job. I know I’m doing what I was meant to do.”
This feature originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue.
