Cameron Tay-Yap

Conversation with a chef: Hi, Cameron, I'm Jo. Nice to meet you. You're unloading.

Cameron Tay-Yap: Yes, we've got a massive weekend ahead of us. The same event that I did with Dan (Lidgard), I have someone else tomorrow, and I'm triple probably booked.

I feel like every weekend's been massive, though, havent they?

To be honest, yeah. And then on Sunday, we've got 100 people for lunch.

Where are they going to go?

I don't know. It is supposed to be raining. It's always about figuring it all out. Do you fancy a chat inside?

I've been really listening to quite a lot of podcasts recently. That's something I love to do, as I'm driving. Some of them are really, really great and some of them I think, no, this, this is not going to happen, Im not captivated by this whatsoever. The questions are neither here nor there.

Have you got a favourite one at the moment?

I've listened to quite a few recently. There are maybe about five of them that I keep going back to and I keep listening to over and over. One of them is Gordon Ramsay. He was on a couple, he did one with an Australian Anthony Huckstep that was really good. Then he did one with another British interviewer where they were talking about success and motivation and stuff. It's quite interesting listening to his background story. I listened to Curtis Duffy talk about his restaurant in Chicago called Ever and his background, which is really interesting. It's a really great documentary about him called For Grace when he was opening a restaurant and it really puts things into perspective. It's very easy to get into this victim mentality a lot. To be honest, Australians in general complain a lot. They think they've been hard done by by everyone. But to put it in in perspective, if you go to literally anywhere else in the world, it's just so much harder. The UK, the US, its brutal. You're working 17, 18 hour days and then going to moonlight somewhere else for another three, four hours just to make just enough money to pay rent and survive. Whereas here you get your minimum wages, it's so good. And we still complain. When you listen to a lot of people's stories and the hardships that they've faced, whether it's this guy Curtis, his father, ended up in a murder-suicide where he killed his mother and then himself when he was at a young age and Curtis was only 14 or 15. And seeing people rise above all of the challenges that life throws at you, you know really puts things into perspective of how difficult things are. Same as Grant Achatz at Alinea in Chicago. You could be at the top of your field and hitting the peak of your career. And then he got mouth cancer and this was right before chemo had started. They thought that they were going to have to remove his tongue, most of his mouth, his neck, and just surgically just take everything out. But then chemo was an experimental thing. He tried it and it they succeeded in removing the cancer, but it also stripped him of all of his taste buds. Life is full of challenges and curves in the road and you never know what's going to happen, but it's kind of how you manoeuvre and respond to these challenges, whether you just let these things hit you and you give up or you can write your own story, rise above it and then from there you go on to inspire more and more people and do your own little bit. It's always interesting and always great to listen to other people.

Well, absolutely. I think we're all influenced by others and when you are making your way in whatever field you're in, hearing what other people have been through and taking bits from what they've said or just not feeling alone. It's good to hear other people's stories.

Absolutely. A hundred per cent. I think it's funny because you had Dan on the podcast. I love Dan. I really love Dan. We have such a strong history and we were joking around because he did the collab here and when we worked together at Attica, I was 17 or 18, my parents came in, my mum and the rest of my family. He was a sous chef and he was on the pass and I was running the pastry section and he would just come and joke around with me like a big brother all the time. And coming to the end of the night we were doing the desserts and we were sending a a special VIP dessert out. I'd been practicing all of my quenelles and my rochers to get them better. And Dan said, how about you do two and I'll do two and then we'll go over, we'll take it to your family and then we will get them to say which two plates look the best. Obviously Dan's looked the best because he is way older than I am. But it's a very funny sort of full circle moment, having him here and being able to cook with him and everything. And now he's a muscled bodybuilder. It's actually really weird having all of these people that I looked up to for most of my career and now being like treated like an equal is really strange to me. It's the most bizarre role reversal and I still can't wrap my head around it completely. It still feels very strange. I have this weird sort of impostor syndrome kind of thing.

I understand. When did it start changing, do you think?

It happened very quickly. It would've been probably when I started at Amaru, which would've been just over four years ago, going into a sous chef and then a head chef role very quickly. Obviously being a manager, you have to suddenly become more than just a chef and a cook. You have to be a leader and you have to inspire a team and overnight, suddenly I'm not an apprentice anymore and you have all of these apprentices, especially at Amaru. We had a huge portion of our staff being apprentices. They would suddenly come to you and ask for advice about cooking, but also just in general things how to cope with things and suddenly youre not a mentee anymore. You're a mentor to everyone. I guess dealing with that was a bit of a shock. Then it became something that I'm quite passionate about now, especially young people. I find nowadays it's quite rare finding really hardworking, passionate, driven young people. It's a funny time where everyone is subjected to heaps of influences and you just have so many options. You just don't know what's happening anymore. So when I do find young people who are really driven and motivated and keen and passionate, I've suddenly now become very passionate about mentoring them and teaching them and giving them all the tools that they can have to be successful. There's actually this one kid, his name is Max, he did the first collab here at Pebble and he was an apprentice of mine at Amaru. I love his tenacity and his keenness to try things and put himself out there and I'm happy to meet them in the middle. If they want to learn and they want to come to the table and give me their best, I'll give you all the tools, everything I know. To a degree, sometimes I feel a little bit jealous because when I was younger, I didn't necessarily have a head chef who came to all of my pop-ups and helped me with my pop-ups. I kind of did it out of spite, it had to be successful purely out of spite. Hospitality and cooking is not really one of those things that is a sought-after profession in my culture. So it was more mostly, I'll show you, I can do this. This is not a cop-out profession. This is something I'm passionate about and I want to be really like real. So originally when I first started, it was a tenacity to prove everyone wrong. And then, the more you go on, the more you fall in love with it. I often have the conversation with my wife that if we had $10 million, I wouldn't change anything. I'd still be going into a kitchen, maybe not into a car park, but I'd be in a kitchen running something or opening a restaurant or whatever. But it's not like I would change my profession.

Where do you find compassion for the young people that are coming to you? Because as you were saying, you had to exhibit tenacity and you did it with real grit and perhaps other young people aren't facing those same challenges that you did. Now you're in that mentor role, where do you summon up that patience to listen and give advice?

I'm probably going to get into a lot of trouble later on, but I think that I'm a pretty patient person. Most people would definitely argue against that, it's like a three strikes and you're out sort of situation. In the moment we might have a falling out and I'll let you know that I'm not happy. And then after work, we'll kiss and make up and it'll be fine. In the moment it's a very professional thing. It should never really be personal. And that's something that I struggle with. I'm getting better at it and it's something that I'm improving on myself. But sometimes I struggle to differentiate between professional and personal because I take my professional so seriously that's an extension of myself. So if you mess up in the workplace, I take that somewhat personally and I shouldn't and I'm getting better at it. But the compassion, probably my wife, because I guess since getting married and since Trish came along, it's probably because of her that I'm a bit nicer now. Also, it comes with age. It comes with some maturity and when you lose your temper and you get upset about it, more often than not the person who's losing their temper is just losing a lot of energy. You are getting more upset than the person who's really at fault here and that shows. At the end of the day, everyone's in a position that they're in for whatever reason. This person who might not actually care at all, and you might be yelling at him, suddenly you've now expelled all of this energy and all of this is negativity that you are harbouring and this person just doesn't care. It may just go over their head and it doesn't matter to them. But obviously now what's happened is you've damaged yourself, and also the environment around you. Because everyone else has to be subjected to this in a team and even though it might not be directed at other people, they're still going to be affected by your actions. If I'm going around slamming fridge doors and banging things, one person might not care, the rest of the people are going to feel really uncomfortable and it's going to affect their performance. I had a long talk with an old head chef of mine. Because I used to be that guy. I used to be an angry little boy who would just get frustrated that other people were not performing to my expectations. I would get upset and then I would start slamming things and get annoyed and take it out on some poor fridge.Then everyone else would feel really on edge and uncomfortable in the workplace. That's something that hit me pretty hard. I had that conversation with the guy and from then on a very hard corner was turned and suddenly I've become a lot more aware of people's capabilities and expectations and what individuals want to get out of experiences and stuff.

And as you say, you can't always assume that you know where the person in front of you comes from and they might be presenting as not caring, but why are they presenting like that? Maybe something's happened. It's hard. It's frustrating when it's your great passion and you also know how things need to be run and then you have to negotiate all these other little energies around you.

It's silly to project your own expectations onto other people. Because it's something you can't control. So, coming back to the compassion part, whenever I do find anyone who matches my passion and keenness, I have a bit of a soft spot for that, and probably also my wife brings that out of me. Now I really enjoy mentoring and guiding a lot of young people. Because I love this industry. I'd like to see it continue to be great and that can only be continued if you have another generation and more and more young people put in the time and effort and love into it.

I'm sure there's more people like you that do want to put the time and effort in. I often have this conversation and it's a difficult conversation to have because of the wage stuff and limits on hours, but to become really good at anything, whether it's bouldering or cheffing, you have to put the time in. There's that balance between being paid for that and doing it because you love it and you just want to improve and do the best that you can. It's tricky.

There's no shortcuts in anything. Sports, anything. I still love sports and I used to be quite competitive and, but to become good at anything you just have to put in the hours and the hard work. Especially earlier on. I am quite young. I don't think so. I think I'm somewhat older now. I'm just really old. My wife is nine years older than me and whenever I call myself old, she looks at me with the most evil eye. I feel old. But, putting in the hours when I was younger, when I was 17, 18 and 19, not really looking at how much I was getting paid, but just mindlessly clocking in and learning and soaking it all in as much as you can, travelling and no savings, just putting it all out there Im pretty fortunate. I'm pretty lucky to be in the position that I'm in and given the opportunities that I've been given. There's definitely a little bit of luck that that comes with it.

Oh, I don't know. You've put in a lot of hard work.

Tell me about seventeen-year-old you, because I've read the story of you dropping out of culinary school and knocking on the door of Attica. But how are you even at culinary school at 17? Did you always know you want to be a chef?

No. I went to Melbourne High and it was probably when I was about 15, 16 that I had two choices. I was enjoying cooking at home because it meant that I didn't have to do my homework. I was helping out. I'll cook dinner tonight, don't worry about it. We had a big household, me, my mum, my brother, and we'd have homestays. We'd have sometimes 10 people staying in our house at once. We were frugal. It's not like we went out to eat very often or anything. The way we would celebrate was we would just cook at home. I would bake cakes and I would cook at home and, that way everyone could still celebrate at home. I enjoyed it. I really did. But I was in Melbourne High and I wanted to do VET hospitality.It wasn't held at Melbourne High, so we had to go after another school. It was Melbourne Girls College. There was this one kid Max who also did it. There were only three of us from Melbourne High who went to do this subject. Max's whole family were really into fine dining and eating out. I remember sitting in the orientation and Max's dad was showing my mum all of these things that Max had cooked and they were all recipes from Quay cookbook or from Sepia and stuff like that. And my mum would show Max's dad the banana bread that I made and obviously, it looked very different and I was, I wouldn't say embarrassed, but `it was just something that I'd never seen before. I had never been introduced to that idea of food being more than just sustenance and nutrition. It was like an artistic form. I thought it was cool. We did this subject and Max would always top the class but really effortlessly to the point where it was actually really frustrating. I started to try because I actually really enjoyed it. So I tried harder and he would still beat me and he would come up with these dishes and these recipes that were just amazing. He was just very naturally talented and it just pissed me off so much. Then one day in Year 12, one of our assignments was to come back and cook a three-course meal of our own choosing. I started making these things without a recipe, without following a cookbook. I was trying out all these things and I beat Max, I got top of the class and I was like, hot damn, this feels really good. I really like this winning thing. I'm very competitive so I thought, I could get used to this. This is something I might actually become good at.

I put all my eggs into that basket, to my mum's chagrin. She was not super pleased at that point, but that's where that determination to prove her wrong came from. My mum said, if you go into law, I'm going to help you pay some of your uni fees. If you go into this cooking thing that's on you, you're going to have to pay your way. I said, I'm not scared, I'll do it. Fine. I was picking up casual jobs in kitchens and then I was working in a pastry manufacturing place called Sweet by Nature and saved up enough money to pay for my TAFE tuition. Went to that, thought it was interesting, it was cool. But then over the summer break I applied for an internship or a stage at Attica. Back then they used to do stages and I went there and it was a huge culture shock going to this kitchen full of grown-ups. It was very intense and it's just how you imagine kitchens to operate, it's intense, it's fast paced, you're always doing stuff. Someone's always in the shit and you're always swimming to get on top. I instantly fell in love with it. I thought, this is amazing. This is exactly what I want: it's fast and I'm doing stuff all the time. I think on Dan's podcast he talked about how he had to be a little bit humble, and he was experienced, but he was still washing cabbages. It's bullshit. I was washing his cabbages for him. Maybe before I came along, maybe he was washing his cabbages, but I remember, there was this cabbage bolognese and you had these cabbage leaves which the outsides were just always covered in mud. I would wash them and I would polish these leaves with a Chux cloth and I would bring them back and it was Jay or Dan and they would say, it's not clean enough. Id say, I don't know what to tell you, I spent 10 minutes washing one cabbage leaf and you're just operating at this intensely high level. The expectations were so high that you had to turn up and every day it was the Super Bowl. Every day it was Grand Final. You have to put that into perspective because at a restaurant like that where you're paying, I think it's $385 now, you might be having a bad day and you are human, that's totally fine. But at the same time it's totally not fine because there's a person out there who's spent all of this money to invest their time, their money, and they could have been on a wait list, waiting for this, this event to happen three months in advance, it could be an anniversary, it could be celebrating a engagement, birthday, its their night. And they don't really care if you've had a bad day. You just have to turn up and perform all the time. Youre on show all the time. And that level of on-ness is something I loved. I loved turning up and just having to be on. And then I guess from there carry on that expectation to everyone else.

It's a discipline too, isn't it? And there's something really comforting about the boundaries of discipline so that, as you say, you have to be on. When you go into that space, this is what you're doing and everything else doesn't matter. It's a good place to be and it's great if you can get to that place to be able to switch off.

A hundred per cent. Everyone's human but not robots. And that can be quite challenging. But I've always seen it like a team sport. Whether you play basketball or anything else, if you turn up and you don't perform, someone else has to pick up that slack. You are held accountable by your peers as well.

After my summer internship, I went back to TAFE and I thought, oh man, this sucks. TAFE is a funny place where you get a very wide mix of people. I'm sitting in this classroom and we're talking about seafood and they're going around the room, asking people to list different seafoods. Someone said crab, someone said Blue swimmer crab and then one person was like, no, we already said crab. There's more than one type of crab, it was just ridiculous. I was pretty lucky to be able to go back to Attica and keep the internship going. I would go to school just to do my assessments once a year. I was very lucky that there was a coordinator or a teacher who was very supportive of me to do all of these things. He just let me not turn up to class and just do assessments and fast tracked everything, which was good. After that, eventually I got a job at Attica.

Is that what you learned or maybe cultivated a love for foraging?

I guess I was exposed to it at Attica a lot, especially at the start when they used to have a heap of space at the Ripponlea Gardens. I don't know if I fell in love with the idea of foraging straight away, but I treated everything as a learning experience, whether I had to go to the garden every day with everyone and pick herbs. It's a drab job. You have to just turn up and pick herbs and then portion herbs. There was one dish that had 30 different herbs in it. And every day I would have to portion out all the herbs and flowers into these little moulds. I would have to take them to maybe Dan or Jay or Matt and they would go through everything and make sure that you had 30 different herbs in there and they would check everything. It's quite menial work. It's not fun. A lot of the time, you go into restaurants and there are some crap jobs. But that's just the reality of it. There's always going to be crap jobs to do and you can stand there and take six hours to portion these herbs, which a lot of people did. There's no point in me standing here for six hours portioning herbs and not really learning much. So I would get faster and faster with them and at the same time, you would start learning unconsciously about the seasonality of herbs and flowers and you would pick up all of this information and learn how to identify lots of different ingredients. I actually look back on it quite often and I was lucky because I get to look at item lists now and I see things and whenever we're coming up with dishes I think, oh, this will definitely be in season right now and it's probably growing around here. We could definitely pick that and we can use this as a garnish and your bank of knowledge is just increased just by a change of attitude. It just depends on how you look at a task. You can look at it as what a shitty job putting flowers into pots. Or you could look at it as a learning experience of how come the flowers today are not looking so good in the middle of summer. What's happening to these different plants? You just come to the table with more knowledge and experience down the road just by changing the way that you see things a little bit.

So in those early days, you're obviously wanting to do really to show your mum and everyone that you had made a good choice. But were you always thinking I'm going to be head chef of a three hat restaurant, or I'm going to be Young Chef of the Year. Are they things that you aspired to?

I've always been extremely goal-orientated. In high school, we went to the Melbourne High speech night when I was in Year Eight. We saw all of the kids coming up for different Dux awards. I said to my mum, by the time I graduate, I want to be collecting a Dux. I flunked out of a lot of other things. I didn't do well in English or anything, but the subjects that I did end up enjoying, I put all of my eggs into that one basket. I went up and I collected a Dux for hospitality and for sports and Vis Com. I was always like, okay, we're going to do this, but what I want to achieve out of this experience is this or this or this. So, starting at Attica, I thought, firstly I wanted to be a paid chef. At the time there were lots of stages and people from around the world who came to do different experiences. I wanted to get on top of all of them and be a permanent staff member. That was my first goal. And then from there I thought, okay, I want to get into a management position. Eventually I was about 20 or 21, I got junior sous. And then from there I thought, I want to get a dish on the menu. So I started working on lots of dishes and started doing lots of research and development for the menu and eventually, I got a couple of dishes on.

Then I thought, okay, well I feel like I should travel. I felt like my confidence in myself was strong in this one place, but I wasn't sure if I would be good in a different kitchen or a different restaurant. I thought, I want to go somewhere else. I wanted to travel. I went to Europe and did some traveling and did some work experience at Core by Claire Smyth, which was the opposite of Attica. We spoke about the food at Attica as being almost like a showcase of what Australia has to offer, and going into Core, all the dishes were very meticulously thought out and there were many elements and different components to a dish. It was supposed to work quite harmoniously to create a piece. Claire used to be Gordon Ramsay's executive chef for 12 years, so, it was a very intense kitchen. It was a three-Michelin star kitchen and it was intense. We would start at 6, 6.30 in morning and we would finish up at midnight, one am every day. It would be intense. And it was cut throat. It was really ruthless. Everyone was just pushing so hard to make sure that we hit that goal of being ready for service. And it was immaculate. It was a beautiful kitchen. Every day the entire team would stop at 10 am and then again at like 3.30 or 4pm and completely deep clean the kitchen. All of the crevices, all of the skirting boards, everything. The glass would be polished multiple times. because it was completely on show. You could eat off the floor.

Like The Bear.

Literally. On Saturday nights we would be there at Core by Claire Smyth until 4am scrubbing down, pulling the fridges apart, cleaning the wheels of the fridges, cleaning everything. We would go through and literally scrub the ceiling all the way down to the floor, under the tables, everything. It was always impeccable. You take that as a learning experience. It was very disciplined and you take a lot out of it. There was a lot that I really enjoyed and a lot that I thought, oh, this is okay. But then you take that experience and you apply it to whatever you want and no place is perfect. And eventually in your own brain and through many experiences, you figure out what's perfect for you. Other people will come decide that's not perfect for them and they'll go off and do their own thing. The experience was amazing. After that I ran out of money and I came home. I had to do a bunch of other stuff and eventually found my way into Amaru and then after Amaru into a car park.

So there are a few things that came up for me when I was reading about you. I did read that initially that perhaps your Mum was a bit worried about her experience of people cooking and that in your culture she was thinking of Hawker style food. And people were really struggling every day to sell enough food. And then I saw that you classify this as Hawker style.

Yeah. What a full circle moment. My mum comes quite often now.

But yours is more fine dining hawker style?

I went in with the full intention of making it as rustic as I could. Turns out after10 years of fine dining, thats not easy. Eventually I've got heaps and heaps of plates.

You change the menu every two weeks?

We change the menu every two weeks. We've had collabs every other week. So it's basically a new menu every week. It's pretty full on changing the menu every week.

I read that it was going to be four months, but is it?

We have extended it by another two months. 4th of May will be our last service.

The other thing I read was that this was going to be a bit of a step back and a more relaxed thing after the intensity.

Ah, yeah. It's definitely not. I came in with some very holistic intentions. But I definitely didn't account for my personality to change everything. In some ways it is more relaxed, let's say the expectations of people coming here and the way that we operate is a little bit more like laid back. I'm wearing flip flops and shorts to work.

And it is a car park.

Yeah, exactly. It is a car park. There's been a lot of compromises on different things and it is in some ways laid back, in some ways it's not laid back because we don't have walls or we don't have a ceiling. And when it's raining and when it's 37 degrees tomorrow it's going to be hot. It's still challenging. No matter what it was going to be challenging.

Can you enjoy it?

I love it. I have a great time. I enjoy doing this because you're really cutting out a lot of steps and it's a very holistic approach to the whole thing. It's very stripped back. It's like, okay, let's just cook some yummy food. Now it's on plates. Before it wasn't on plates, it was in boxes, takeaway containers. But there's a great community here. Let's create a space for them to hang out, give them some food and let's build this community. Let's keep growing it. Let's just enjoy the summer. And then I decided, okay, let's do some collabs. Because I love doing pop-ups. So we started doing the pop-ups and then I was thought, okay, great. I can do this pop-up down in Mornington as well, which is amazing. I think it's just funny because I've always done pop-ups. My first one was when I was a fresh 18-year-old. At Attica I was doing three, maybe four pop-ups a year, and then I kept doing them. Then at Amaru I did a little bit less because I had a bit less time. But I would still do one pop-up, maybe two collabs.

Do you document all that? It would make a great book.

It would make a great book. I like the idea of writing a book, but linguistically I'm not great.

But where do keep all your menus and your ideas?

There's a little folder at home stashed away and I go back to them sometimes and I think, oh my god, what idiot created this menu? This is horrible. I look back at the first pop-up I did. I have a very strong recollection of that night. And I think, oh my God, how dreadful. Every time we've done another pop-up, it grows, it gets a bit better. We keep adding to it. We keep buying more and more plates. We have a gazillion plates now. My wife hates it and they take up so much space. We keep adding things, napkins, cutlery, glasses. Basically. I have a storage room full of everything to open a restaurant. But we don't have a restaurant. We have a car park now. You learn a lot very, very quickly. You learn the business acumen side of things. You learn managing people and paying for things. You learn about the front of house side of things as well and by doing all of these things, obviously it's your own money and your own investment. So if it fails, you feel it. If it's successful you feel it. But yeah, now we've got a six month pop-up and pop-ups within a pop-up.

Do you think you'd like a bricks and mortar?

A hundred per cent. That's the goal. The goal is to get to a position where I can open up my own place. We're close. We're definitely coming to that point where it's a very prevalent thought that I think about quite often. The only thing is obviously now you look at things, not just about the cooking, not just about the food side of things, but you're looking at the business side of things and Melbourne is an amazing city, but at the same time it's scary out there right now. There's places opening and closing like no tomorrow. It's quite exhausting keeping up with all of it. There's a lot of changes in work culture and changes in the way that people are prioritising things, the way that people enjoy their time, the way that people want to have their dining experience has changed. When I first started at Attica it was almost 10 years ago and people would love having a six hour meal. Nowadays if you go over two and a half hours, people are bored. They want to get out, they want to go to do the next thing so the experience has changed. The way that people see dining and restaurants has changed and it's always changing. The way people want to spend their money has changed. Looking at that is like where we are at, where we're like, what exactly do we need to do for this restaurant to be successful? Do we open a fine dining restaurant or bistro or a cafe or a bar or what, what is it that people exactly want to do? Because no matter how passionate you are about one thing, you can't force it down people's throats. You have to learn from the market and then acclimatise yourself to that.

I guess what you've done is a bit like when you scale a climbing wall, because I feel like there's the poetry of the wall, right? You're thinking about all the parts of your body and there's a flow when you're climbing, but you're looking about whats next? Where are you going to put your foot next? Where are you going to put your hand next? Can you jump a few steps and go higher? That's a really big risk and you might fall, but I feel like you've put in those steps with the pop-ups and the different things and some spicy little shapes along the way.

Anything in life is always going to be a little bit scary. Making that jump, going for that promotion, going into the unknown, it's always scary. Nothing is guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed. So it is scary. There's no doubt about it. It's terrifying. That's part of life, to take that step of faith and wander into the unknown. Fingers crossed. All you can do is persevere, push through the hard times and hopefully come out on top.

I am who I am. I'm always going to bite off more than I can chew. And I'm always going to do something silly that is extremely risky, but it will come out okay at the end of it. Australia's an amazing place. There's always opportunities for people to be successful here. Everything's going to be all right. I'm not sure if I'm telling you or if I'm telling myself, a bit of both really. But if we can figure out six months in a car park with a horrible summer that was up and down flooding, sideways rain, heat waves, forty-degree days, thunderstorms. If we can manoeuvre that, we can figure out what's next. It'll be easier when we have walls and a roof and a whole team. I'm pretty sure it'll be easier. I mean, maybe we'll see.

Thank you. I feel like I need to leave you to get ready for all these hundreds of people.

We're chilling. We're okay today. Things are going to happen and you have to brush it off and acclimatise to change: duck and weave. Just go with the flow of things. Learn to dance in the rain of everything, you know. It's pretty crazy out there. But that's okay. It'll be fine.

Pebble at La Roca, 2 Natalia Avenue, Oakleigh South