The first issue of Regional Food magazine will be on sale July 13. While we like our website, there's nothing quite like a print magazine, on nice shiny paper with nice shiny photographs and words you don't have to scroll. Print is print and we like magazines to be well designed and a pleasure to hold. We're torn between wanting it to be a complete surprise, and giving you enough reason here online to rush out and buy it. So this is a compromise, my personally guided sneak peek as to what I think you'll enjoy in this first issue and why.

What do you think of when you hear the words 'King Island'? Cheese almost certainly, beef as well. You probably think green pastures, clean ocean waters full of seafood and ...

Exactly, not much else. So since we needed to know more, we figured you would too. While we're all familiar with the high quality produce from the island, there's not much we're told about the place itself, the people who produce and maintain that quality, and all the other things that make this small Bass Strait island special.

"What if we did the King Island issue without any pictures of those cliché lighthouses and just used the symbols, on pack shots and souvenirs" I mused. It was an over-reaction. The lighthouses are ok.

King Island sits like a dangerous bump in the relatively narrow strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. Still a busy waterway, it was directly in line of the sailing ships catching the Roaring Forties winds that whipped them from Cape Horn to Australia. Until someone turned on these lights at night, the Island was a graveyard for hundreds of lives as ships were wrecked on its rocky shores.

Today, these much photographed lighthouses are a tourist attraction, Kodak could have sponsored them (pre-digital). This low, undulating island has spectacular private beaches on a rocky coastline, green paddocks rimmed with hedges and wind breaks and a network of roads that cross it. This is a place that repays exploration with unspoilt beauty and rural charm. We took the time for that to become clear, and the photography in this issue has captured it. You'll like this place.
 

The sign at the airport says "Pop. about 2000". Think of a fair sized country town spread very thinly. There is space to move and grow. The people of King Island, old and young, know how lucky they are. They leave, return, leave again and often come back never to stray.

Then there are the people who have visited, come to love this island and its lifestyle, and who have moved here. Some have been here for a long time, like Italian born John (Giovanni) Boschetto, the butcher in Grassy. He produces a range of smoked smallgoods that his home town would be proud of. There are new businesses starting and old businesses being passed on and given a fresh lift by newcomers. This is a place of sea-changers and fisherman, kelp harvesters and cheese makers. We've told the best of those stories in this issue.

That 1940's photo is the Grassy Working Men's Club, it never closed.

Cheese? Of course. We have pages of it. There's a profile of King Island Dairy's remarkable cheese maker Ueli Berger, and Ueli then leads us through eight pages of almost every cheese they've made, or plan to make and some they didn't. Think tasting notes, storage tips, how and when to buy it. And there's some cheese, yoghurt and recipes to enjoy.

We tell the story of King Island beef, the marketing of myth and the widespread stealing of the island's reputation on the mainland. Then there's seafood - crayfish, oysters and abalone. That parrotfish you see in a tank in Melbourne's Chinatown has almost certainly been shipped alive, carefully, from King Island.

Then there's the honey, eggs, plum puddings and shortbread, crayfish pies, wallaby hams, traditional jam making and King Island rain water that is so pure it's bottled. We are Regional Food magazine.

Whilst we give the region all the space it needs to tell the story, the rest of Australia is waiting. In each issue we have our regular sections, an Australia-wide coverage of new products and food ideas, the season's best produce, wine, events listings, farmer's markets, book, magazine, web and TV reviews. There's a guest column and some lighter bits.

If that sounds like your kind of magazine, camp out in front of your newsagent the night before launch day, or subscribe now to make sure you get a copy.

Thanks for listening, enjoy the magazine.

Fred Harden.