Damper Period COrigin theory CVerified

Damper is a soda bread: flour worked with water and a little raising agent, then baked directly in the embers or hot ashes of a campfire. It needs no oven and no tin. It was the bread of settlers moving through the Australian interior, of swagmen (itinerant workers) and drovers, who baked it on the spot with whatever they had to hand.

The main ingredient, wheat flour, was not something that could be produced out here. It came by ship and was carried from the coastal settlements inland into the bush. For a loaf baked at a remote camp, everything turned on whether the flour had made it that far. Raising agents came into common use only later; the earliest dampers were plain things, flour and water set hard by the heat of the ashes alone. Baking a soda bread in the coals, and the ease of making it wherever people gathered to camp so long as there was flour, are what carried this frontier bread.

The earliest written record of a wheat-flour damper is from 1825, in a memoir edited by Barron Field. The name itself is explained two ways, and neither has won out.

One account traces it to the Lancashire dialect phrase "something that damps the appetite," a reading endorsed by the Australian National Dictionary Centre.

The other comes from the historian James Bonwick, who held that the First Fleet settler William Bond, a Sydney baker who advertised his shop on Pitt Street in 1804, was the first to bake a damper, and that the name came from the method of covering the fire with ashes to damp it down. Bonwick also claimed Bond as the inventor of the damper, though this is offered as one competing account among others.

The two explanations pin the name on a word and on a way of cooking, and the question remains unsettled.