Although camp pie in various guises had been around for many decades, it appears that Foggitt Jones of Queensland was the first to market it in Australia. Their Rex Camp Pie became a well-known brand. The famous “Camp Pie” Case in the 1920s was a legal dispute over trademarks between Foggitt Jones and the Darling Downs Co-operative.

The origins of the name “Camp Pie” are obscure. The dictionary defines it as: (Australian, history) tinned meat.

But it probably isn’t uniquely Australian. Camp Pie (at least in its tinned version) is recorded in Britain long before being manufactured in Australia. The term may have originated with the military, as tinned meat became a staple in the military diet around the time of the Crimean War (1853-6). Another theory (which would support its Australian credentials) is that it was made in miners’ camps on the Australian goldfields, but I can’t find any evidence for this.

It wasn’t always tinned either. A recipe for making a dish known as Camp Pie was published in the Scottish weekly magazine, the People’s Friend, in 1879. It sounded very like cottage pie, with a mixture of cold beef or mutton, chopped finely, mixed with gravy, covered with mashed potato and baked. Other home-cooked versions appeared over the years in the Australian press. The following recipe, similar to the one featured in People’s Friend appeared in The Bathurst Post in January 1883:

Camp pie

Ingredients. — Cold beef or mutton, pepper and salt, seasoning of ketchup or Worcester sauce, and onion if liked.

Method. — Mince the meat very fine, add pepper, salt, and the onion finely chopped. Make gravy of the bones and flavour it with ketchup or Worcester sauce; mix these with the minced meat, put it into a pie dish, with a tolerably thick layer of mashed potatoes, well seasoned with pepper and salt, and bake for an hour.

A 1930s recipe from Mrs C. H. Applebee of Ulverstone in Tasmania, took a completely different approach, with rather different ingredients:

Home-made Camp Pie

1 lb. sausage meat, 1 cup soft breadcrumbs, ¼ lb. bacon (rather fat), 1tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 cup milk, salt, 2 hard-boiled eggs for garnishing. Cut the bacon into dice. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Turn into a greased basin. Tie greased paper over the top, and steam for 2 hours. Unmould, and allow to become cold and firm. Cut each egg into four lengthways, and garnish the dish with these.

This latter recipe would produce something closer in texture to the tinned Camp Pie, which had been imported as early as the 1870s. Well-respected brands included Maconochie Brothers of Lowestoft in Sussex, Shippams of Chichester and Glencairn Camp Pie from the firm of Cunningham and De Fourier in Glasgow. From the 1890s, St George Camp Pie was also imported from New Zealand.

These companies typically produced a range of potted and tinned meats. Advertisements in Australian, Canadian and United States newspapers in the 1870s and ‘80s promote a range of imported English luncheon meats including ox and sheep’s tongues, jugged hare and roast grouse as well as the more common ham and corned beef.

Foggitt Jones commenced trading in 1904 in Brisbane, initially producing hams but moving into meat canning. According to a 1916 newspaper report, their product range had grown to include ham pate, veal and tongue pate, pigs’ feet, camp pie, pork and beans, pork brawn, Lorraine sausages, pork sausages, pork and veal Fritz and luncheon cheese (an early form of cheese spread). The company later expanded its distribution and production facilities to Sydney, Perth and Adelaide.

Although Foggitt Jones was probably producing camp pie by around 1905, an advertisement touting Rex Camp Pie as a new product appeared in the Brisbane Courier in October 1915.  Other manufacturers soon followed. In the 1920s, Foggitt Jones took the Darling Downs Co-operative to court, claiming their trademark had been infringed by the co-op’s KR brand, which had used a similar scroll on its label. The judge, saying “camp pie is camp pie”, threw out the case. Foggitt Jones appealed – and had the judgement reversed. The Darling Downs company took the matter to the High Court of Australia, but Foggitt Jones’s appeal was upheld. The case gained considerable coverage in the newspapers of the day.

Subsequent Australian brands of camp pie included Tom Piper, Swift, Smorgan’s (who also supplied frankfurts to the military, dubbed by soldiers as “Smorgan’s organs), and the Imperial brand owned by William Angliss. Initially, camp pie was supplied in round tins, but in 1955 Tom Piper announced the introduction of “the latest American-style square cans”. These were opened with a key that rolled back a strip of metal around the side of the can.

Spam, a similar product introduced in America in 1937, is made from pork and ham. Camp Pie is generally made from beef and/or mutton.  It was very popular until the 1950s and was eaten cold with salad, or sliced and fried. It is currently difficult to obtain in Australia, although Heinz continues to produce it under the brand names of Sita Ox & Palm and Globe,  for export to the Pacific Islands. Until recently Heinz-Watties was selling camp pie under their Hamper brand, but this seems to have disappeared – at least from the major retail chains.