International House is the second-largest hall of residence at the University of Melbourne, housing both international and Australian undergraduates and post-graduates. It was established in 1957, in part to welcome students from Asia who came to Australia under the Columbo Plan.  The menus in the dining hall, however, showed little consideration for international tastes. According to an article on the establishment’s website, the 1960s breakfast menu included Sun Flakes, porridge, and brains and bacon while dinner dishes featured such Asian classics as steak and kidney pie and steamed marmalade pudding. The Head of College (then known as the Warden) assured the International House Council that the meals were “good, and varied enough to meet reasonable requirements”.

I was intrigued by the regular appearance of Sun Flakes, a cereal I had never encountered while growing up in the 1950s and ’60s. I assume the product was introduced as a competitor to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. It was made by White Wings and advertised as the “new cereal Sun Flakes” in 1936 (although the product had been advertised by grocery stores the previous year). It may have been a replacement for White Wings’s much less catchily named XTC Wholemeal Breakfast Flakes which were likely introduced in the 1920s. Sun Flakes seem to have disappeared by the late 1970s as the product was not listed in a 1979 Tharunka article that lists the sugar contents of a range of breakfast cereals.

The Australian Sun Flakes preceded by more than 50 years an identically named cereal manufactured by Ralston Purina in the USA. This was an artificially sweetened cereal launched in 1985 and now discontinued. It had its fans, but not everyone was on board, as the following rant indicates:

Imagine for a second that cereals were like families. Kix would be the greener, hippy sibling of Trix, Cocoa Pebbles would be the tiny offspring of Cocoa Puffs, and so on. Well, The Flakes are a family, too. Corn Flakes, the staunch patriarch of the clan, watches over its family like the Godfather. Frosted is his son; a huge follower of his dad’s work and a huge proponent for the sugar frosting. Ah but there was a far less known and far more worthless sibling to Frosted, and his name was Sun. He tried desperately to follow his big brother, but somehow managed to traverse a path that roamed the darkest corners of the cereal shelves. He not only couldn’t amass the sweet, sweet sugar coating that Frosted could, but his structural integrity also wore away to that of something akin to a scab. Yes, I’m still talking about cereal here. Sun Flakes were like diet cereal for hapless shut-ins.

Those university students back in 1960 may or may not have enjoyed their Sun Flakes. But whoever devised the breakfast menus obviously thought a cooked breakfast was vital to set them up for the day. In addition to the ever-present cereal, Monday’s bacon and tomato was accompanied by stewed apples, porridge and boiled eggs. On Tuesday, there was liver and bacon, on Wednesday sausage and egg and on Thursday, mince and poached egg. Dinner always included soup and dessert, along with a solidly Anglo main course. Except on Friday. Fried rice was the sole concession to international tastes.