Australian Dictionary of Biography

Suzanne Catherine Du Val (1916–2000), society hostess and gastronome, was born on 17 September 1916 at Newcastle, New South Wales, youngest of four children of New South Wales-born parents Archibald Aloysius Rankin, solicitor, and his wife Vera, neé de Laure(nt)-Simpson. Sue was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Rose Bay, Sydney, before undertaking training as a nurse at Tresillian Mothercraft Training Home, Vaucluse. She was a keen golfer, and had a vibrant social life.

On 17 January 1939 at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, Rankin married Robert Andrew Du Val, a medical practitioner. The couple left immediately for London aboard the ship Otranto, with Robert intending to undertake postgraduate medical work. When World War II broke out, they remained in London. Sue joined England’s Women’s Land Army, and eventually the Mechanised Transport Corps, while Robert served from 1939 as a surgeon lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his services aboard the destroyer HMS Eskimo in the second battle of Narvik in 1940, he trained as a flight surgeon and served with Bomber Command and the Fleet Air Arm.

Returning to Sydney in 1944, the Du Vals settled in Double Bay. Shortly thereafter, Sue gave birth to their daughter, Louise; their son, Tim, was born in 1946. In January 1948 Robert, who had returned to London, took his own life, leaving Sue a widow with two small children; for some years she lived at Newcastle with her parents. She never remarried, claiming with characteristic humour several decades later that ‘the only time I think I wouldn’t mind a man around the house is when I’m putting out the garbage’ (Australian Women’s Weekly 1978, 29). After Robert’s death, however, she did strike up a close friendship with the businessman Andrew Thyne Reid, who introduced her to fine food and wine.

Unimpressed by the state of Australian cookery, in 1956 Du Val left for a tour of Europe, during which she undertook a cookery course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and spent time as a ‘guest-cook observer’ in the kitchens of the Dorchester Hotel in London. She claimed to have ‘talked [her] way into’ the Dorchester, where she was the only woman, and learned how to cook ‘just about everything on the menu’ (Sun-Herald 1957, 51). Having been influenced by other female gourmets such as Elizabeth David and Julia Child, she was determined to introduce Australia to haute cuisine. She returned in early 1957, with the hope that someone would ‘give [her] a restaurant’ (Sun-Herald 1957, 51).

While Du Val did not end up with her own restaurant, in 1958 she established the Suzanne Du Val School of Cooking in her home at Roslyndale Avenue, Woollahra. She famously listed her phone number in the telephone directory followed by the label ‘gastronome.’ Her cooking classes, which she held both day and evening, were popular, with pupils travelling beyond Sydney to take part. She taught the ‘who’s who’ of Sydney society—including the Vogue Australia editor Sheila Scotter—how to master sauces, souffles, and sole bonne femme. While Du Val claimed that she was ‘a strict disciplinarian,’ the lessons were light-hearted, with one pupil calling them ‘a riot’ (Guinness 1967, 23). Du Val herself said that they were ‘very funny’ (Guinness 2000, 38).

Du Val also started catering for dinner parties hosted by the high society of eastern Sydney. Described as ‘the hostess with the mostest’ (Walford 1981, 124), she lent any party she was involved with immediate social cachet. She catered for both private parties and charity events, including in November 1974 the first Opera Foundation of Australia ball. In her role as a ‘doyenne of fine living’ (McNicoll 2000, 17), the press sought her opinion on food and drink trends. Vivacious, charismatic, sometimes savage, and with a ‘wacky sense of humour’ (Tennant 1971, 6), she was a pillar of the Sydney social scene, particularly after her retirement in the 1970s. Her own soirees were legendary, attracting guests and friends who were ‘artists, writers, the posh and the stony-broke’ (Guinness 2000, 38). Popular with many due to her ‘joie de vivre’ (McGinness 2000), she forged especially strong friendships with the art patron Mervyn Horton and the media mogul James Oswald Fairfax.

Beyond her culinary expertise, Du Val was active in the art world. Famously, she was loaned the artist Bryan Westwood’s Archibald prize-winning portrait of Prime Minister Paul Keating. She promptly hung it on her dining-room wall in order to annoy her Liberal-voting friends. A ‘tapestry buff,’ she never flew anywhere without taking a tapestry square along, which she claimed ‘stop[ped] [her] drinking’ (Johnson 1988, 129). She was also a noted animal lover who, with typical humour, had a greyhound that she called ‘Waiter’s Eye’ because ‘you could never catch it’ (McGinness 2000). Survived by her daughter and son, she died on 30 May 2000 in Sydney. She was a lifelong Catholic, and her funeral was held at the Church of St Joseph, Edgecliff, attended by five hundred of ‘her closest friends’ (Zachariah 2000, 116). In 2007 a play based on her life, titled If You Knew Susie and written by Cenarth Fox, was performed by her daughter.