The doors to Narnia. Photo: Supplied.
Twenty years ago, when Peter Wenzel went to parties, his small talk of choice was often met with glazed stares.
As owner of the Canberra-based company Fungi Co, Peter loves mushrooms, and he’s pleased to say it’s a conversation that now goes down much better with strangers.
“Now there are movies about fungi; people are interested in their culinary value, ecological uses, medicinal value, and the benefits of microdosing to treat anxiety,” Peter tells Region.
Fungi Co was founded in the late 90s as a small commercial business operating from a simple polytunnel. After a few years on the back burner, Peter reinvigorated the industry a decade ago.
Peter now uses Victorian train tunnels in the Southern Highlands to grow unique and exotic mushrooms for chefs, grocers and the general public, as well as making educational products for school-aged kids from kindergarten to year 10.
If you think that abandoned train tunnels are an odd place to build a business, the mushrooms think otherwise.
“The thermal mass of the mountain keeps them at 17 degrees year-round and a bit damp; it’s like Narnia for mushrooms,” laughs Peter.
Peter Wenzel and Leonie McGlashan of Fungi Co. Photo: Supplied.
As well as the perfect growing conditions, the magical train tunnels allow Peter and his partner Leonie to entice more people into the world of mushrooms, and they now run regular tours of the mushroom tunnels.
“There are two things that attract people to the tunnels. There are the people who are interested in the mushrooms, and then there are the tunnel enthusiasts.”
No matter what draws them in, Peter says at the end of the tour, they are flabbergasted. Tailoring the tours to people’s area of interest, Leonie and Peter can go deep on the process of growing mushrooms as well as get excited about the tunnels themselves, which were hand-built by candlelight in an era before dynamite.
“Leonie loves to delve into the National Library’s Trove, so she is always adding more and more detail to the tours.”
Peter’s lifelong interest in mushrooms stems from a childhood spent collecting plants and fungi in the forests around his home, and he once dreamed of having a mushroom zoo, which he explains is like any ordinary zoo, but full of living mushrooms. Unable to find a degree specialising in just mushrooms, Peter pursued a broader science degree, followed by a biochemistry degree.
As the moniker “the mushroom guy” has followed him around his whole life, Peter’s journey intersected with other “mushroom guys” like Kunihide Inoue, a Japanese professor of mycology, and together they advanced the field, developed new growing techniques and started mushroom farm trials in Japan and Kota Kinabalu.
“He was born in 1935; he was just a dude, I couldn’t keep up with him.”
The abandoned train tunnels offer ideal conditions for mushroom growth. Photo: Supplied.
Peter doesn’t discriminate when it comes to specific areas of interest in mushrooms; he knows it all, and he talks about it with great humour and passion.
The ‘mushroom murders’ became the Voldemort of our chat. I was reluctant to bring it up, knowing he might be a little tired of the topic, but when it came up naturally, Peter addressed it with his characteristic humour.
“Leonie got a bit tired of it at the markets. People would inevitably come up and say, ‘You got any deathcaps?’ but she would respond with a quip like, ‘We used to, but we didn’t get enough repeat customers!’”
Peter explains that while sales did dip slightly in 2023, they are back stronger than ever.
“We’re at this point finally where fungi are in the limelight, and the applications for humanity, for medicine, for food and for the environment are broad.”
Peter grows rare and exotic mushrooms. Photo: Supplied.
While touching on some of those uses, from soaking up oil spills to art, leatherwork and living fashion, he still comes back to food as being most relevant to his customers.
“From a culinary perspective, we introduce people to mushrooms that have such diverse flavours and textures. We have mushrooms that taste like bacon; there are ones with lilac overtones, there are deep meaty ones and thin crunchy ones,” Peter enthuses.
“We have all these cultures in our culture bank just waiting to go onto the Australian market.”
The culmination of Peter and Leonie’s activities is really to help create the market that he speaks of. Without a champion leading mushroom education with enthusiasm, they simply will never find their place in the real world and risk remaining in the dark corners of Narnia’s tunnels.
You can learn more about Fungi Co, their mushrooms and tunnel tours on their website.
