Pyney the Pieman, a pie ambassador for the Aussie Pie Council and one of three guest judges at the Official Great Aussie Pie Competition, is probably Australia’s only full-time pieman – and perhaps the only career-professional pie-eater on the planet.

Pyney (born Shaun Pyne) describes himself as “just an average bloke on a mission to visit every bakery/cafe in Australia”. He believes there are between 4000 and 5000 pie-makers between Australia’s northernmost bakery in Bamaga, Cape York, and the nation’s southernmost in Huonville, Tasmania. Pyney has visited both these pie shops, along with about 1000 others.

Pyney generally fronts up at a bakehouse at between six and eight in the morning, when the goods are at their freshest. He talks to the baker, samples their pies, then has his picture taken with them while pulling an unusual face. He later posts the photographs on his website, along with a review of the pies.

Pyney is among a handful of prominent Australian online pie influencers, who include Curls, Snowy and the Pie Boi (born Antonio Khant).

I am just an innocent pie-stander (sorry) in search of answers to a few simple questions. To wit: over many years of road trips through country Australia, between the cenotaph, the memorial hall and the Railway Hotel in almost every coffee-stop-and-toilet-break town, I have been lucky enough to stumble upon a bakery selling “famous” meat pies.

In NSW alone, the Glenorie Bakery in Sydney’s Hills District offers its “famous meat pies” as part of a set afternoon-tea menu. Nearly 200 kilometres to the south, Berry Bakery in Berry sells “famous Berry pies”; 60 kilometres up the road in Robertson, the Pie Shop itself claims to be famous.

“Famous” where? Among whom? For what?

Back up north, the Famous Timbertown Pies of Wauchope, near Port Macquarie, incorporates its renown in its name. In Kyneton, Victoria, the Country Cob Bakery Café boasts that it’s home of “Australia’s best pie” and an “award-winning vanilla slice”.

I’ve noticed that “famous” meat pies are often “award-winning”, “medal-winning” as well as “prize-winning” – but who in Australia grants awards, medals or prizes for meat pies?

It turns out to be the Aussie Pie Council.

The Aussie Pie Council’s Official Great Aussie Pie Competition is held annually, with the location alternating between Melbourne and Sydney. The 2025 event took place last month at the Fine Food Australia trade fair at the International Conference Centre in Darling Harbour in Sydney.

When I arrive at the judges’ enclosure, Pyney is being filmed and interviewed in front of a pie-warmer by the Pie Boi, while a man dressed as Peaky the Pie pads around behind them, his progress hampered by his enormous red shoes.

Pyney is a large, energetic and voluble man, whose Ringers Western shirt and trucker cap distinguish him from the 15 working pie judges, who oddly resemble a bikie gang in their black chef jackets patched with the colourful logos of corporate supporters. Secretly, I think of them as “bakies”.

The Pie Boi looks more like a neat, fit, regular bloke who has accidentally stumbled into a den of pie-racy (sorry), perhaps while searching for a charger for his vlogging camera. While the Pie Boi tells me that he juggles his life of pie (sorry) with his full-time job as national operations manager at Ben & Jerry’s, Pyney says he takes to the pie-way (sorry) for about eight months of the year, driving a Toyota HiLux, towing a caravan, free-camping where he can, and eating pies.

Pyney spent 20 years of his working life as a mortgage broker, but gave that up to become a full-time pieman in 2020. He hadn’t intended to turn his hobby into a career, but he quickly acquired sponsorship from pie-adjacent businesses such as Bakewise professional bakery equipment and Cybake bakery software.

“Whenever there’s a pie-related story, the journos ring me,” he says. Which is exactly what I did.

The Official Great Aussie Pie Competition includes categories such as “gourmet sausage rolls” and “meat pasties”, but Pyney’s only interest is the pies. “I don’t eat pasties,” he says. “I don’t eat sausage rolls.”

Nor do I. In fact, I have a dark and meaty secret – unless I’m on a road trip, I never even eat pies.

I ask Dani Lindsay, national manager of the Official Great Aussie Pie Competition, whether I can act as a category judge at this year’s event. She politely turns down my request on the grounds that I have no industry experience, but kindly allows me to shadow the judges, nibble pies alongside them, and compare tasting notes.

Every year, the contest receives three individual samples of about 1500 different pies, to be judged over four days. Each pie is anonymised and numbered, then labelled with its ingredients and price. The first two samples go out to the judges cold on a plate: one is kept whole, and the other is cut in two, while the remaining one is placed in a warmer.

The judges work in pairs, and all of them have many years of baking behind them. They assess the cold pies first on appearance. Then they hold them up, press their thumbs into them, and sometimes turn them upside down. “We put them through a workshop like a car,” says chief judge Mike French. “We take them apart and strip them down to the bare bones.”

The judges then taste the heated pies. “Any bits they taste, they spit out,” says French. “Like wine.”

The pie spittoons are cardboard boxes, which are hidden under the pie tables. “It’s not very sophisticated,” admits French.

Between tastings, the judges cleanse their palates with swigs of Lipton Ice Tea Lemon. The pies are judged according to 19 criteria, from appearance and aroma to filling and lamination. I join the gourmet pie-category judging team of Brendan Pullen and Mark Davis, where the two expert piemen seem to have different approaches to pie tasting: Pullen bites then assiduously spits, whereas Davis nibbles and swallows.

“I have some of the meat,” explains Davis, “then I taste the pastry, then I do an overall.”

“He’ll learn,” says Pullen. “At the end of the four days he’ll go, ‘Oh I wish I hadn’t eaten so many pies.’ When you go to the toilet after four days, it’s hard because of all the starch. It clogs you up.”

This year’s gourmet-pie entries include a roasted cauli with black truffle provo cheese sauce pie; an espresso rub barbecue beef pie, and a butter chicken pie (spoiler: the winner turns out to be a beef bourguignon pie from Mount Barker Bakery in Western Australia, which I don’t get to taste).

Pullen, Davis and I all enjoy a steak and three cheeses pie (“it’s balanced,” says Pullen; “well-balanced”, agrees Davis). But I’m especially excited to taste a lamb, rosemary and shiraz pie, which has been pointed out to me as a triumph of presentation. But, Pullen says, “It’s got no flavour, no aroma. There’s no taste to that at all.”

It is a bit insipid. “It was a high-scoring pie to start with,” says Pullen, “because it looks so good; it’s just the flavour letting him down.”

Dani Lindsay runs a company called Simple Simon, which manufactures pie-making machines. (It seems ironic that an apparently chance meeting on the way to a fair has seen “Simple Simon” inextricably linked to the world of piemen.) Simple Simon’s most popular pie machine can manufacture 3000 pies an hour.

But what kind of establishment could possibly need 3000 pies? A prison? “Yes,” says Lindsay, to my surprise. “We’ve put our lines into Wellington jail [in central-west NSW], so they’re making pies for all the inmates.” Simple Simon’s machines are also used by artisan bakers such as Sonoma Bakery and Bourke Street Bakery in Sydney.

The Pie Boi, however, makes and invents his own pies, including a Mi Goreng pie and a Bunnings Sausage Sizzle pie. His KFC pie was an internet sensation, delivering a wildly unlikely half a million views to his Instagram page, as people assumed it was an official product and KFC had started selling pies.

Pyney was born in Charleville in western Queensland, where his grandfather took him for his first meat pie at Heinemann’s Country Bakery when he was about five years old. Nearly 45 years later, that Charleville pie shop is still owned by the same family, but the impoverishment of many once-thriving country towns has meant that dynastic bakeries are becoming a thing of the past.

Pyney and the others are fighting to keep the family meat pie alive against competition on price and convenience, which is coming from industrially manufactured products such as Mrs Mac’s (inevitably) Famous Beef Pies.

Yes, almost every country cafe claims an award, even if that prize was won by a previous owner. “I’ve seen signs from awards that date back to 10 years ago,” says Pyney. “At the end of the day, it’s [regional pie-makers] a dying industry.”

The Pie Boi sees hope for the future in migrant communities. He is intensely concerned with the pie-valry (sorry) between Australia and New Zealand. He travels throughout both countries, seeking out the differences and similarities in their pies.

And his conclusion? “Any bakery you go to, the best pies are all done by Asians,” he says. The Pie Boi sees much of the creativity and growth in pie-making as driven by Vietnamese and Cambodian bakers. But in my experience, skilled and entrepreneurial migrants are rarely drawn to fading country communities.

So, as often happens at the conclusion of an epic quest, I finally come to realise that the answers to my pie questions lay within myself all along.

In many of those off-the-highway hamlets boasting “famous” meat pies, the Railway Hotel closed down when the train line bypassed the town, and the memorial hall has become a history museum stuffed with Bakelite phones and decorative ashtrays. The bakery is often one of the last surviving businesses of these places. When it closes, there will be no reason for drivers to pull over, and the place will disappear from the memories of road-trippers like me.

We are the reason that the meat pies in these places are famous. Without them, we wouldn’t talk about the town at all.

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