Jimmy Cameron of Jimmy Brisket: Australian BBQ World Cup Qualifier

In August 2025, Jimmy Cameron packed up his gear before the awards were even called, drove home, and told himself he was finished with competition barbecue. Seven years of early alarms, long hauls, and the whole expensive circus had worn him down, and he did not expect to be back for a year, maybe not ever.

Then he heard that barbecue was getting a World Cup, with $1,000,000 on the end of it, and a man who had just quit found a reason to light the fire again.

Cameron cooks under the name Jimmy Brisket, out of Mount Evelyn on the eastern edge of Melbourne, and the meat was in the family long before the fire was.

He is the son of a lamb butcher and exporter, a kid who grew up around premium cuts and hundred-acre paddocks of sheep, who understood a good piece of meat before he understood much else.

He was raised by his grandparents. His mother, a wonderful cook, passed away when he was sixteen, and when he traces his cooking back to its start it lands on her: mashed potatoes, onion gravy, green peas, and rissoles at the family table.

He still makes them. He likes to think he makes them a little better now.

How Jimmy Cameron Got Into Competition BBQ

Barbecue itself arrived through a screen. Around 2015 he caught an episode of BBQ Pitmasters, the American competition show that reached Australia a couple of years late, and went looking for more. He found a Kansas pitmaster called Chef Tom, started watching his weekly videos, and tried his first brisket on a Weber using the snake method he had seen online. The meat fought him. He walked into an Australian butcher, asked for a brisket, and got back something the size of a baby next to the fifteen-pound slabs on the videos, because the domestic market runs on younger yearling beef.

Finding the right beef, he learned, was half the battle in those early days.

In 2017 he wandered through his first Meatstock, the big traveling barbecue festival, as a spectator, and turned to his wife with a plan. I want to compete here next year, he said. She said, no problem.

They were back the following year, entered, and won first-place brisket in their very first competition at Meatstock Melbourne.

He had barely tasted anyone's brisket but his own, so when the callbacks climbed toward the top of a sixty-team field he was almost angry at himself, certain he had blown it.

Then they called his name near the top. He was hooked and half-terrified in the same breath.

Why the Team Is Called Jimmy Brisket

Brisket was the reason he started and, for a long time, the only protein he truly loved. The others he cooked because the contest made him.

So the team became Jimmy Brisket, and the name found its biggest stage in Houston, Texas, at the World Championship Barbecue Cook-Off.

When the finalists are announced there, staff walk a banner through the international village, and word spread that an Australian team had made the top ten. A lot of people, Cameron included, assumed it was his more experienced mate standing beside him. Then they said it was Jimmy Brisket.

A man not known for showing much emotion admits that one took him back.

Houston became a habit worth chasing.

As part of an elite Australian contingent, Jimmy Brisket has twice finished in the top four there, including a fourth in ribs in early 2025.

Along the way Cameron learned the hardest lesson competition barbecue teaches: you can be brilliant in two or three categories and still lose, because the scores that sink you are the ones you neglect. For years he hated chicken, the fiddly skin, the scraping, and wished the category would disappear.

He embraced it instead. Chicken is now one of his most consistent boxes, rarely out of the top ten, and the first hand-in that sets the tone for his whole day.

How Jimmy Brisket Qualified at Meatstock Gippsland

None of which stopped the burnout. After roughly seven years of footing the bill for his own team, the preparation and the travel and the cost of all of it, Cameron cracked at a comp in August 2025, drove home before the trophies, and quit.

He was not really missing it. Then the World Cup landed on his radar, and something tugged.

If there was one thing he loved as much as barbecue it was America; his first trip overseas, back when he still feared flying, had been to Houston, and he had loved the people there ever since.

You don't want to die wondering, he decided, and got back in.

The return was not tidy.

Two weeks before the first qualifier he cooked his first comp in eight months and came third, winning brisket.

Then he and his wife drove a four-thousand-kilometer round trip to Meatstock Toowoomba in Queensland, where they bombed the lamb, finished 27th in it, and put everything else in the top ten.

Lamb, of all things, for a butcher's son who grew up on it.

He had one week until the next qualifier. He went back to an old rub, ran a single practice cook, and told himself the way his wife had taught him to: we are going to win this.

He had even picked the venue out loud, either Toowoomba or Gippsland, because he did not fancy the drive to Sydney.

At Meatstock Gippsland, a twenty-three-team field, Jimmy Brisket won Grand Champion and the ticket to Las Vegas.

Jimmy Cameron's Wife, Team and Sponsors

He did not get there alone, and he is quick to say so.

His wife, Liza, is the lucky charm, the one who makes the presentation boxes look spectacular and preaches visualization until he walks the grounds telling himself he has already won.

She was not at Gippsland, to her lasting disappointment, but she was his first phone call, and she was ecstatic.

His son-in-law Nick has been on the team since day one; his good friend Paul Henry rides along for most of it; and a tight circle of barbecue mates he can ring at any hour has become one of the real prizes of the sport.

Business helps too. Cameron built a barbecue catering operation, Jimmy Brisket, to fund an expensive hobby, and it does, alongside sponsors like Cameron Finance Group and the Lilydale butcher The Meat Inn Place, where he now teaches masterclasses.

That instinct to hand it forward has become the point.

Victoria, his home state, has been short on new competition teams lately, so Cameron and his friend Dan Barrett of Big Smoke Barbecue are planning a masterclass for people with little or no competition experience, teaching every trick they know for next to nothing.

It is not about them earning money, he says; it is about pulling more people into the sport.

The one person he wishes could see all of it is his mother, the cook who started this and never got to watch where it went.

What Jimmy Cameron Would Do With $1,000,000

So the boy who learned meat at a butcher's bench and cooking at his mother's table is headed to the BBQ World Cup in Las Vegas in April 2027, one of a hundred of the best pitmasters on earth cooking for $1,000,000.

He knows what he wants the picture to look like: an Australian team holding up the trophy, his wife somewhere in the crowd with the biggest flag she can find, the way she did in Houston.

If the money came, he would help his kids into homes, pay down some debt, and finally buy one of those American barbecue trailers he keeps seeing for sale, maybe drive it around the States for a competition season. And if he does not win, he has already decided how he wants to be remembered. Whoever wins deserves it, he says, because everyone there fought to get there, and finishing fiftieth does not make you any less of a cook.

He just hopes people walk away thinking they met some good, friendly Aussies who gave it their all.

On that count, the result is already in.

Sources

Meatstock Gippsland results, Australian BBQ Alliance. Meet Jimmy Brisket, The Meat Inn Place. Road to 1 Million interview with Shannon Pruitt, BBQ United. BBQ World Cup Qualified Pitmasters tracker. Photo credit: pending clean hero image.