Burnley Bounty tomatoes are an Australian cultivar. They have a good classic tomato shape, about 7 cm round and slightly flattened top and bottom, with a nice orange colour ripening to red. I selected it from the catalogue expecting it to have a good chance of being suited to the climate.
It was a nice addition to the tomato mix, and bore well in high Summer. The only problem it has had is splitting in the wet weather, which you can see in the main image, but the affected fruit doesn’t spoil too badly. Along with the rest of my tomatoes it suffered from the continuous rain of February, and lost most foliage and all fruit for a while, but it is coming back now for an Autumn fanfare.
As for local cultivars for the local climate, we are probably too big a country for rules like that. Burnley it turns out is a suburb of Melbourne, where they have hot dry Summers, very different from ours here. Nevertheless I have been including Burnleys in my current tomato sowing heading into Winter, and will see how they cope with the more moderate weather. My guess is they would be ideal in our sunny and dry Spring, when they can either fend for themselves as a dry soil crop or be pampered with watering.
One sure lesson from this year’s tomato crop though, was that it pays to sow as many types as you can. From cherry tomatoes to the big beefsteak ones, they all have their uses in the kitchen.