All Eaten Up
10

Native foods: a history

Imagine a place where women are the principal food gatherers and men hunt kangaroos, snakes, lizards and small birds, with boomerangs, sticks and spears.

A place where witchetty grubs, moths and roots were served as the main dish with a dessert of berries and people would travel from season to season, having to move to where the various food sources would be available. A place where the land, nature and roaming animals were your grocery shop.

Well that place still exists... Welcome to Australia, and the native food of its traditional people.

Prior to white settlement, Aboriginal people relied on what nature had to offer.

There were no supermarkets or convenience stores or someone else doing the hard work for them - to survive, they had to have sharp instinct and know how.

But even with such skills, living off the land also meant that from season to season, there would sometimes be hardships.

However, when early settlers arrived in Australia, Aboriginal food started to change.

The settlers were confronted by a foreign landscape and saw plants and animals they had never seen before.

Curiosity got the better of them and they started to eat foods such as stuffed wombat and fried echidna.

Instead of getting accustomed to the new environment and food, early settlers planted European crops and raised European animals such as rabbits and deers - some of these animals are now considered pests by modern farmers and environmentalists.

They also started to use rum as a key currency when trading.

Despite being more 'modern' than the Aboriginals, some explorers observed Aboriginal food gathering and eating habits and started to exchange food with them.

Aboriginal hunting skills were very useful and some explorers, such as Ludwig Leichhardt, commented in his journal that the only reason they survived their expeditions was due to their two skillful Aboriginal hunters.



As time went by, however, immigrants started to come to Australia, bringing their own kinds of foods, washing away the traditional Aboriginal foods.

What were considered the normal meats - kangaroo, wallaby, emu and crocodile - are now considered specialty foods and as for the Australian native bush tucker foods, they are now a novelty.

The macadamia nut is the only Australian native food crop that is highly commercialised.

And as for that rum that settlers introduced to Aboriginals, well, it has had a detrimental effect on communities because genetically, Aboriginals are more susceptible to alcoholism.

Some traditional communities still live the way their ancestors lived prior to being 'modernised', however, and rely mainly on the food that nature has to offer them.

And some Aboriginal chefs, such as Mark Olive (pictured), have developed a television show - The Outback Cafe - which promotes bush foods, recipes, and gives a history of indigenous communities.

 



The government has also stepped in to help promote traditional Aboriginal traditions by creating a specialised garden, the Alice Springs Desert Park - Bush Tucker and Medicine Garden. This garden, launched in 2008, provides bush tucker and bush medicine to patients and also promotes indigenous health and culture while using traditional Australian plants.

It will be interesting to see what will become of indigenous foods and medicine, a few decades from now.

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