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November 2022
Essays
Native foods in the Plate Southern Land
Adelaide’s first McDonald’s restaurant outlet, in the suburb of Enfield. © News Ltd / Newspix
The history of Australian gastronomy is written on the menu at McDonald’s. With 1024 franchises nationwide, “Macca’s” (we are the only people who call it that) can lay claim to being at once Australia’s favourite burger joint, ice-creamery, morning-commute pit stop, late-night stomach liner and “family restaurant”.
In effect, McDonald’s represents a kind of culinary consensus. Just as prospective government policy must first pass the pub test to become ensconced in the Australian mainstream, a food trend must run the gauntlet of the “Drive-Thru”.
Before coffee became the national obsession, the world’s first McCafé opened in Melbourne, in 1993; before Australian restaurants came to customarily hide the provenance of their meat behind the breed of the animal (as if an Angus can’t be factory farmed), ours was the only country where McDonald’s served a Wagyu burger. And before Australians competed with Americans on the obesity scale, there stood one lone pair of golden arches, looking out over the Sydney suburb of Yagoona. That McDonald’s opened for business on December 30, 1971. A “Big Mac” cost 49 cents, a cheeseburger 25 cents, and “fries” came with a translation – the Yanks meant hot chips.
It’s too soon to tell, but the latest chapter of our culinary history might have been written earlier this year. In late May, the week following the advent of the Albanese government and its commitment to a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, McDonald’s began pouring a blend of coffee, chai and wattleseed. It is the first time the company had used an ingredient endemic to this continent.
I drank my “Australiano” the way I felt appropriate, in morning traffic after collecting it from the Drive-Thru. It was hard to discern the taste of wattleseed, or even coffee: the chai was so cloyingly sweet I was left thinking of a tub of vanilla ice-cream left out on the kitchen bench overnight. Only when I tapped the bottom of the upturned cup (had the seeds all sunk to the bottom?) did I understand that the Australiano’s value transcended mere taste. A slogan was printed on the cup’s side, girt by stylised wattle blossom: “coffee fit for an Aussie”.
As recently as nine years ago, McDonald’s had launched two limited-release hamburgers to coincide with Australia Day: the McOz (“McOzzie, Ozzie, Ozzie”), which resembled a Big Mac with the addition of a slice of tinned beetroot lolling out of the bun like a kelpie’s tongue; and the “pride of the nation” Aussie Lamb burger on a damper-style bun. Both burgers were advertised in the colours of the Union Jack, with the Southern Cross sparkling overhead.
It depends, I suppose, what you mean by Aussie.
One of the first Tasmanian words to enter the English language was the Aboriginal pidgin term for food: tucker. According to the Australian National Dictionary, this word had not appeared in print until the spring of 1833, one year after the Black War, in which Europeans sought to exterminate the First Nations people of Van Diemen’s Land.
“They then asked for a ‘tucker’ (the slang word for a meal),” recounted the Launceston Advertiser of October 24, “which was supplied.” The dictionary does not specify who “they” were; one pictures wretched survivors, recently dispossessed of their land and now begging for food.
Tucker, especially when prefixed by “bush”, has retained its Aboriginal connotation. But if you grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, chances are you didn’t hear it referred to as a whole meal. Les Hiddins was ABC TV’s Bush Tucker Man, and for those of us parked on the couch in the hours after school, we loved him for it. Hiddins showed us how to gather drinking water from a gum tree by covering a branch with a plastic bag; he taught us that the fruit of the native grape makes for good eating (“just like a muscatel!”), and that if you ever step on a death adder, the plant’s sap will work as an antivenom too. Hiddins taught us how to survive.
Rewatching Bush Tucker Man today, it is easy to see the childhood appeal. With his maniacal grin, pistol stuffed down his stubbies and squashed traffic-cone hat, Hiddins has a loose-unit, gone-troppo charm. He also says things that, 34 years after the show first aired, make it a fascinating, if jarring, historical relic. Hiddins clearly loved going bush, and had a respect for the First Nations people he met. But there are strict categories he employs. Australians are hardly ever mentioned. There are “Aboriginals” and “Europeans”. The “early explorers” are a recurring presence: in the first episode, while dunking ti-tree leaves into his billy deep in the Arnhem Land bush, he mentions that “a bloke came through here years ago, Leichhardt” and that he “used the countryside all the way along his journey”. Trouble is, says Hiddins, taking a theatrical slurp of his cuppa, “a few years later he went out in the desert country and no one’s seen him ever since”.
The emphasis is on sustenance, not enjoyment. “When Aboriginals travel through this country,” says Hiddins, “they have an uncanny eye for its potential. While we are looking at the scenery, they’re thinking survival.”
In one episode, while the whip-crack of an electrical storm builds outside his tent, Hiddins pushes away a plate of fish he caught earlier that day. “That’s not too bad,” he says. “But you wouldn’t wanna be chasing up bush tucker out in the bush all the time – takes you all day to find it. See the problem is that only some of the tuckers are in season some of the time. And even when you find ’em on a bush, there’s only one or two berries or maybe half a dozen. So you’d spend all your day chasin’ ’em up. I’ve got a job to do as well, so, I eat ordinary food.”
Tucker is what you eat to stay alive; food is what you eat to live.
In the decades since Hiddins drove his Land Rover across our screens, a tectonic shift has occurred. The emergency rations of Bush Tucker Man are now showcase ingredients of the best restaurants in the country. From the 2022 Good Food Guide: Murray cod head wrapped in paperbark, its cheeks cooked down to “rich striations” (Firedoor, Sydney); “burnt honey mousse surrounded by house-made cocoa pops, topped with lemon myrtle oil” (Corella, Canberra); and “expertly deployed” native flavours, be they Manjimup marron in curry broth or Davidson’s plum “served like a lunchbox rollup” (Vue de Monde, Melbourne).
The food these restaurants are serving isn’t bush tucker, a term that has become something of a marker, among white Australians at least, of retrograde politics. It’s instead “native foods”, “Aboriginal foods”, “Indigenous foods” or “bush foods”. It’s also called something I never heard Les Hiddins say: “Australian foods”.
There are several reasons advocates for native foods, who are largely non-Indigenous, say we should eat more of them. As Australian-grown, small-scale, perennial plants, not subject to the horrors of industrial farming, they are presented as environmentally sustainable. Research into the nutrient content of several edible Australian plants has also shown them to rival the healthiest of “superfoods”. (Hiddins claimed to have personally provided the Kakadu plums that were found by a lab to contain more vitamin C than any known food.)
Then there’s the allure of the new and exciting. “From a chef ’s point of view, there’s so many accessible flavours that can be tapped into,” says Louis Couttoupes of Canberra restaurant Onzieme, which received its first hat in this year’s Good Food Guide and where “there’s always a dozen native ingredients rotated on the menu”. “By putting those different flavours on, you can give customers an experience where they say, ‘Holy shit that’s crazy, I’ve never tasted anything like that before.’”
But perhaps most significantly, these ingredients can engender in the diner what author and farmer Bruce Pascoe has called the “warm and fuzzy enthusiasm for eating Aboriginal foods”. Advocating their use has become a non-threatening way for a largely non-Aboriginal clientele to embrace the aboriginality of their homeland.
This radical reimagining of native foods – last resort to five-star resort, Aboriginal to Australian – maps neatly onto a new, progressive civic nationalism, one that has moved beyond both the ethno-nationalism of white Australia and the multiculturalism of the 1990s. What were once called New Australians have been joined by what are now called the First Australians, or more patronisingly, our First Australians. The fact that many First Nations people don’t consider themselves Australian is irrelevant: it’s not about them. They may have been deemed worthy of addition to the melting pot, but the identity of the hand holding the spoon stays the same.
“Can we be Australian without eating indigenous food?” asked food writer John Newton, who is not Indigenous, in a co-written article for The Conversation in 2016.
“I want to be able to stand in a suburban street and smell ’roo being barbecued,” Newton later wrote in Cooking with the Oldest Foods on Earth, “riberries being simmered for sauce and jam, to know that wattleseed is being rolled into pavlova and finger lime caviar is being squirted onto oysters and fish, and into the evening gin and tonic.” Stirring stuff.
At the restaurants serving this cuisine, the symbolism can override the substance. But at its best, this new Australian cuisine is dynamic, complex and unlike anything, anywhere. Some of these restaurants are run by Indigenous chefs, such as Bundjalung woman Mindy Woods’ Karkalla in Byron Bay. Most are not.
Kylie Kwong opened Lucky Kwong last year, in the restored railway yards of Sydney’s South Eveleigh. Having been part of the culinary scene for decades, Kwong is a well-known exponent of cooking with native ingredients, a flavour profile she encountered mid-career, likening it to an artist suddenly discovering a new palette of colours to paint with. It is rare to see a chef as famous as Kwong in the kitchen, but there she is: stirring pans, shaking woks, scanning the docket for incoming orders. She uses native foods carefully. Each has job to do; each pulls its weight.
Steamed spanner crab and prawn dumplings are dressed with Sichuan pepper and bush mint, the latter providing an astringency more reminiscent of a dry sclerophyll forest than the mint plant growing on your windowsill. An “Australian-Cantonese” coleslaw gets its crunch from cucumber and pickled carrot, its lightness from bean sprouts and its acidity from crimson-skinned native finger limes. Sometimes, the contribution is textual: to contrast the chewiness of black fungi and softness of tofu, Kwong adds to her vegetarian stir-fry the pop of karkalla, an okra-like plant better known as pigface.
“It’s hard to get large quantities of these ingredients,” Kwong told me mid-service, “and you’ve seen the size of this place anyway – we’d have nowhere to put them. But native flavours are so intense, you don’t need to use a lot of them.”
When Nigella Lawson spent a day in Sydney recently, she had lunch at Lucky Kwong. “So many people talk in a po-faced and worthy way about using native ingredients and then make food that’s self-referencing, woefully deracinated and not necessarily guaranteed to delight,” Lawson wrote on Instagram. “Kylie could not be more different”. Jamie Oliver chimed in with a comment: “Jealous.”
Lucky Kwong is only open for weekday lunch, but when my bill arrives, it feels more apt of a weekend dinner. Over the railway line in Newtown, the Saturday-morning queue for a warrigal greens and ricotta pie at A.P Town bakery testifies to the intensity of the filling, the salty native greens a seasoning in itself. But again, at $13 a pie, it’s hardly a tuckshop lunch to rival a sausage roll and tomato sauce.
Native foods’ influence on dining culture may be significant, but beyond expensive restaurants their consumption is minimal. The industry is worth around $20 million annually. For comparison, Australia’s turkey industry, producing a meat that many only eat once a year, is worth $200 million. As Les Hiddins says in a piece to camera that could’ve been filmed in 2022: “Our diet today basically comes from the plants and animals that have been brought into the country, been bred and cultivated up to finally produce the food you find in the supermarket.”
One of the curious aspects of the enthusiasm for Australian foods is that it was started by chefs who aren’t Australian. The current trend dates from 2016, when René Redzepi of Copenhagen’s Noma, still probably the world’s most famous restaurant, relocated to Sydney’s Barangaroo precinct for a 10-week pop-up venue that sold out in four minutes and attracted a waiting list of 27,000 people.
In the year leading up to his residency, Redzepi foraged and hunted with traditional owners to collect foods that he promised “most Australians have never seen before”. The 12-course menu cost $485 a head and included a dehydrated scallop tart with lantana flowers, an abalone schnitzel with bunya nut, sea lettuce and mat rush, and a mango sorbet sandwich sprinkled with green ants.
Ben Shewry, head chef at Melbourne’s Attica, grew up in New Zealand, where he learnt Maori and how to cook in a hangi (ground oven). He has spoken of his shock at moving to Australia in 2002 to find that Indigenous culture this side of the Tasman was “not a part of broader society”. And Scottish-born chef and MasterChef presenter Jock Zonfrillo established the Orana Foundation to support Aboriginal-led documentation and promotion of native foods and cooking.
With native foods, “you are entering into a realm of cross-cultural work”, Clem Bresson, a Darwin-based French academic researching Aboriginal social enterprises, tells me. “And so it probably does help to come from a cross-cultural background as well.” He adds that people from countries outside of Australia “are also not so embedded in the politics of it”.
Bruce Pascoe is less diplomatic: “Foreigners do not have their brains fogged by ridiculous views on Australian history,” he writes to me in an email, “so they are able to embrace Aboriginal providence more readily.”
Pascoe’s 2014 book Dark Emu upturns the orthodoxy that, before 1788, Australian native food was gathered, not cultivated. Terra nullius took the conceit that the Australian continent was not farmed for the British Crown to justify its annexation. A form of cultivation familiar to Europeans – sheep, cattle, wheat – staked the colonists’ own claim to the land, eradicating proof of Indigenous foodways. This justification has remained evident for generations. “In those days the Australian earth was far from productive,” Babette Hayes wrote in Two Hundred Years of Australian Cooking (1970). “America greeted her settlers with fields of wild buckwheat and corn; Australia offered nothing.”
It may explain why native foods are not a common part of the contemporary Australian diet. Rather than engage with what were considered nomadic and therefore primitive foods (or concede a form of agriculture was practised by Aboriginal people and risk acknowledging sovereignty), the Georgian diet was imported wholesale from Britain. As early as 1820, local mutton was the principal meat eaten by the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land.
John Newton calls this “food racism”, and argues that only now have settler Australians matured to the point they can taste their homeland. In The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes, Newton recounts that when Dennis and Marilyn Ryan, pioneers of the commercial bush foods industry, started farming finger limes, lemon myrtle and lilly pilly among other natives on New South Wales’ North Coast in 1989, a neighbour said, “You’ve got rocks in your head. You growing blackfella food, who’s going to eat that?”
But for racism alone to explain why Australian foods are missing from the modern Australian diet requires that the invaders of this continent were unique, during the centuries of European conquest, in their perceived superiority over those they conquered. More racist than the Portuguese in Brazil, the Spanish in Peru, the French in Canada, the Dutch in South Africa or the English in America – where the food of colonised peoples, be it corn, potatoes, cassava or antelope biltong, became staples of the colonisers.
The indigenous peoples of these countries were largely farmers, and considered more civilised than hunter-gatherers according to the doctrines of colonialism. But Dark Emu argues that early settlers to this continent observed and admired Aboriginal agriculture, even if it was never officially recognised.
Another explanation can be found in One Continuous Picnic, a gastronomic history of Australia that was mocked as pretentious upon its publication in 1982. “People would say to me, ‘How’s your cookery book going?’” its author Michael Symons told me recently in his Sydney kitchen, surrounded by recipe books and cooking utensils. “I got so annoyed at that.” Back then, Australians didn’t think food was worthy of inquiry; it was, said Symons, “fuel”, something you mindlessly pulled from a packet or the freezer at Woolworths. And that was precisely his thesis: not counting starvation-induced experimentation in the earliest days of Sydney, the Europeans who settled this continent never developed an Australian cucino povera based on what the land could provide, because they never needed to.
“Our history is without peasants,” Symons writes in One Continuous Picnic. “We’ve had hunter-gatherers and then industrial civilisation. It means we’ve been either conservationists or developers, without ever coming to an appreciation of the cultivated landscape. We’ve not made a permanent home, even using refrigeration to pretend we live somewhere else.”
Symons’ words seem dated now, in the context of Dark Emu. But his book is about the society the settlers brought with them, not the one they encountered.
When the First Fleet left Britain in 1787, it sailed into a proto-globalised world. Adam Smith had published The Wealth of Nations eight years earlier, with its blueprint for how the division of labour and a free market would turn still-rural England into a “nation of shopkeepers”. The 80 years during which convicts were transported to Australia coincided with the emptying of the British countryside. As farms became larger, more specialised and more market-oriented, the peasants who once worked them and had been allowed to grow their own food on them were forced off the land and into the cities. A diet previously determined by the soil and the seasons was replaced by commodities bought with factory wages.
Colonial Australia helped feed and clothe Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and was a part of it. Wool and mutton produced in Australia was exported to the urban masses of the metropole. The farming practised by the colonists – vast tracts “squatted” by transient shepherds who moved their flocks once resources were depleted – was more akin to the extraction of the underground coalmines happening in Britain than pre-modern, small-holder self-sufficiency. As with the output of the factories, what mattered was not freshness or variety but durability: goods that could be shipped vast distances. The land itself was converted into an instrument of commerce; farmers produced goods for the new market of consumers. In return, the convicts and swagmen who worked the land were fed the same diet of the Dickensian working class: flour, sugar, mutton and tea.
“It could be argued that opening up the country required a form of peasant living,” Symons writes of the British settlement of Australia, “but most arrivals settled in towns and were fed massive imports of food, and squatters kept down the number of smallholdings. Certainly we neglected the vital task of assimilating indigenous plants and animals into something resembling an environmentally appropriate agriculture or cuisine. This country became the world’s earliest truly urban nation, in which many of us could no longer even recognise a tomato plant.”
This was not so in lands colonised before industrialisation. As Michael Pollan explains in his book The Botany of Desire, a sweet-toothed frontiersman in early colonial America had to content himself by keeping bees or planting an apple tree; in colonial Australia, Symons points out, swagmen were allocated rations of refined sugar from the West Indies. The 17th-century Dutch farmers who ventured into the unknown beyond Cape Town found that hot water mixed with the leaves of a red bush they called rooibos made for a pleasant drink; those swagmen of Australia could throw a handful of their Caribbean sugar into a boiling billy of Chinese tea leaves.
The idea for One Continuous Picnic came while Symons was living in Italy in the 1970s. A former environment reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, he had become disturbed at the excesses of industrial capitalism he encountered on his daily beat, and sought a pre-modern way of life, in sync with the seasons. In Tuscany, in the woods surrounding his house, Symons picked strawberries in spring, blackberries in summer and chestnuts in autumn. In winter he was invited to partake in the slaughter of pigs. He even cooked Tuscan food for Tuscans, when the padrone of the feudal estate on which he lived asked him to open a restaurant “in Leonardo da Vinci’s grandmother’s farmhouse”. Globalisation hadn’t seemed to have permeated: one fine day, Symons remarked to his neighbour how well you could see the Florence skyline, half an hour’s drive away. “And she said, ‘Oh, have you been there? What’s it like?’”
In a country such as Italy, Symons notes, there is not one national cuisine but many regional cuisines, dictated by local variations of soil, climate and geography. In Australia, where most of what we eat originally came from elsewhere, there’s barely any regional variation, unless you count Adelaide’s pie floater: a meat pie listing in a bowl of pea soup.
This is also true of most of the restaurants serving native foods, where in spite of the massive geographical and environmental variety on offer, the same ingredients tend to recur no matter the location. Uluru’s Tali Wiru restaurant may mean “beautiful dune” in Anangu, but most of the native ingredients on the restaurant’s $415 set menu (served under the stars accompanied by a didgeridoo performance and Indigenous storytelling) come from far outside the desert: Kakadu plum and green ants from the Top End; Davidson’s plums and macadamias from the rainforests of eastern Australia.
This may change. Louis Couttoupes of Onzieme tells me that, when it comes to flavouring cocktails with native ingredients, Davidson’s plum, finger lime and lemon myrtle are “the obvious ones that everyone knows about”, but he is experimenting with other, lesser-known flavours found around Canberra. He tells me of a cherry ballart that would soon be in season (“tastes like apricots, looks like a little tiny cashew berry”), as well as geebung (“another really beautiful sort of berry”).
One Continuous Picnic takes its name from a description of colonial Australia’s eating habits, attributed to the 19th-century English novelist Anthony Trollope. From the earliest days of settlement onwards, writes Symons, “We brought our food with us and we have been kept well supplied with portable provisions.” Symons believes the through-thread of Australia’s gastronomic history is a reliance on “preserved, packaged fare” transported from far away – first evident in the First Fleet, then the penal colony, the outstation, the mobilised wartime nation, the frozen-meal supermarket aisle. To that list, in the 40 years since the book was published, could be added the click-and-collect online grocery shopper, app-wielding dinner commander, the homesick backpacker being sent care packages of Tim Tams and Vegemite, the wannabe home chef, conveniently able to cook the precise ingredients used on MasterChef thanks to Coles’ sponsorship of the show, and the unrivalled enthusiasm for fast food that led, in 2003, to McDonald’s chief executive Jim Cantalupo calling this country the “most ideal environment in the world” in which to operate.
When the COVID-19 pandemic happened, supply chains were disrupted everywhere. In Australia, where 70 per cent of agricultural commodities are exported, where the domestic value-added food sector is underdeveloped, and where two supermarkets determine what most of us eat, the effect was acute.
In autumn, the already higher prices and inconsistent supply of food was compounded when flooding in Queensland’s agricultural Lockyer Valley, along with spikes in the price of fuel and fertiliser due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, labour shortages and a new award wage for farm workers, resulted in a head of iceberg lettuce retailing in supermarkets for as much as $11.99. But none of the resulting media coverage questioned why Australians eat out-of-season cultivars grown thousands of kilometres away instead of locally grown, seasonal produce – let alone native produce. My local farmers’ market was then selling organic autumn greens for as little as $3.80 a bunch, but on ABC radio’s The Money, the solution proposed to expensive icebergs was the development of automated hydroponic glasshouses.
The pandemic has forced at least a partial rethink of our reliance on “preserved, packaged fare”. A nursery industry statistics survey found a 27 per cent increase in the sale of herb and vegetable plants across 2020. Anna-Lize Pretorius, product manager for seeds at Heronswood nursery on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, tells me that there was a huge increase in the sale of vegetable seeds and seedlings during the first lockdown in 2020. “In general, it was the fast-growing crops like lettuce, radish, peas and mizuna,” she says. Pretorius notes that vegetable seed sales have dropped in the years since, “but not to the same level prior to the pandemic”. (There has been no change, however, in the demand for native Australian food plants.)
But in other ways, the trend has become worse. By the winter of 2022, the price of fresh fruit and vegetables increased by 7.3 per cent in 12 months; in August, Woolworths announced a marked shift in consumer spending from fresh produce to canned and frozen goods.
One day in February, during a week of particularly bad supply-chain disruptions caused by the Omicron variant of COVID-19, an Australian nutritionist with a large online following posted on social media about the virtues of eating canned and frozen vegetables. I replied that fresh produce is more nutritious, and that because the organic produce sold at farmers’ markets is local and seasonal it is not subject to the same supply chain pressures as supermarket produce.
The responses I received were befitting of a society that is alienated from the source of its food. The nutritionist accused me of pushing a “privileged agenda” for promoting organic produce, while one of their followers asked: “Where do people live that fresh veg is grown locally year-round? Canned and frozen is often fresher than what’s in the produce aisle, and less environmentally costly, too.” Most of the commenters thought me a silly idealist.
Another person commented that due to the geographical location of remote Aboriginal communities, canned and frozen vegetables are their only source of produce.
In 2008, the Rudd government outlined its “Closing the Gap” framework to reduce Indigenous disadvantage in the areas of health, education and employment. One of its targets was that, within 10 years, 90 per cent of First Nations families could access a healthy food basket for less than 25 per cent of their income. But according to Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet, which is based at Perth’s Edith Cowan University, healthy foods can cost double this for many Indigenous people. By 2018, the target had been quietly dropped from the Closing the Gap framework.
High freight costs, distance from provenance and an absence of retail competition can make the cost of food exorbitant for many Indigenous people. While $11.99 iceberg lettuces hogged the headlines earlier this year, less well known is that in Newman, Western Australia, a quarter of a watermelon can sell for $12.78, and that in Alice Springs, two cobs of out-of-date corn cost $12.80. Neither products were affected by flooding.
Some communities are feeding themselves. In Arnhem Land, Maningrida Wild Foods was established in 2018 as a social enterprise that supplies native sea and bush food to faraway wholesalers and restaurants, including Attica in Melbourne. But the most important market remains the people of Maningrida.
“We’re finding with Maningrida Wild Foods that the local market is much bigger than what people would think,” explains Clem Bresson, who helped found the social enterprise. “In remote communities, just even having a car to go out bush and harvest foods is not as easy as that, you know? Look at how much diesel costs in Maningrida – over $3 a litre.”
Bresson tells me that two of Maningrida’s four takeaway shops now only buy local fish from MWF, rather than using frozen imports as they did before. But the local demand for fish and crabs still massively outweighs supply. “They could sell five times what they sell at the moment.” Moreover, says Bresson, when in season, native fruits “on the sweeter side”, such as green plums, “go like hotcakes”.
But Bresson thinks that the nature of these foods – often wild harvested, far from transport hubs, subject to extreme seasonality and needing a third-party distributor – means it’s “impossible” for them to get a foothold in distant supermarkets to the degree of existing farmed fruit and vegetables. Fewer than 20 native species have been commercially developed, and fruits now grown in orchards, such as finger limes, often sell for $40 a kilo, making them unlikely to ever compete with the economies of scale that allow apples and oranges to retail in supermarkets for a fraction of that price. Couttoupes tells me that native foods can take a week to arrive from the time he orders them, making it hard to build a menu around them, and meaning the ingredients, which haven’t been bred for longevity, are often past their prime by the time they arrive in his kitchen.
Kylie Kwong has come up with her own solution to sourcing native ingredients. On a windy morning in late August, I joined Kwong and her long-time friend Clarence Slockee for a tour of the South Eveleigh Community Building Rooftop Garden, where the sirens at street level and jets overhead are muffled by the crunch of gravel and the warble of magpies.
The garden was co-founded in 2019 by Slockee, a Cudgenburra/Bundjalung horticulturalist and one of the presenters of ABC TV’s Gardening Australia – a bush-tucker man more appropriate for the times. At 500 square metres, this is the country’s first all-native rooftop urban farm, a logical use for the top of a four-storey building, Slockee told me, because the harsh, windy conditions replicate the natural environments of many bush foods.
Around 65 species native to New South Wales grow in the garden – a mix of roughly 20 bush foods, nitrogen fixers and foods for pollinators. As we walked among them, Kwong and Slockee pulled off leaves and fruit for me to taste: Geraldton wax (which Kwong likened to kaffir lime), river mint, native raspberries.
Kwong told me that she was already considering opening a restaurant at South Eveleigh, but when she learnt Clarence was working in the neighbourhood it was a “very big drawcard for me to come here because I started thinking, Oh my goodness, Clarence can grow the native ingredients that I can use at Lucky Kwong.”
Native edible plants, said Kwong, have a “natural simpatico” with the Chinese flavour profile: they work gastronomically, which is why she uses them. Otherwise, she says, it would be tokenism. Lucky Kwong’s native ingredients come from Slockee’s rooftop farm, as well as from a community garden he planted with local schoolchildren 50 metres from the restaurant. Back at ground level, Kwong excitedly showed me this garden, a source of Vietnamese mint, Chinese white cabbage and bok choy, but also several natives. “Come and look at the warrigal greens. Look at this: now if I had to buy this from interstate, it’d cost a fortune!”
When we were on the rooftop, I had mentioned to Slockee that my Australiano coffee from McDonald’s only cost $4.75, to which he responded by leading me off the path to the garden’s “only WA ring-in”, a leafless rock wattle native to the Kimberley. Grabbing a spindly branch, Slockee showed me the beginnings of a seed pod, which contained, he reckoned, only seven seeds. He told me commercial wattleseed is harvested from different species to this one, but the effort required was similar. “It’s a big job, and you get very little return on your investment, so to speak.”
Once harvested and roasted for flavour, Slockee said wattleseed should cost 10 cents per gram. “If you’re going to start making wattlechinos, as opposed to $5 coffee it’s going to be a $15 coffee.”
The Australiano has since been discontinued, but a spokesperson for McDonald’s told me it was “well received by customers” and they “wouldn’t rule out the Australiano returning to our menus”. The wattleseed, the spokesperson continued, was sourced from “Indigenous and Australian farmers and communities”.
Bruce Pascoe argues that Australia’s edible plants (he calls them Aboriginal foods) wouldn’t exist today without thousands of years of selective harvesting, replanting and burning by First Nations farmers. “The plant belongs to the people where it grows,” he tells me.
But the problem with laying claim to living things is that they tend not to stay put. Apples are native to Kazakhstan, but the history and reach of their trade is so long and vast that they have lost all cultural association with Central Asia. The cultural transfer of plants is one of the earliest examples of globalisation, and what is today thought foundational to one culture (tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Spain), often came via another (the former were introduced from the Americas by the Spanish, the latter were brought by the Moors from North Africa, with an earlier provenance of Asia).
The supposed isolation of pre-1788 Australia means its native foods are less globalised. But even this isn’t always true. The warrigal greens plant is among the most popular of Australian native foods, but it is also native across the Tasman, where it’s called New Zealand spinach. Joseph Banks took seeds back to England in the 18th century, and in France it is a commonly grown vegetable known as épinard d’été (summer spinach).
And what about animals? Oysters, crabs, fish, ducks and quail – they are never listed as native foods, although all were and are eaten by Indigenous people. Are they disqualified because they can swim, fly and ride the currents elsewhere? Perhaps as early as the 16th century, Yolgnu people were trading trepang (sea cucumbers) with Makassan seafarers who sailed from what is now Indonesia, in exchange for metal axes, tobacco, alcohol and rice.
Today, what is culturally Indigenous food isn’t even always native to Australia. One of the most exciting chefs of this new Australian cuisine is Torres Strait Islander Nornie Bero, who in 2021 opened the restaurant Big Esso (“the biggest thank you”) at Melbourne’s Federation Square.
Bero, a member of the Komet tribe of the Meriam people from Mer Island, makes food that isn’t easily categorised. At Big Esso, tins of corned beef line shelves in the dining room – the ultimate Australian provision, literally convict rations. Bero’s menu contains native ingredients from throughout the continent: octopus tentacle with local seaweed; charred emu with kutjera (desert raisin) and pepperberry; fried crocodile that tastes like clams and looks like Twisties. But she also makes croquettes with the corned beef, which is a cheap, beloved and readily available meat for many Indigenous people, and likewise feral pig, which at Big Esso comes in its own blood with native lemongrass and warrigal greens. Many Indigenous groups don’t even have a word for “feral”, and have incorporated the meats of invasive game species into their diets more readily than non-Indigenous people.
Does that make Bero’s food any less authentic? Perhaps tellingly, Big Esso enjoyed a prominent Indigenous patronage the night I ate there. That most Indigenous people cannot afford to eat at the bulk of restaurants serving native foods is a common complaint.
Nornie Bero is so exciting because her food is seamlessly creolised, a rare achievement in a country where the White Australia policy and its aftermath have resulted in more rigid identity categories than most other settler-colonial states. That Bruce Pascoe has been so aggressively vilified for the fairness of his skin is an indictment of this country’s reluctance to blur racial categories.
Pascoe wants Indigenous people to own the intellectual property of native foods, something that elsewhere usually concerns either value-added products (French champagne, Greek feta), or the insertion of patented genes into food plants to create new cultivars. “We believe we should have cultural rights but also rights over our methods,” Pascoe tells me. “I think we can challenge in the courts on these grounds.”
How this would work is unclear. Aboriginal art is easy enough to prove cultural ownership of, but wouldn’t patenting a plant be akin to patenting a pigment? Would Kakadu plum only be allowed to be called Kakadu plum if it is grown in Kakadu?
Intellectual property is already being sought for native plants, often by non-Aboriginal people. In 2017, two non-Indigenous entrepreneurs applied to trademark the name “gumby gumby”, which they claimed to have invented, for the native food and medicinal plant also known as native apricot. Their application was rejected in 2020, but only on the technicality that they had not responded to objections that the name has been in use by Aboriginal people for thousands of years. And in 2007, the American-based cosmetic company Mary Kay Inc. was granted a patent for the use of Kakadu plum extracts in a cosmetic skincare product, but withdrew it four years later amid opposition from Indigenous people who claimed it would limit their ability to use the plant in medicine.
“Government needs to help us protect ourselves from non-Aboriginal profiteers,” Pascoe tells me. “They are everywhere, sharks in the water, many of them pretending to be supporters of Aboriginal people. Most not even pretending.”
Australia has not ratified the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization, a supplementary agreement to the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Doing so would require that traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources held by indigenous communities could only be accessed with their approval. Moreover, the protocol compels signatories to take certain measures so that any benefits arising from these resources are shared in a fair and equitable way with the indigenous communities holding such knowledge. So, should the Australian government ever become a party to the protocol, it would be compelled to legislate against the possibility of non-Indigenous people seeking the intellectual property of native foods. Australia’s existing copyright legislation prioritises documented knowledge, making orally transferred Indigenous cultural knowledge difficult to prove.
An estimated 1 per cent of the total money made from these foods ends up with Indigenous people. Pascoe tells me he is working with Aboriginal organisations and communities to help them enter the bush food industry, and that he is lobbying government for support by arguing that native foods create jobs and reduce carbon emissions. “There is a huge environmental benefit but recognition of Aboriginal land rights is also key.” He cites Supply Nation, a non-profit aimed at building Indigenous business, as an example of Aboriginal companies entering the sector, but also wants government to help with land and labour.
Pascoe concedes that bush foods will remain expensive, limiting their mainstream accessibility, until scale of production can be increased. At Black Duck Foods, based on Yuin country near the Victorian town of Mallacoota, he employs four Aboriginal people with whom he is experimenting with growing and harvesting native grains and tubers, in collaboration with Riverina millers Woodstock Flour and the University of Melbourne, where he is an enterprise professor in Indigenous agriculture, to see how these foods can be grown and distributed more cheaply. “Our methods and learning show us that this is going to be possible,” he says. “We want to be part of the society and economy.”
Several obstacles remain before native foods are likely to become pantry staples. Wild-harvesting is time consuming and costly, and even where native plants are being farmed, they have not been bred for a long shelf life. In some cases, such as with Kakadu plums, the demand so outstrips supply that the strain of wild harvesting “is making it even more of a threatened species than it already is,” Clarence Slockee tells me. “How do we maintain an industry that is eating itself?”
Legislative barriers remain as well. The harvesting of kangaroos is restricted on account of the animal falling under native animal protection legislation. One company, Adelaide-based Macro Meats, is responsible for nearly all commercial kangaroo meat sold in Australia. Before chef Adam Veikkanen closed his popular Canberra restaurant, Polo, at the start of the year, he told me he wanted to put a kangaroo pierogi on the menu, but gave up trying to source local kangaroo meat. Louis Couttoupes, too, tells me he has difficulty sourcing local kangaroo, despite the prevalence of kangaroos in the capital, and the ACT government conducting an annual cull to control numbers.
Cultural barriers remain before mainstream acceptance of native foods is likely: the annual ads on January 26 equating eating lamb with Australian nationalism are seemingly entrenched, as is the insistence on eating iceberg lettuces year-round. It is notable that Indigiearth, perhaps the first Indigenous owned and operated native food company to be stocked in Woolworths, markets its products with English names (native thyme, cinnamon myrtle, saltbush dukkah).
In September, Yamatji man Matthew Moncrieff, who teamed with Kaitlin Pisani and became the first contestants on Channel 7’s My Kitchen Rules to compete using mainly native ingredients, created an online petition calling on Coles and Woolworths to stock these foods. He cited the difficulty in finding these items at an affordable price, and said he’d been “flooded” with queries about where people could buy them. As part of the campaign, Moncrieff wrote: “The big Supermarkets have Asian, Mexican, English aisles but they don’t stock our incredible Native Australian ingredients! WHY! They are literally grown on our door step.”
So far, the only native ingredient to have become commercially mainstream is the macadamia, with the local industry having a “farm gate” value of $300 million. A mark of the macadamia’s acceptance is that you rarely hear it called native food – it’s just food.
When the pandemic began, I sought to become that make-believe creature of Michael Symons’ book One Continuous Picnic: an Australian peasant. My day job is farming, and, true to Symons’ thesis, most of the beef I produce is exported overseas.
Although I am hardly a serf, with the good fortune to manage 650 acres, I still have to eat. With the first lockdown in March 2020, my visits to the supermarket, like everyone else’s, were curtailed. The onset of COVID-19 in Australia came a few weeks after the end of the worst drought for decades in my part of the country, and a few months after I had taken over the farm’s management. Suddenly the landscape I had been entrusted with erupted in edible weeds. I began wilting nettles and sowthistle to accompany my breakfast eggs, and adding purslane and dandelion to salads.
Next, I killed roosters for the stockpot, and lambs for the chest-freezer. My family had always done the latter, but where they had previously fed the fat to the dogs, I kept that too, as an alternative to cooking with oil or butter.
I learnt to preserve fruit and started pressing apples by the wheelbarrow-load for juice. I learnt that I should plant garlic by Anzac Day, harvest it by Remembrance Day, and keep it in a dry, dark room all summer. Last summer I grew 15 pumpkins, picked them on the first frost of the autumn, and ate the last one at the end of September.
Initially it didn’t occur to me to eat native foods, but slowly this has changed. A friend now shoots kangaroos on the farm to furnish his family with meat, and he always leaves me a leg. I have learnt that in southern Australia you catch yabbies in months ending in “r”, and that if you soak ripe wattle blossoms in a jar of water, they will release yeasts that can be used as a sourdough starter. I have learnt that this country is full of food.
Sam Vincent
Sam Vincent is a writer, farmer and the author of Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars and My Father and Other Animals.
The history of Australian gastronomy is written on the menu at McDonald’s. With 1024 franchises nationwide, “Macca’s” (we are the only people who call it that) can lay claim to being at once Australia’s favourite burger joint, ice-creamery, morning-commute pit stop, late-night stomach liner and “family restaurant”.
In effect, McDonald’s represents a kind of culinary consensus. Just as prospective government policy must first pass the pub test to become ensconced in the Australian mainstream, a food trend must run the gauntlet of the “Drive-Thru”.
Before coffee became the national obsession, the world’s first McCafé opened in Melbourne, in 1993; before Australian restaurants came to customarily hide the provenance of their meat behind the breed of the animal (as if an Angus can’t be factory farmed), ours was the only country where McDonald’s served a Wagyu burger….
November 2022
Issue
November 2022
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Politics The makeover: Peter Dutton’s hard sell to the electorate
Society Native foods in the Plate Southern Land
Culture Should the Australian Museum return Papuan artefacts?
The Nation Reviewed
Politics The curious mind of King Charles III
Politics Salute to the sum
Society Race around the world
Society Renewable energy’s power-lines problem
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Culture A close, careful looking: The work of Cressida Campbell
Culture The unsettled isle: Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Culture The centenary of the death of Marcel Proust
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Culture Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Best of Friends’
Culture ‘House of the Dragon’
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The curious mind of King Charles III
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