Unsung Hero

THE BUSH TUCKER EVANGELISTS

WORDS BEN SMITHURST

Personal tragedy inspired Gayle and Mike Quarmby to work with Outback communities—and bring native Australian grub to the world.

Gayle: “My father was left for three days in a pile of his dead mates on the Somme. He was being put into a mass grave when they realised he was still alive and so he returned to Australia quite badly injured. He couldn’t return to being a farmer, so he headed out into the desert on camels—as you do.

“He reached the centre in 1932 and he came across a young man who looked at my father’s paintings and was really inspired. That friendship between my dad and Albert— Albert Namatjira—was the foundation of today’s Aboriginal art industry. Albert wasn’t allowed to paint traditionally because of the missionaries.

“Anyway, by the 1950s I was this little kid running around with the children of Aboriginal artists while they were painting over there under a gum tree with dad. And learning about native bush foods. Going forward to 1999, Mike and I were working in a big commercial propagating nursery in Reedy Creek, South Australia, where we seeded 150,000 trees a day. And our 20-year-old son, Daniel, was killed. Coming back from the funeral, I remembered dad’s words to me: life can kneecap you at any time, but you have to choose to stand up and go on a healing journey. That’s what he did. So we did, too.

“I’d kept contact with my old friends in the desert, so we went back and thought, right, let’s see if we can create an industry that would create jobs for people in the bush. Mike is a horticultural genius, so it took us two minutes to decide we’d do something with bush tucker. A lot of it was disappearing because of feral grasses and overgrazing.

“So we pulled our super and over the next decade we put $1.5 million into setting up the Outback Pride project. We engaged with 3000 Aboriginal people to train them towards a pathway into an industry. At the same time, we had to actually create the industry draw. So we created Outback Pride and Outback Pride Fresh. And we handed our three businesses into Aboriginal ownership two years ago exactly. We’re now in our

There have been so many discovery moments out bush, tasting something totally new that absolutely blew us away!

seventies, but we’re still doing it, mentoring people. We’re just a little more subdued now.”

Mike: “The biggest misconception about bush food actually comes from The Bush Tucker Man, the 1980s TV show with Lez Hiddens. Lovely bloke! But it portrayed an image of native foods being ‘bush tucker’—you only ate it when you were starving in the bush and that it tasted like shit! We turned that around.

“I had a lot of experience in propagating hard-to-propagate plants. So we went bush with a botanist friend and Aboriginal elders and travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres finding the last remaining strands of the best native food plants. And then we worked out how to cultivate them.

“As we introduced the program to Indigenous communities, we ascertained what plants were special to their areas and which plants were climatically suitable in each case. Of course, most of those things had never been commercially grown and never been marketed. The public didn’t know what they were! So we set about starting the Outback Pride brand name, which we put into Coles and Woolworths.

“At the end of the day we created a monster—in conjunction with a lot of wonderful celebrity chefs who really promoted it like Kylie Kwong and Peter Gilmore. The beneficiaries have really been the Aboriginal people in communities where these gardens now are.

There have been so many discovery moments out bush tasting something totally new that absolutely blew us away.

And then we’d send it off for testing and some of these foods are off the charts in nutritional, even medicinal, properties.

“I’m probably most proud of the edible saltbush that I developed over the years. The wild saltbush out in the bush is virtually inedible—it’s bitter and tiny and tough. But we started to select for palatability and rapid growth and all that sort of thing. Now it’s probably the most used native food, apart from perhaps lemon Myrtle, in Australia.”

NAME Gayle and Mike Quarmby WHO? Founders of Outback Pride Fresh, pioneering Australian bush food company, built to help bring Indigenous fare to the world.

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