FROM INDIGENOUS Indigenous Dreaming stories tell cautionary tales of over-exploitation. Stories about seasonal abundance law. Narratives on taking what you need and leaving the rest for later. Yarns about futureproofing the continuous cycle of life. Nothing revolutionary here. Australia’s First Peoples have been relying on native foods for thousands of years and have led healthy and prosperous lives doing it. Aboriginal people right across this wide colour-soaked land have enjoyed a varied and rich diet for millennia, which has enabled them to thrive. To sustain and nourish. To live and flourish. Pre-European Aboriginal diets based on seasonal availability were extremely healthy and mirrored the ‘healthy pyramid’ approach emphasised by contemporary nutritionists. Food was eaten raw and/or cooked, sufficient to maintain well-being of Aboriginal peoples all over the continent. Mobs living near the sea harvested shellfish and fish in abundance. Desert mobs ate seed dampers, yams, lizards, snakes and birds. Bush mobs ate tubers, fruit,
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nuts, kangaroo and emu. Everyone came together after a day’s hunting and gathering to socialise and share. Peter Aldenhoven, pictured, who is the executive officer of Willum Warrain Gathering Place, finds this thought-provoking. He explains: “We’ve always eaten everything this country has on offer. I find it interesting that Australians have gladly embraced multiculturalism in terms of international cuisines but have had little interest in Indigenous foods up until fairly recently. Seasonal abundance was always capitalised on but never to the point of over-exploitation. All Aboriginal people, wherever they lived, had an intimate knowledge of natural cycles and seasonality. Everything was interconnected. When a certain plant was in flower, oysters were at their plumpest or turtles were laying their eggs, it was the time to gather and hunt. Women went out in the morning looking for roots, nuts, fruits, lizards and small marsupials with their digging sticks and dilly bags. Men would also go out with spears and boomerangs, hunting larger game like kangaroo and emu. Eels were caught and preserved by using smoking trees. Soils were tilled with yam sticks. Aquatic plants like water ribbons and cumbungi were staples. Sophisticated fish traps, such as at Brewarrina, were used all over the country. Large game like kangaroo was stuffed with saltbush and pigface and cooked in ground ovens. Bread was
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