FROM INDIGENOUS Focus on food from Country with Peter Aldenhoven

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, 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

Focus on food from Country with Peter Aldenhoven

made out of seeds like millet, spinifex and other native grasses, ground between stones before baking.”

Peter continues: “Locally, the hundreds of middens on the Port Phillip Bay side attest to thousands of years of Bunurong/Boon Wurrung peoples’ presence with the local clans cooking shellfish and harvesting the sea’s abundance. On the other side, Bushrangers Bay was also a place rich in abalone, crayfish and other shellfish, with the hinterland teeming with kangaroo.”

Life on the Mornington Peninsula before white colonisation must have looked very different for First Nations People where, according to rule, all food collected was to be enjoyed by all generations. Imagine sitting on the dunes fronting the ocean beach with a view out to the world after a day’s foraging, with fire ready to go and a diversity of plentiful foodstuffs for enjoying. This would have been a simple life full of complex social structures and profound understanding of how Mother Nature works. Indigenous techniques for cooking or preserving bounty locally and across Australia were varied and many. From drying fruits like bush tomatoes and muntries and making them into pastes to rolling wattle gum into balls and storing it in the forks of trees, our First Nations People were skilled kitchen hands and prolific innovators. Having limited access to sugar, mobs would eat resin from trees, edible flowers and honey ants, or harvest ‘sugarbag’ from native Australian bees. ‘Cordial’ was made from water sweetened with flower blossoms such as banksia and crushed fruits.

Peter concludes: “Willum Warrain is seeking to teach people about local high-nutrient Indigenous plants and their multiple uses as food, medicine and for material technology. Our top five ‘deadliest’ (coolest) plants, which we sell to the public, include garawang (apple berry), cooked green or eaten fresh when fully ripe or saved as dried fruit; karkalla (pigface), which is like eating salty strawberries; lomandra, which tastes like snow peas; chocolate lily bulbs, which are eaten raw or steamed while the flowers are eaten or soaked to make a sweet drink; and myrnong (yam daisy), where the tubers are roasted or steamed and pounded into cakes and cooked on rocks. I have served roasted myrnong for the last five years to my family at Christmas.” Absolutely inventive and delicious.

Willum Warrain is a not-for-profit charitable organisation and conducts cultural tours of the Gathering Place, Koorie Plant Trail and Pun Pun Wetlands in Hastings on the Mornington Peninsula. You will find it at www.willumwarrain.org.au LIZ ROGERS