The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes
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The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes
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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 28 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Oldest Foods on Earth
A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes
By John Newton
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2016 John NewtonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-226-2
CHAPTER 1
BEFORE THE BOATS
They were the most healthy people I have ever seen ... they were literally glowing with health – not an ounce of superfluous fat. They were extremely fit.
Founding doctor of the Pintupi Homelands Health Service Dr David Scrimgeour on seeing the last of the Pintupi people walk out of the desert in 1984
In 1688, William Dampier was the first Englishman to explore parts of Australia, to have contact with the Indigenous people and to write about the experience. On his return to England in 1691, he wrote a book, New Voyage Around the World, which was published in 1697. He was less than kind – or accurate – in his judgement of the people he had come across there: 'The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World ... setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.' As for their diet, he wrote: 'There is neither herb, root, pulse, nor any sort of grain for them to eat that we saw; nor any sort of bird or beast that they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so.'
Dampier was the first but certainly not the last to overlook the intricate patchwork of farming and land-care techniques of the original inhabitants of this land. Neither he nor most of those who followed him saw evidence of farming in the European sense – or rather, as we will see, some did but suppressed what they saw – so they surmised that these people were 'ignorant savages'. Dampier had an excuse – he wasn't here for long – but Darwin should have known better, when he called them 'a set of harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night, and gaining their livelihood by hunting in the woods'. While conceding that a group of Aboriginal people that he had encountered were 'good humoured and pleasant' and that several of their remarks 'manifested considerable acuteness', Darwin deplored the fact that 'They will not ... cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them.'
Historian William Gammage comments that 'the people of 1788 spent more time each year managing land than Darwin [did] in a lifetime.' We have learnt, thanks to the work of historians and authorslike Gammage, Eric Rolls and Bruce Pascoe, that the entire country was carefully and thoroughly farmed in a manner that left the land and its bounty in balance and abundance for at least 50 000 years.
They reared possums, emus, dingos and cassowaries; they penned young pelican chicks and let parent birds fatten them. They carried fish and crayfish stock across the country. There were duck nets on the rivers with sinkers and floats, and fishing nets of European quality, with the mesh and knot varied to suit their prey, placed in the right waters. In 1839, the explorer Thomas Mitchell wrote:
Many fish weirs were seen and one could not help being struck with the ingenuity displayed in their construction, on one creek we were surprised to find what looked like the commencement of work for a line of tramway. There were sapling sleepers about eight feet long in length and various thicknesses laid a few feet apart for at least half a mile. The work must have been done by natives but am quite at a loss to understand their motive.
It is significant, in contemplating the relationship of the Aboriginal people to the colonisers, that he did not think to ask. As Gammage writes, Aboriginal farmers 'burnt, tilled, planted, transplanted, watered, irrigated, weeded, thinned, cropped, stored and traded'. We have been shown what the first settlers missed: that they were farmers in every sense but one – they did not put livestock behind fences. They didn't need to. The livestock were directed to the hunters by the judicious use of fire or by 'game drives', the employment of nets up to 50 feet (about 15 metres) long and kilometres of brush fences to drive game (kangaroos in the main) to the hunters. The original inhabitants of this land, unlike those who came later, worked with their environment, not against it.
But did the first settlers 'miss' evidence of Indigenous civilisation, or was knowledge of it deliberately suppressed? Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu makes the case for suppression. Take the 'humpie' that was supposed to be the sole dwelling of Indigenous Australians: a couple of pieces of bark held up by sticks, the rudimentary dwelling of the Aboriginal warrior of my childhood imagination. One of the arguments advanced to justify European overlooking of Indigenous farming practices was that there were no dwellings: no dwelling, no fences, therefore no agriculture.
Pascoe tells of the astonishment of the late ABC broadcaster Alan Saunders on interviewing the authors of The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture and discovering that the first chapter was devoted to Aboriginal architecture. As Pascoe writes, 'he wondered at the depth of Australian scholarship and education which had allowed Australians to remain ignorant of this aspect of our national culture.' Yet references to elaborate houses and villages are common. Pascoe notes, for example, that the Australian poet Dame Mary Gilmore 'reported her uncles saying that 5000 people lived around the Brewarrina fish traps.' And that Sturt reported a prosperous town of 1000 on the banks of the Darling, and writer Alice Duncan-Kemp claimed 3000 lived on Farrar's Lagoon, not far from Brewarrina.
Pascoe suggests this suppression was deliberate. Why was knowledge of sophisticated dwellings, such as the large structure in a settlement south-west of Lake Blanche in South Australia, described as 'very warm and comfortable', and 'capable of holding thirty to forty people', kept from official accounts? Because, Pascoe believes, such knowledge would get in the way of the main game: taking over the land for cultivation and the running of stock. If the local people were acknowledged as the skilled agriculturalists they were, it would have been difficult to trample all over them. This 'underestimation of indigenous achievement' writes Pascoe, 'was a deliberate tactic of British colonialism.'
If what Dampier wrote, and many other commentators more or less substantiated, were true, and the first people were 'the miserablest People in the World' and ate 'neither herb, root, pulse ... nor any sort of bird or beast that they can catch' because they had 'no instruments wherewithal to do so', they would have presented a wretched spectacle.
And although, for obvious reasons, we have no photographs of Aboriginal people before 1788, thedrawings, paintings and later photographs show us a remarkably healthy population: slim, well-muscled and lithe. That is because on the whole, drought notwithstanding, they ate remarkably well from a varied diet of wild, native Australian foods. And these foods, as I will outline later in this book, were extraordinarily high in nutrients. In the Western Desert, the Aboriginal people chose from a seasonal menu of 150 different foods a year. In the tropical north, that figure jumps to 750 a year. We know this from accounts by anthropologists and others in the field who lived with them and carefully recorded what they ate, how they ate it and often how they caught or gathered it.
By contrast, the average European Australian today will choose from between fifty and a hundred foods a year, while largely ignoring even the (European imposed) seasonality of food.
One further important observation: when Europeans arrived in this country, not only did they bring their own flora and fauna, and their own agricultural methods – they also imposed the seasons of the northern hemisphere. Australia is a vast country, stretching from the tropics to the temperate zones. The four seasons of Europe do not begin to describe the variations across this vast land. But over 50 000 years, the original inhabitants have adopted seasons based upon acute observation of their country.
THE WESTERN DESERT
Between 1966 and 1967, anthropologist Richard A. Gould lived with and then reported on the food and food gathering practices of a group of thirteen Nyatunyatjara (alternate English spelling Ngaatjatjarra) people in the harsh climate of the Gibson Desert, north of Warburton, around 1500 kilometres north-west of Perth. At the time, the Western Desert was one of the last regions of the world to support groups of people living entirely on the uncultivated resources of the land. The Aboriginal settlement of the Western Desert represented possibly the most marginal example of permanent human occupation in the world, and one of the most extreme places where hunting-gathering took place. Gould and his wife (extensive research has failed to unearth her name) spent almost a year with this nomadic group. He described his purpose as studying the 'living archaeology' of these people, knowing that the days of their hunting-gathering existence were numbered. He later recorded their physical degradation when they drifted into townships.
Gould observed that the diet of the Nyatunyatjara was primarily vegetarian and at least 90 per cent of the time females provided 95 per cent of the food for the group. Men hunted constantly but had limited success, as game was only plentiful after rains. Although large game was rarely caught, a regular supply of small game contributed 9 per cent of their diet by weight. Gould mentions a total of thirty-eight edible plant species and forty-seven named varieties of meat. But on the day he describes at the opening of his book Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert, he writes that 'as on most days, the hunt has been poor, but the collecting successful.' The only meat available was a goanna, which was roasted, cut in half and shared among the two male hunters' families by being roasted, and 'mashed' between two flat stones into a paste after the intestines were first discarded and the organs given to the hunter as his due. This paste of flesh, skin and bone provided a mouthful of food for each member of the group.
Aside from the rare treat of kangaroo or emu, other small game like the blue-tongue lizard and edible grubs provide the majority of protein, along with – at the time Gould was writing – rabbits and feral cats, which would not, of course, have been on the menu pre-1788.
On this day the women gathered two plant foods: kampurarpa, a small green tomato-like fruit (from the Solanum genus, as is the tomato) and ngaru, another small green tomatolike Solanum. Both were mashed into a paste, then eaten fresh as the paste or rolled into large balls which could be dehydrated and stored until wanted.
This was not a particularly good food day, as Gould's visit coincided with the last months of a severe drought.
He noted that while 'the people are generally strong and basically quite healthy they sometimes do show signs of deficiency', particularly the children, all of whom in his group display 'strikingly swollen bellies'. He attributes this, perhaps correctly, to protein deficiency. The disease is called by western medicine kwashiorkor. The people themselves called this condition nungkumunu, and 'proudly' show Gould the stretch marks left by this condition as evidence of 'the rigors of their childhood'. That they appear to have recovered from the affliction points towards it being minor, and a result of food shortages following drought. Even such harsh conditions were better than life post– European invasion: an estimated population of 314 500 was reduced to around 16 000 by the 1930s.
THE CENTRE
Just 1000 kilometres east is Arrernte (Aranda) country. While no Richard Gould has documented the Arrernte people's hunting and gathering, Eastern Arrernte woman Margaret-Mary Turner has published in a book, Arrernte Foods: Foods from Central Australia, an inventory of local foods and methods of preparing them which would have comprised the diet before 1788. She begins with honey-like foods, which include bush honey, nectar and edible gums, one of which is witchetty bush gum. Turner says, 'when the flowers start to fall, it comes out through the bark and forms in lumps ... you can make it into a lump on a little stick, like alolly.' Then there's the honey ant, which is found in the ground in Mulga country. 'You don't swallow them, you put them on your tongue and bite on the abdomen and suck the honey from it.' And there is also honey from stingless native bees.
Next, Turner lists thirty-eight foods from plants (the same number as Gould's assay of the Gibson Desert), including the wild orange, quandong, wild fig, two bush tomatoes and the bush banana fruit, flower, leaves and root. 'You can eat the bush bananas when they are small or full-grown ... You can cook bush bananas in hot earth, or they can be eaten raw when young.' The flowers 'hang in clusters and can also be eaten. You can even eat the plant itself': the root can be eaten raw or cooked. Tim Low, Australian biologist and author of Wild Food Plants of Australia, also records this plant, but as the native potato. Four edible seeds are listed and eleven edible grubs, caterpillars and other insects. Turner reminds us that non-Aborigines use the name witchetty grub for any edible grubs, but the witchetty grub proper is found only in the witchetty bush. Cicadas are also eaten. Most of these grubs and insects are cooked in the coals first.
There are fourteen listings under meat and other food from animals, and these include the obvious, like the goanna, bearded dragon, carpet snake (Turner remarks that one reptile 'feeds lots of people'), kangaroo, rock wallaby, euro and possum, of which Turner says 'they taste really sweet, especially the milk guts [intestines, the same as Southern American chitlins], but nowadays they are few and far between.' The crested pigeon was another prized game bird, as were the galah and the budgerigar. Of the budgerigar she writes: 'they are eaten when they are newly hatched ... You cook a whole lot of them in hot earth and when they are cooked, you pull the guts out and eat the bird. Some people remove the head before eating the bird, others eat it with the head because they like the taste.'
It is doubtful that baby budgerigar will ever appear on European menus.
The last entry in Turner's book is for water, which, as in the Gibson Desert, is a scarce and crucial element. She lists soakage water (artesian water), water from tree roots, and water from tree hollows. 'Survival' she writes, 'depends on knowing how to find water.'
THE TROPICAL NORTH
Aboriginal groups throughout the tropical north of Australia have the same seasonal cycle as the Yolnu (the Aboriginal group of north-east Arnhem Land, sometimes spelt Yolngu). Aboriginal groups in other parts of Australia have a seasonal cycle based on local seasonal indicators, such as changes in wind direction, animal behaviour, and plant flowering and fruiting. The delineation of these seasons and the foods associated with them is laid out by Stephen Davis in his book Man of All Seasons. Davis, an anthropologist, like Gould lived with the local people with his family for three years and shared their daily routine. During that time, he documented the Yolnu seasons:
» Dhuludur: the pre-wet season in October–November
» Bärra'mirri: the growth season in December–January
» Mayaltha: the flowering season in February–March
» Midawarr: the fruiting season in March–April, including
» Ngathangamakulingamirri, the two week harvest season in April
» Dharratharramirri: the early dry season in May–July, including
» Burrugumirri, the time of the birth of sharks and stingrays – three weeks in July–August
» Rarrandharr: the main dry season in August–October.
The range of foodstuffs available to the Yolnu people across these seasons is remarkable, making our European choices appear skimpy. Even in the pre-wet season, Dhuludur, one of the least prolific, there is much to choose from.
Native grape, long and round yam, the new growth of the finger bean and the giant waterlily. As the waterholes shrink early in the season, magpie geese flock to the remaining water making them easy prey for hunters. When they begin to fill, the whistling duck, Pacific black duck and radjah shelduck all come home to build their nests to breed which means they are fat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Oldest Foods on Earth by John Newton. Copyright © 2016 John Newton. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION,1 BEFORE THE BOATS,
2 HOME-GROWN MARVELS,
3 A DISASTROUS CHANGE OF DIET,
4 THEY BROUGHT THEIR OWN,
5 FROM BANDICOOT CURRY TO VEGEMITE,
6 GREEN SHOOTS,
7 THE PRODUCERS,
8 WILD ANIMALS AND GAME BIRDS,
9 CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS,
10 THE CHEFS: PIONEERS AND CONVERTS,
11 WALKING TOGETHER, EATING TOGETHER,
APPENDIX:,
A list of Australian edible plants, animals and grains,
Useful contacts,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,