S
ometimes I consider
geophagy. My soil of
choice would be Permian
mudstone, the creamy,
250 million-year-old clay of both
the hills where I grew up, and of
Neika where we now farm. My
blood is Dutch and half murkily
charted white Australian and New
Zealander, and perhaps this lack of
belonging to any particular land
drives my daydreams of eating
earth. I long for the connection
Indigenous Tasmanians feel with
the land, of blood and earth being
one, neither owning the other.
Perhaps it’s these cravings that
drive me to sink my hands into the
dirt, and perhaps it’s the craving to
belong to the land that also drives
my desire to be kind to it.
Australian soils are fragile.
Before the introduction of hoofed
animals the hardest impact on
our earth was the soft pad of a
kangaroo’s foot. I love lamb chops
as much as the next omnivore,
but I wonder why my idea for
a soft-footed national dish has
thus far remained unheeded?Every evening at least
15 Tasmanian pademelons – small,
plump wallabies – are outside my
door, eating my lawn. If I left the
farm gate open they’d demolish
my crops overnight. In 2009,
in Tasmania alone, 1,369,000
wallabies and pademelons were
killed to protect crops, with
only 19,000 kilos of the meat
harvested. And so, my friends,
I give you spaghetti wallanaise.
Our pademelons are as mild in
flavour as they are in appearance,
fooling even the most suspicious
child (ahem) into thinking that this
wallanaise is the usual Bolognese
they eat every Wednesday night, just
with less erosion. More sophisticated
consumers of wallanaise could
braise whole hindquarters for a
ragù. Were I to dig deeper into
these “crop protection” numbers,
would I find that we’re killing
wallabies to protect pasture to grow
beef? Macropods such as kangaroos
and pademelons love open country
and waterholes, so the more land
we “improve” for grazing the more
macropods will breed.“Killing what
you ate was
par for the
course. The
species
mattered not;
only that it
was legal,
tasty and
humane.”Terra firmer
The protection of our soil is grounds for putting native
fauna on our plates, writesPAULETTE WHITNEY.
We can protect our delicate soil
in other tasty ways. Many hoofed
creatures live outside the bounds
we have set for them. Feral goats
overgraze native plants and cause
erosion, so when visiting north-
eastern South Australia we brined
a feral goat haunch with fragrant
native lemongrass and roasted it
all afternoon. Never was a problem
solved more deliciously, and there
is sadly no shortage of feral pigs,
goats, horses, blackbirds and
camels out there for us to eat- logistics and legislation aside.
This is a small leap for me,
having once been caught as a child
climbing on a chair to poke the eye
of a taxidermied goat to see if it
was as squishy as it appeared, while
my stepdad and his mate prepared
Cape Barren goose sausages for
lunch. Killing what you ate was par
for the course. The species mattered
not; only that it was legal, tasty and
humane. For all their bluster these
tough flannel-shirted folk prided
themselves on a clean kill, and
favourably compared a wild bunny
that didn’t know what hit it to the
fate of an animal corralled, trucked
to an abattoir and killed on a
production line. I’ve had friends
euthanise an emu that had broken
its leg, then drive a giant drumstick
home covered by a portacot to
keep off the flies, before turning
it into burgers. All of this dulls the
cultural aversion – flesh is flesh.
Any healthy animal that has had
a good life and a clean death, and
is prepared deliciously is, arguably,
as legitimate a food as another.
Maybe I don’t need to eat that
dirt. Maybe tucking into our coat
of arms – offering respect for the
lives of the animals killed to
protect crops by eating them,
rather than leaving them to rot in
the field, and putting the animals
that harm the landscape on our
plates – eating in a way that works
with what our land needs, rather
than a post-colonial, European
notion of which animals are right
to eat, is enough.●
GOURMET TRAVELLER 45ILLUSTRATION BY DAWN TAN
Produce