which mushrooms, mosses and weeds you
could eat and we’d construct a dish with
what we’d collected. My expectation was
that Australia wouldn’t be any different.
There’s a culture here that’s 60,000 years
old and, in my mind at least, Australians
were élite foragers.
That first year in Sydney I never met
an Aboriginal man or woman. When
I went back to the UK, where I stayed
for five years, I had a lot of time to think
about that. I felt guilty about not having
participated in the Indigenous culture at
all. It may not have presented itself to me,
but I also didn’t get off my arse and go
out and find it.
Eighteen years ago, in January 2000,
I immigrated to Australia. It was my
second chance. I went looking for native
ingredients straight away. I started getting
my hands on wattleseed and riberries and
experimenting with them on the menu
at Forty One. Then we got a review that
absolutely spanked us for using them.
The sentiment was that it was a hark back
to the bush-tucker era, that it was archaic
and rubbish; they disappeared from our
menu just as quickly as they had arrived.
Fast-forward to the past few years
and there’s been a huge boom for native
ingredients. But let’s not ever call it a
trend. A trend is something that comes
and goes, not something that’s been
around for thousands of years, and that’ll
be around for thousands of years more.
It was years after I arrived in Australia
that I opened my restaurant Orana in
Adelaide. I didn’t know what I was
starting. I had no fucking idea. But the
more Indigenous communities I visited,
and the more Aboriginal people I spoke
with, the more I realised how little
I knew about the culture of the country
that I now called home.
The Orana Foundation is trying to
change that. For everyone. Together with
the University of Adelaide, the South
Australian Museum and the Adelaide
Botanic Gardens, we’re building a
database of the 10,000-odd edible native
ingredients here in Australia. The whole
purpose of this resource is to dig into the
cultural information on each ingredient:
where does it come from? What are its
traditional uses? How does it grow? It’s
all very well for Jock the chef to say thatyou should eat Geraldton wax because it
tastes nice, or because culturally it’s been
used for thousands of years, but we also
need to dig deeper.F
rom there we want to be able
to build an industry based
on benevolence. We want
to acknowledge Indigenous
people and their culture, and create
opportunities for communities that
are Indigenous led.
One of the issues that the native
ingredients industry has had so far,
generally, is that people have tried to own
the industry, or have been cloak-and-dagger
in their dealings. A lot of early researchon these plants also didn’t really look
beyond whether or not they tasted
immediately delicious. Nor did it take
into account the cultural significance
the ingredient may have had to the first
Australians, or the ability of these
ingredients to provide a food source
(in most cases) without irrigation and
other intensive farming practices.
Between Bistro Blackwood and Orana
each year we use 700 native ingredients.
There are between 40 and 60 on the
menu at a time, depending on the season.
In spring it’s a lot more because we use
a lot more blossoms, so the number
creeps up by an extra 15 or 20.
I don’t own any of this. It’s my
interpretation of Australian food
and I encourage everyone – at home,
in restaurants – to also interpret it in
their own way. Even though I’m not
from Australia, I’ve done a few things
that have been easily accepted here:
skewering damper on lemon myrtle and
cooking it on coals at the table; topping
pipis with beach succulents; serving
flathead with eucalyptus. These are
simple things that people really love
and enjoy eating, but why should it
only benefit an élite few? I’d love to see
mainstream manufacturers using natives
to make soy sauce, simple vinegars andoils. Native peppers, herbs and tubers
are easy starting points for the home
cook, and you can grow a lot of natives
in your garden with relative ease.
The Orana Foundation’s goal is to
do what we’ve done at the restaurant
on a much bigger scale. This month
we’ll be starting field trips to gather
ingredients and meet with Indigenous
elders. In the first six months we’ll
hit every state, and in 12 months
we’ll have gathered information on
a thousand species. We want to work
out how to farm these ingredients
successfully, in the right climate, under
the right conditions and in volume, in
order to supply a market.A
s a chef I can look at the world
of food and say, “these particular
natives are going to relate better
to gastronomy here and now,
more than something else.” We’ll be
hitting that low-hanging fruit first. Things
like Moreton Bay fig shoots and mangrove
seeds, along with other fruits, seeds, and
even a natural form of sugar, are at the
top of our list. I understand that these
ingredients can be intimidating, but at
some point rosemary must have been
intimidating, too. And expensive. Native
thyme being in the supermarket is great,
but at the price it’s at it’s not going to help
anyone. It has to be as easy and affordable
to pick up as it is a bunch of basil or
parsley, otherwise we won’t succeed.
Once we hit a thousand entries in the
database it will become an open resource.
This information has been shared with me
and I plan to share it with as many people
as I can. Does it make me nervous trying
to commercialise something that’s been
around a lot longer than we have? No,
because I’m not commercialising it for my
own benefit; I’m doing it for Indigenous
Australians. To get there, we need to keep
telling a story of place and people. I can’t
complete this in my lifetime. But I’ll be
able to pass this on as something that will
keep going on, and giving back, forever. ●“Native thyme being in the supermarket is great, but at
the price it’s at it’s not going to help anyone. It has to
be as easy and affordable to pick up as basil or parsley.”INTERVIEW MAGGIE SCARDIFIELD. PHOTOGRAPHY SCOTT HAWKINS (RIBERRIES) & JAMES KNOWLER (PORTRAIT)
GOURMET TRAVELLER 89