Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  The flat rocks used to make cakes or breads are also difficult to recognise unless you look for them specifically. Rocks are often dusty, and that layer of dust helped seal foods and stopped them sticking to the rock, as did the natural oil in many of the seed and nut pastes. Fruit might be mixed with the starches extracted from a wide range of plants, then baked on the hot rocks, or starches made into a kind of porridge cake mixed from crushed kurrajong or other seeds, sweetened with honey. Waterlily, bulrushes and other plants gave large amounts of pollen which was also used as a basis for cakes and breads.

  As well as being baked in ground ovens, or baked on a spit over coals, or softened and ‘cooked’ in acid fruit pulp, fish was also cooked on a platform of green branches propped up over the coals of a fire – much more delicious than baking, which can dry out the flesh, or frying, which can toughen it.

  Smaller animals – the kind caught by women and children, like snakes, lizards and small birds, also needed no cooking implements beyond a small knife/scraper, though they did need skill. Snakes had to be stretched over a fire, and kept reasonably taut until the reflex movements after death stopped. They were then put on the ground, the belly sliced and the guts scooped out, and the head and neck cut off. Then cuts were made near each vertebrae, deep into the flesh. The snake could then be rolled up, a bit like a long coiled sausage, and cooked on hot, but not red hot, coals, turning several times so it cooked evenly. Goannas also needed their entrails removed, and their poison glands. An experienced cook could remove these through the goanna’s mouth, so that ash or sand wouldn’t adhere to the cut and make the meat gritty.

  It was even easier to cook a flying fox, and as flying foxes mostly only eat foods that aren’t toxic to humans, like blossom and fruit, their entrails needn’t be removed. The fur was singed off over the fire as they were held by the wings, then the wing membranes cut out, then they were roasted in their skin at the edge of the fire.

  Nor were there easily recognisable purpose-built Indigenous food storage areas, like cellars. In arid country many hundreds of kilos of grain and dried fruits would be parched – dried – and stored in caves, hollow trees, in baskets or bags made from skins or intestines or wooden containers. Nardoo flour was stored in woven bags, hung from trees. In wetter, forested areas bunya nuts were stored in giant pits and dried fruit in woven bags, loosely woven so the fruit could dry out if the ran wet it. Wooden and woven containers also held dried eggs or tubers that had been grated and then dried to powder or made into cakes. Fish, eels and whale meat were smoked and dried, hung from lines and stored in baskets hung from trees. European food-storage areas were defensible, in cellars or storerooms that could be locked or bolted. Indigenous emergency supplies needed only preservation, not defence.

  Even the cooking tools that were carried from camp to camp and used by generations of women may be hard to recognise: the small handled knives and grinding tools that fit snugly into a woman’s small hand, the fine-crafted hardwood digging sticks, with fire-hardened tips, up to two metres long. I used a digging stick instead of a spade in my vegetable garden for more than a decade – exactly what was needed for planting seedlings, or digging up a few carrots without bending down – until a guest tossed it into the fire, thinking it was kindling. It was perhaps the best gardening and farming tool I have ever used, but unrecognisable unless you had been shown what it was capable of.

  The food we still don’t see

  When you are used to orchards of neat rows of trees, two or three native figs, some tussocks and a carpet of flowers near a waterhole don’t look like farming. But if ‘mobile agriculture’ was hard to recognise, so were many, or even most of the foods harvested by Indigenous women. They still are.

  ‘Bush tucker’ has only been popularised in the past three decades. Even now, few Australians could name a dozen native fruits (there are hundreds, possibly thousands), and probably no native grains, tubers or spices. Despite being part of the gardening/plant loving community, I have only met a handful of non-Indigenous people who can look at a patch of relatively untouched bush and think ‘Look at all the food’. Even those who can are usually expert in only a small part of Australia’s varied ecologies. To be a botanical anthropologist you need to know not only botany and anthropology, but also be intimate with the area you are studying. The latter takes years or even decades to understand, even with good teachers, as the plants and productivity of the land can vary in seasons that may be years or decades long.

  Many traditional foods are so foreign to modern and colonial Australian culture that their contribution and lore have been ignored, apart from a few like bogong moths, ‘witchetty grubs’ (a catch all name for many different larvae, as long as it’s fat, white and wriggling) and ant ‘honey’. As I write this, the sweet white sacks of condensed ‘lerp honey’ are ripe, each about the size of a sultana, the leaves falling to the ground so thickly that it takes about ten minutes to fill a cup. It’s time to dig the wombat berry tubers, leaving enough for the vine to keep growing, and the orchid tubers (but I won’t, as they are now protected), and a dozen other seasonal foods, like bee and termite larvae – a bit like the modern supermarket’s ‘on special, this week only’.

  These can all be made into dishes that Westerners will enjoy – as long as you don’t tell them what they are eating. It has taken more than two hundred years for kangaroo and emu meat to gain limited acceptance, despite their similarity to beef and chicken. I doubt there will ever be wombat berry tubers in the supermarket, and not just because the harvesting season is so short, and in dry years there should be no harvest at all. Our culture already has a wide variety of cultivated tubers, and a new offering would need to be not just good to eat, but have some major health or taste benefit to be worth attempting to market.

  Few Australians even know that Australia has many species of native bee. Even fewer would be prepared to eat bee larvae, as well as bee honey. Possibly the one species that has really thrived since colonial settlement are possums, but although many suburbanites are happy to trap them and relocate them (which usually leads to a lingering death for fiercely territorial possums), even those who countenance their destruction wouldn’t eat them.

  Most of the deliberately cultivated living larder has also been destroyed by settlement. The murrnong was the staple food over most of eastern New South Wales and Victoria, a bright yellow flower that early explorers said carpeted the ground to the horizon. It’s sweet, starchy and prolific – ten minutes’ digging will feed a family for a day. Sheep and feral pigs and goats, in particular, will seek them out, though they can survive light stocking, especially if they are protected by fallen trees or on near-vertical banks. Tens of thousands of hectares of native millet and other grain-bearing species have been replaced by introduced grasses that provide more feed for cattle or sheep. Waterways have been dammed, contaminated and their water taken for irrigation, removing the vast harvests of native waterlily, bulrushes, water chestnuts, as well as the massive catches of giant fish like Murray cod, freshwater mussels and other plenitude from waterways.

  But there is a more profound reason why the contribution of Indigenous women to the ‘natural’ landscape has been ignored: you need to know the land and its plants well to recognise it. Colonial settlers lived on meat, golden syrup and damper, suffering nutritional disease like Barcoo rot and scurvy in the midst of a vast richness of indigenous grains, tubers and fruits. An outsider here, looking at the mountain slope, just sees ‘the bush’. Only someone who can recognise thousands of species will even see the patchwork of hundreds of interlocking niche ecologies. You can’t understand the significance of kurrajong ‘signposts’ unless you can tell what a kurrajong coppice looks like among the eucalypt trees from several kilometres away.

  Utilising a living larder is far more complex than learning how to plant apple or lemon trees, water and feed them, spray for pests, then pick and eat the fruit. If you want to learn the ecologically sustainable way to harvest kurrajong roots, n
ative bee larvae or the other native foods and useful plants in this valley, you need to know not just thousands of species but also the different times and ways those species will fruit, flower and send out seedlings or root systems in years that can range from ten millimetres of rain in eleven months to 575 millimetres in a single day, both of which I have experienced here. Other years, decades and even centuries have been even more extreme.

  Most visitors here look at the ground and see grass. In fact there are at least forty species of ground cover in every few square metres, and probably more I haven’t identified or that are only noticeable in extremes of drought or wet, when some plants do well as others become dormant. You need years of studying the land to even begin to understand how Indigenous women manipulated it.

  Huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’

  But even the first colonials could recognise that Indigenous men contributed by hunting, even if the burning and hunting techniques were misunderstood. Europeans had come from a culture where hunting, shooting and fishing were admired, whether legally by a gentleman or on someone else’s land by a skilled poacher.

  Ask a kid what Indigenous people ate and they’ll probably tell you kangaroos.

  But in my area, as in many parts of Australia that have more wallabies than roos, kangaroo was a small, infrequent part of the diet, and wallaby even less so due to its tougher, gamier texture. Many of the clan would even have been unable to eat kangaroo meat because of its kinship associations.6 (Others would have been unable to eat other foods, for similar reasons, but this is an area that is complex to explain, nor do I have the right to explain it.) Possum, which also provides superb soft, warm fur, is tastier, and relatively easy and fast to catch if you look for possum scratches on a tree and know where the possum is sleeping. But possums were caught and skinned by women and children.

  Duck was another staple food here – early settlers claimed there were so many you could shut your eyes, shoot into the air, and six would fall down as your shot scattered. But duck catching, too, was women’s work. Fish were another staple – like today, most Indigenous settlement follows the coast or inland river systems. In these days of overfishing, over irrigation and pollution, we often forget just how rich our waterways used to be in fish. Permanent stone fish traps, or temporary stringybark ones, catch large numbers of fish with little work. Fish flesh is also more easily flaked then dried or smoked as ‘travel food’ than kangaroo, which needs to be thinly sliced before it’s dried or it will become flyblown or rot.

  It is also surprisingly heavy to carry a dead kangaroo back several kilometres to camp. Once you’ve got it there you need to butcher it for fast cooking, or slice off bits as they cook while the kids are clamouring for dinner. Anecdotally, cooking the result of a roo hunt was a chore. As one woman told me, ‘It’s no good waiting all day for the men to bring the meat back – you get something else to feed the kids.’

  Roo hunts were a bit like modern football games: a way for blokes to get together and show off their skill and fitness, then congratulate each other afterwards. Spearing food is dramatic, but it’s also less efficient than many other ways of getting dinner. The kangaroo hunts were as much ceremonial as sport, often with men from several clans gathering to work out hunting strategy. Sometimes exceptional runners would take it in turns to run after the roos, with new runners waiting at points where they knew the roos would likely pass, keeping pace with them until the roos were exhausted. This needed not just knowledge of the roos’ likely behaviour, but speed and stamina. At other times the spear holders would neither run nor walk. As other hunters drove the small mobs of roos into one larger mob, the spear holders would wait downwind so the animals didn’t catch their scent, each waiting hunter standing on one leg to blind the roos to the characteristic ‘two-legged’ human stance, holding their faces side-on and eyes half-closed, looking sideways or upwards so their close-together predators’ eyes were less noticeable. The roo hunts were more like the Olympic Games, but with a far deeper social and spiritual complexity, than a modern bloke in a ute, poking his firearm through the window and going ‘bang’.

  I have lost count of the number of farmers who have told me that ‘shrubby regrowth’ shows that the land needs to be burnt. In our area, at least, wallabies ate the young trees and shrubs, and so kept the land ‘cleared’, not fire. Shoot the wallabies and you get regrowth.

  * * *

  How a woman catches a duck

  Indigenous women didn’t just ‘gather’ food. They also hunted and fished, but without the drama of men’s spear hunts. Turtles and echidnas follow certain routes at different times of the year. Snakes, bees, goannas, possums, water dragons, fat wonga pigeons, bettongs, bandicoots and ducks return to certain spots according to the time of day. In mid-summer, in the pools of our creek, for example, ducks fly back from the grassy areas where they’ve been grazing at about 4.30 p.m. in late spring, when the shadow begins to cover the valley. (This time is area and seasonally specific - different duck species and different ecosystem niches will mean different times for returning to water at different times of the year.)

  Mrs Meredith7 described women catching ducks of the Murray River in the 1840s by spreading a net over the water before the ducks returned for the night. The women gathered in strategic places to drive the ducks towards the net then threw pieces of bark over their heads to make the ducks land on what they thought was safe water, instead of flying away. Their legs became tangled in the net and the catch could be hauled in. But a single woman could catch a duck - or even two or three - by herself.

  Slide into the water gently, so you don’t disturb algae or waterweed - ducks will notice any disturbance. Sink under the water. Use a hollowed reed to breathe; you won’t need to wait long. As the duck lands and begins to paddle above you, grab a leg, haul down, then swim up to the air. Breathe deeply and pull the duck’s head sharply so the neck snaps. Carry your duck to shore. Bake it in hot ashes - the feathers will singe away and the guts shrink.

  * * *

  The myth that the land must burn

  Firestick farming as undertaken by Indigenous men was and is equally misunderstood, and usually vastly overestimated in the area that was burnt, the severity of the burning, and its contribution to food supply.8 It involved lighting small controlled fires to encourage new, young, nutritious grass tips for kangaroos (who don’t like long shaggy grass) and bowerbirds, or so that flocks of cockatoo would come to dig up the grass roots, or goannas to feast on the flesh of rotting burnt animals. All these would in turn feed the tribes responsible for the fires. The second motivation was to burn back shrubby regrowth and make walking easier, or to trigger the blooming of ground orchids and other plants with roots that were good to eat or had medicinal or other uses. Small fires every few years made selected patches of land different: instead of the whole bush being green or dry, or all the wild plums fruiting at once, it could be managed to harvest different bits at different times.

  This sounds simple. It isn’t. There is no ‘one size fits all’ fire management strategy that works for the whole continent, or even for areas a few kilometres apart. Each area, and each year, had its own fire regime, with many variables taken into account. Yet forestry departments, National Parks and Wildlife and bushfire brigades are now encouraged to ‘control burn’, justified as a modern form of Indigenous firestick land management, with little or no specialised knowledge of which areas need to be burnt, when, and in what way.

  Firestick farming is complex. Land wasn’t burnt every year, nor was it burnt at the same time of the year. (Modern ‘control burning’ is almost invariably done in late winter and spring.) You had to know the right time to burn: in some regions or small patches that was every few years, in others only when so many blossoms set seed on the black wattle trees (Acacia mearnsii) and the gang-gang cockatoos arrived to eat them that you knew a hot, dry year was coming, and you had to burn more to stop big fires next year.

  Many areas, like our ‘neverbreak’
(Backhousia myrtifolia) dry rainforest or the nearby plumwood (Eucryphia moorei) forests, and most forests that have – or once had – a fern understorey were never firestick farmed, and should never be if the forest is to survive. If those forest types are burnt then the trees and their associated shrubs and sub-shrubs and ground covers may be replaced by species that have evolved to cope with repeated fires and burn all too well, their seeds only ripening after a fire. But a fire-dependent ecosystem may need burning at least every decade so that seeds can germinate in the heat of the fire, or even more often after two or three wet years.

  Few members of bushfire brigades, or even the officials who order the burns, could explain the differences between fire-sensitive, fire-resistant and fire-dependent ecosystems. There is a general flattening out of understanding, an over-simplification of the ‘Australian bush recovers from fire’ type that is trotted out after every bushfire, without any recognition that different species and ecosystems have completely different relationships with fire and wildfire.

  So called ‘controlled’ burning has created fire-dependent forests. Ironically, large parts of Australia are now far more prone to bushfire, all in the name of trying to reduce it. Once you have created a fire-dependent landscape, it does need burning to reduce the fuel load. But even in these areas the wrong kind of burning increases the risk of uncontrolled bushfire, it doesn’t decrease it. In fire-dependent areas, burning in the wrong way and at the wrong time can leave dead wood that will make a bushfire burn hotter, as well as encourage grass growth that may dry like tinder in summer.

  ‘The bush’ is not homogenous. Even in a small area of, say, fifty hectares there may be several forest types, with different burning regimes needed to maintain them. Most fire agencies try to control burn on a regional basis, ticking off a certain number of hectares each year. In doing so they are making the bushfire danger far greater, creating larger areas that burn easily because the only plants that survive are the fire-dependent ones that burn hard, fast and often.