ANY EXPLORATION OF ancestral foodways should begin with the native Australians. They provide us with a unique example of an isolated Paleolithic population, one that existed on the hunter-gatherer’s lean-meat, grainless diet, without the practice of agriculture or animal domestication. They occupied temporary shelters and prepared their foods in the most primitive way; in short, they lived the life of the primitive nomad, wandering across the face of the earth. It was a life that was necessarily nasty, brutish and short.
An Australian government website asserts that the Aboriginal people in Australia lived by “roaming their vast continent in search of animals and eating seeds and roots of plants for survival… Foraging parties gathered enough food for their immediate needs and food was not often stored.”1
According to this point of view, the Australian native survived because he lived on a continent blessed with abundance. Early colonists from Europe, who began arriving in Australia in 1788, described a land teeming with life, with soil of unusual loamy lightness and kangaroo grass so high as to conceal the sheep and cattle of the first settlers. Orchids, lilies and mosses flourished in the fertile ground. The settlers were astonished at the beauty of the country, which they considered completely natural and accidental. According to the early settler and diarist Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell, writing in 1839, “We crossed a beautiful plain; covered with shining verdure, and ornamented with trees, which, although ‘dropt in nature’s careless haste,’ gave the country the appearance of an extensive park.”2 Many other settlers noted that the land had the appearance of landscaped park, where tracts of pasture alternated with belts of timber in an artistic fashion, very pleasing to the eye.3
This beautiful continent abounded with fish and wildlife of every sort. “Newcomers commented endlessly on plains rich with life, skies dark with birds, seas black with fish… Kangaroos very numerous and easily caught… Newcomers heard possums grunting and saw glider possums flying.”4
In the early 1840s, colonist Angus McMillan saw a lake “alive with swans, ducks and pelicans… The country was absolutely swarming with kangaroos and emus… In all ordinary seasons… they can obtain in two or three hours, a sufficient supply of food for the day. Even in the desert, people got food in four to five hours per day.”*5
The problem with these descriptions of the native Australians is that they are misleading, if not completely wrong. The Aboriginal peoples did not live haplessly in a land fortuitously blessed by abundance; rather, through wise and ingenious land management, they created the landscape and the abundance that so amazed the European interlopers. And far from existing on a meager, dry diet of nuts, vegetables and lean meat, the Aborigines enjoyed a wide and varied diet that included everything from fatty animal food to grain flour made into cakes!
AGRICULTURE, PARTICULARLY THE cultivation of grain, is defined as the cultivation and breeding of plants and animals by largely sedentary human beings, thereby producing food surpluses that can be stored between harvests and for times of famine. Agriculture encompasses the domestication of animals, selection of seed, preparation of the soil, harvesting of crops, storage of surplus and water management. It requires large populations living in permanent housing. Contrary to the claims of paleo-diet enthusiasts, the Aboriginal Australians did all these things, a fact that emerges from a careful review of early colonial diaries, but one only reluctantly accepted by mainstream anthropologists.
“The whole country looks as if it had been carefully ploughed, harrowed, and finally rolled,” wrote the colonist John McKinlay in 1861.6 In crossing the Australian frontier, Thomas Mitchell marveled, “The grass is pulled… and piled in hayricks, so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field… we found the ricks or hay-cocks extending for miles… the seed is made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread. Dry heaps of this grass, that has been pulled expressly for this purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest.”7 In 1845, the colonist Charles Sturt saw harvested grain spread out in a “boundless field of stubble.”8
On Cooper Creek in east central Australia, the natives reaped millet from fields of one thousand acres. According to settler Augustus Greghory, “The natives cut it down by means of stone knives, cutting down the stalk half way, beat out the seed, leaving the straw which is often met with in large heaps; they winnow by tossing seed and husk in the air, the wind carrying away the husks. The grinding into meal is done by means of two stones.”9
At times the Aborigines harvested through the use of fire. According to one settler, “Fire was set to the grass which was full in the ear yet green. While the fire was burning, the natives kept turning the grass with sticks all the time to knock the seeds out. When this was done, the fire burnt out, they gathered up the seed into a big opossum rug.”10
IN ADDITION TO MILLET, the Aborigines cultivated a native wheat, oats, rye and bull Mitchell grass, which produced, according to botanist Fred Turner, “ears nearly six inches in length, well filled with a clean-looking, firm grain, which separates easily from the chaff.”11 Moreover, they also cultivated and harvested rice. One explorer-driver found two granaries, “one with about a ton of rice seed stored there in large dishes.”12
So the Aboriginal peoples grew grain—lots of grain—which they harvested, winnowed, stored, soaked, ground into flour and baked into cakes. The Aboriginal grain belt stretched from east to west across the continent, with a wide band through the desert interior, whereas today modern agriculture only succeeds in growing grain in the wetter areas of southeast and southwest Australia.13 The evidence indicates that the peoples of arid central Australia engaged in seed propagation, irrigation, harvest, storage and trade of seed across the region.14 Several explorers and commentators witnessed grain traded to distant relatives in small sealed parcels.15 In an 1860 expedition to the unexplored interior of eastern Australia, the Irish soldier John King found a store of grain estimated at four tons.16
Grindstones have turned up in Cuddie Springs, New South Wales and at Kakadu in the Northern Territory. In the 1940s, the explorer Hamilton Hume observed that “on the Darling [River] the Natives gather grain from the wild oats… and grind it between two stones and make a paste and eat it, the same is done by the Natives to the northward.”17
The practice of agriculture includes the manipulation of grains through selection for desirable traits. When plants become “domesticated” as the result of a human-induced selection regime, they undergo changes in form and structure to such an extent that the plants become dependent on humans for the continuance of their life cycle. These changes include a tendency to ripen simultaneously and the development of a tough rachis,* which allows man to harvest the seed. Harvesting and winnowing techniques also contribute to changes in seed characteristics.
Aboriginal grains exhibited these qualities, and native seed-selection techniques were similar to those that led to the domestication of wild wheat and barley in Europe. According to some researchers, the tough rachis developed within just twenty to thirty years of this cropping style, to the extent that the grains required watering for germination to occur.18 Aboriginal grains became dependent on the interventions of the Aborigines.
Grains grown in arid regions require water, and evidence of extensive irrigation systems and man-made wells is scattered throughout the desert areas of Australia. The Airaduri people in New South Wales built large dams to store water. Stories of ancestors teaching their people about selecting seed, sowing it and building dams are common in the grain areas.19
Many colonists saw dams and irrigation trenches, and even saw such structures in the process of construction: “The people would get in a line, using their digging scoops and larger coolamons.† The clay and earth was scooped into the larger coolamons, which were passed along the line.… with a line of people working the deepening of the favoured catchment area and the building of the bank could be done at the same time. When it was satisfactorily excavated, the people would trample the clay base. If ant nest material was nearby this was carried and trampled in to give a very firm base.”20
A dam wall in the Bulloo River floodplain in southwest Queensland was over three hundred feet long, six feet high, and almost twenty feet at its base. The earthen embankment across the catchment of several streams was capable of holding almost two hundred thousand gallons.21 A site in the Great Western Desert was estimated to hold over forty thousand gallons. In fact, today’s empty and forbidding desert regions once hosted a considerable population of Aboriginal tribes, engaged in grain production without any degrading impact on the environment. As one commentator observed: “Desert is a term Europeans use to describe areas where they can’t grow wheat and sheep.”22
The great advantage of Aboriginal crops was their development for harsh conditions through seed selection, direct planting and weeding. Many of the grains grew on sand and required a minimum of irrigation. They also had a very high nutritional value.23
Evidence of widespread and large-scale grain production by the “primitive” people in Australia makes it clear that the Aboriginal people were not reacting to the whims of nature, but directly affecting its production.24 In Australia, the lines between the passive adaptation of the hunter-gatherer and exertive activities of the agriculturalist were blurred or even nonexistent.
While not all Aboriginal peoples cultivated and stored grain, the testimony of explorers indicates that most native Australians were, at the very least, in the early stages of an agricultural society and even ahead of many other parts of the world25—all without the advantages of metals, the wheel or domesticated beasts of burden.
THE ABORIGINES CULTIVATED many other species of plant foods besides grains, especially in areas of abundant rainfall. The east coast of Australia alone provides 250 species of edible plants, including tubers such as yams and grass potatoes, fern roots, palm hearts, legumes, nuts, seeds, shoots, leaves and a wide variety of fruits such as figs and berries.26
Chief among these was the murnong, or yam daisy, a native dandelion, which flourished with the help of human cultivation in areas blessed with moisture. In 1836, one settler saw “a vast extent of downs… quite yellow with murnong” and “natives spread over the field, digging for roots.”27
The murnong seed does not last in the soil, so crops need continuous mature plants, yet “millions” grew in southeast Australia. Where women dug them, for mile on mile the ground looked plowed. The native women burned the grass to better see the roots. One settler met “open grassy country, extending as far as we could see, hills round and smooth as a carpet, meadows broad, and either as green as an emerald, or of a rich golden colour, from the abundance, as we soon afterwards found, of a little ranunculus-like flower… We went on our way rejoicing.”28
Soon after the arrival of the Europeans in 1788, the yam daisy disappeared. According to colonist Isaac Batey, writing in 1846, “Where once abundant they have become quite extinct for the district where the writer was raised… [Today] they might be searched without discovering a solitary example… Elsewhere it has been intimated that our domestic animals had eaten them out, yet there was another factor of destruction in the soil becoming hardened with the continuous tramping of sheep, cattle or horses.”29 The flat feet of kangaroos were much gentler on the fragile soils of Australia!
Settler Edward Page observed, “When I first came here I started a vegetable garden, the soil dug like ashes.” He described the soil as “a spot free of timber or scrub of any description, the soil reddish loam of great depth.”30
Another important food plant was the nardoo or swamp fern, which grew in beds of shallow lakes. John Davis, an early settler, reported on the vast quantities of nardoo seed* waiting to be harvested on the dry floor of Lake Coogiecoogina in the Strzeleck Desert.31 The Aborigines stored the nardoo seed and flour in ingenious vermin-proof vessels.32 The nardoo is poisonous without careful preparation, a task that generally fell to the women.
The desert raisin or bush tomato comes from a small desert plant that grows naturally in many Australian dry areas. A species of tomato, the bushes grow quickly after summer rains, particularly after bushfires. The fruit provided food for the indigenous desert dwellers of central Australia for many thousands of years. The traditional harvesting method involves collecting the sun-dried fruit in the autumn and winter months. In dried form, the desert raisins can be stored for several years.
Another staple from desert regions was the quandong, a fruit of the semiparasitic quandong tree. Ripe red quandong fruits provided tasty treats whether eaten raw or dried for later use. Women collected the quandong fruit in coolamons, separated the edible fruit from the pitted stone, and then rolled the edible fruit into a ball.
Also in arid regions, spinifex grass produced large quantities of edible seed at certain times of the year. Edible fungus (morabudi), which the natives enjoyed both raw and cooked, was another desert bounty.
Onion grass provided flavoring for meat and grains. It was deftly harvested by the women, who would dig a trench at the edge of the patch, then work in a line, turning over the ground as they moved forward. Many early explorers witnessed this cultivation process and recognized its efficacy.33
The cumbungi, or bulrush, is a troublesome weed found in farm dams, creeks, ponds and slow-moving rivers, but for the natives it provided an abundant source of carbohydrates. Meal made from the cumbungi rush was similar to flour or potato meal. According to Thomas Mitchell, cakes made from the cumbungi flour “were lighter and sweeter than those made from common flour.”34 He observed huge mounds dotting the reed marshes near Swan Hill, which housed villages within the swamp to manage and harvest this valuable plant. Settlers were intrigued by these massive mounds and the fact that they were emitting steam. Upon examination, the mounds proved to be gigantic ovens for cooking cumbungi.35 Thomas Mitchell described “the lofty ash hills of the natives, used chiefly for roasting the balyan (or bulrush)” and was astonished at the volume of starch produced.
One of the most remarkable sources of food for the Aborigines in eastern Australia was the mountain bunya pine. Once every three years, these huge trees bore enormous quantities of cones, the largest of which contain seeds over one inch long. Every third year, many tribes would travel to the Bunya Bunya festival—one of the few times when they were permitted to cross the boundaries of other tribes. The harvest was so plentiful that thousands could live for several weeks off the seeds. The nuts are described as having a delicious taste, something like roasted chestnuts.36 The kernels were also pounded into a meal and baked in the ashes as a cake. The Aborigines stored bunya nuts by placing them in large cane baskets and burying them in a particular kind of mud. When exhumed—after many months of lying in the ground—the nuts had an offensive smell but nevertheless served as a popular food.37
Other trees that played an important role in Aboriginal culture included the many varieties of acacia, which provided flowers used in making sweet drinks, grubs collected from their trunks and roots, and bark used as a fish poison. Mangrove trees, which grew in freshwater swamps, or billabongs,* provided fruit and also harbored many creatures in their complex root systems: mangrove worms, freshwater oysters, mussels and crabs. Salt was collected from their leaves.38 Gum trees or eucalyptus harbored grubs, beehives, koalas and possum, as well as a tasty insect exudate called lerp. Even galls that formed on their trunks were eaten. Some flowers provided nectar to make a sweet drink called bool by one tribe of Aborigines. The ribbon gum tree was a rich source of manna, a crumbly white substance with a pleasant taste, which exudes from the bark. As much as forty pounds could be collected from trees in one day.39 Eucalyptus leaves were used to make herbal medicines, while the trees’ gum could be used to fill the occasional dental cavity.40 Melaleuca, or paperbark, tree flowers provided an ingredient for sweet drinks. More important, their bark was used in everything from cooking to canoe production. In short, far from wandering haplessly across the landscape, the Aboriginals nourished themselves from a complex web of cultivated food sources.
THE NUMEROUS AND varied aboriginal food preparation and storage techniques turned plants and seeds that were inherently inedible into foods that sustained life. Aboriginal women spent many hours washing, grinding, pounding, straining, grating, boiling and cooking plant foods. Bark troughs or large sea shells served as vessels for boiling water.41 Tubers were stored in holes in the ground; bunya nuts were soaked in water or buried in bags; cycads were sliced, dried, wrapped in paperbark and buried in grass-lined trenches; water-lily corms were dried and stored; and portulaca were wrapped in mud, baked and stored—these methods made foods that were poisonous, bitter, or difficult to digest into nutritious bush tucker.
Most Australians today know about the poisonous nardoo seeds, which contain thiaminase, an enzyme that depletes the body of vitamin B1 (thiamin). The nardoo seeds require careful sluicing, pounding, winnowing and baking in order to neutralize their thiaminase content and make them edible. The explorers Burke and Wills, who set about crossing the interior of Australia in 1860, died after consuming a diet of nardoo seed, a staple of the Aboriginal people.* Their symptoms indicated that they died of thiamin deficiency, known as beriberi, because they did not prepare the seeds in accordance with aboriginal food preparation methods. Despite eating plenty of food, the men got weaker and weaker. Wills wrote in his diary: “My pulse is at forty-eight and very weak and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out like Mr. Micawber for something to turn up, but starvation on nardoo is by no means unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move oneself, for as the appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction.”42
Very often, the first step in the time-consuming process of plant preparation was the “yandying” process, used by women to separate seeds from stalks and other impurities with which they had been gathered. The process looks deceptively simple but is, in fact, extremely difficult, requiring deft movements and a great deal of skill. The gathered seeds are placed in a coolamon, and the various objects of differing density or characteristics are separated from each other by intricate and skillful rotating and jiggling movements.43
Fern roots formed a meal staple in many regions. Before enjoying them as food, the women dug them up, washed them, roasted them on hot ashes, cut them into lengths and pounded them between a pair of round stones. Other types of fern roots were dried in the sun, lightly roasted to remove the hair rootlets, peeled with the fingernails, chopped on a log to break the fibers, mixed with water and other ingredients, and finally rounded into a lump for cooking. These fern root cakes accompanied fish, meat, crabs or oysters.44
The grass potato is a palatable fibrous root that was roasted and then pounded between two stones before eating. Some foods, such as orchid pseudobulbs, were dried first, then ground, mixed with water, and cooked. Yams were dug out with a stick—sometimes from a depth of three feet or more—and prepared by crushing and washing them in water and cooking them in ashes.45
Grain and legume preparation began with placing the seeds in “dilly bags” or leaching baskets and putting them in running water for anywhere from a number of hours to many days—a process that serves to remove the antinutrients and toxins found in many grains and legumes. The matchbox bean, for example, got a twelve-hour soaking,46 while the jack bean was soaked for several days, then pounded, made into cakes and roasted.47 Seeds of the zamia, a spiky, palmlike plant, were dried in the sun, then put in a dilly bag and suspended in running water for four to five days. Further processing involved crushing and pounding between two flat stones, grinding into a fine paste, wrapping the paste in paperbark, and baking under ashes.48 Seeds of the pineapple palm were crushed into a flour, then washed in running water for a week and cooked in hot ashes.49 Black beans were soaked in water for eight to ten days and dried in the sun. Then came roasting on hot stones, pounding into a coarse meal, mixing with water to make a thin cake, and then baking again on hot stones.50
Nuts from spiky pandanus (screw pine), which cling to the rocky headlands in eastern Australia, required six weeks of treatment to render them safe for eating. They were converted into a tasty and nutritious nut bread that was popular with the earliest European settlers.51 Pandanus (screw pine) and burrawang (cycad) nuts went through stringent sluicing and immersion treatments to remove poisonous alkaloids. The roasted and pounded burrawang flesh needed two to three weeks of soaking to remove toxins.
As for fruit, the Australian flora provided many delicious and nutritious delicacies throughout the year, particularly in the humid coastal regions. Some of these were eaten raw just after picking, while others were processed. The wild orange was picked just before it was ripe, then buried for one day, during which it would become very sweet. The wallaby apple was likewise ripened by placing it in the sand for a day.52 The taste of a type of wild plum improved after being stored or buried for a couple of days.53 The fruit of the quandong, or native peach, was buried for four days. Dried figs were pounded into cakes and eaten with honey. Mangrove fruit was pulped, soaked and mashed through a basket.54
The Aborigines also used fruits like tamarinds and native lime to make refreshing beverages.55 Acid drinks were made from the fruit of lawyer cane by squashing the fruit in water, and from breadfruit by soaking it in water.56 Certain flowers rich in nectar were gathered in the early morning and steeped in water, which was drunk fresh or set aside to ferment.57 Leaves of the red flowering ti tree were added to hot water to produce a tealike beverage.58
An agricultural nation requires storage of food surpluses. Numerous early diarists describe the preservation of everything from grains, quandong, figs, plums, tubers, seeds and nuts to caterpillars, moths, meat, liver, eggs, fish, fish oil and even mussels! Drying and pounding transformed caterpillars into a kind of flour. Figs and quandong were pulped and mixed to form a product like quince paste.59
Storage vessels made of clay, straw, leaves and even gypsum kept grain and other foods dry and vermin-free. Early explorers found stone chambers with tight-fitting stone plugs. In the Great Sandy Desert, the tribes harvested acacia and eucalyptus seed and covered them with spinifex grass for consumption later in the year. Foods required stockpiling before ceremonies attended by hundreds or even thousands of people. Bunya trees fruited so heavily that large stores were set aside. Grain stores of more than fifty kilograms sewn up in animal skins lasted for months in perfect condition. Hollow trees and rock wells also served for food storage.60
Strict protocols and religious observation governed cooking, storage and food handling methods. For example, if a woman damaged the yam leaves or bruised the tuber during harvest, penalties would apply. These rules ensured the propagation and proliferation of edible and otherwise useful plants, while the ancestral preparation traditions ensured that they were edible. Modern science validates these traditions and demonstrates the need for more careful preparation of many of the foods—especially grains and legumes—we eat today.
NEITHER SALTY NOR SWEET tastes were lacking in the Aboriginal diet. Salt was collected from leaves of the river mangrove and was available from the salt flats in desert regions. Roasted leaves of a sodium-rich desert succulent called pigface also added salt to the diet.61 Certain rushes and sedges, as well as seeds of the golden grevillea, some kinds of figs, the nonda plum and the bush tomato, contained reasonable amounts of sodium. Wild parsnip root and water chestnuts contain more than 4,500 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams.62 Animal foods also supplied sodium, especially blood and certain organ meats, as did the goanna lizard, shellfish, snails and worms.63 Ground seeds of the pepper vine added a peppery taste,64 and aromatic leaves provided variety in cooking.
For sweetness, the Aborigines loved honey. They distinguished between two kinds. One was white and very sweet, and always found in small dead hollow trees. The other was dark, more plentiful and of a somewhat sour taste. Lerp, the sweet insect exudate found on certain trees, was collected and chewed or melted with warm water to form a jelly.65 In the desert, the sweet taste came from eating the swollen abdomens of sugar ants. Children enjoyed tree gums dissolved in water and mixed with honey.66
Some tribes pounded flowers in a wooden dish, then drained the liquid into another dish and mixed this with the sugary parts of honey ants. The mixture was fermented for eight to ten days67—we have no descriptions of how it tasted or what effects it had!
THE CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA teemed with animal life, and the Aboriginals ate it all—starting with marsupials such as kangaroo, wallaby, the smaller pademelon, duck-billed platypus and bandicoot. As the Aboriginals put it, “There’s nothing like kangaroo to put strength into you.”68 Kangaroo rats, spiny anteaters, possums, koalas, bats, iguanas, lizards, frogs and snakes also provided nourishment. Bird life on the menu included emus, turkeys, swans, ducks, parrots, cockatoos, cassowaries and jabiru. Seafood including fish, shellfish, eels, turtles and shark. Sea mammals such as dugong and whale held an important place in the diets of seacoast tribes.
The traditional role for Aboriginal women was that of gatherer; they bore the responsibility for harvesting almost all plant foods, but also insects and shellfish. To the men went the duties of hunting large game, birds and fish. Early colonists described stores of fish meal and fish flour; many commodities, including caterpillars, witchetty grubs, grasshoppers, meat and liver, called for individual preparation prior to storage. Dried animal foods were often coated in the ashes of particular woods and later mixed with seed flour before cooking.
Aboriginal people generally hunted kangaroo in groups. A number of hunters would spread out to herd the animals toward a net stretched across a pocket in the forest or brush near the animals’ feeding area. Another group concealed itself near the net to catch the game with spears or clubs. In open country, they tracked and speared kangaroos while the animals were resting in the shade of a tree during the hot part of the day.69
An early settler has given us this description of a kangaroo hunt: “By the time the dew was dry on the grass and herbage—and they never hunt before—their spears were in readiness. Led by the chief, who took good care to keep me near him, they filed off into the scrub. A couple of miles brought us to a sudden halt. To my eye there was nothing visible, absolutely nothing. The native eye, and ear, and smell, have a keenness of perception of which civilized man knows nothing.* After a breathless pause of about two minutes, the chief raised his hand, making certain motions with his fingers, when the party flew off in different directions, while I was an admiring spectator of the strange maneuver. Presently they had formed a wide circle. Now they advanced a step or two. Then they were motionless as statues. Then they all moved a few steps again; and again were still; and all this while every eye seemed fixed on some central object which, to my unpracticed sight remained invisible. At length, however, I saw the game—two hundred kangaroo or more. The beautiful things were grazing among the scrub. They fed; the hunters advanced; they erected themselves to reconnoiter, and they of the chase were still.”70
A key weapon in the kangaroo hunt was the iconic boomerang, which Europeans first encountered at Farm Cove (Port Jackson), Australia, in December 1804, where they witnessed its use as a weapon during a tribal skirmish: “The white spectators were justly astonished at the dexterity and incredible force with which a bent, edged waddy resembling slightly a Turkish scimitar, was thrown by Bungary, a native distinguished by his remarkable courtesy. The weapon, thrown at twenty or thirty yards distance, twirled round in the air with astonishing velocity, and alighting on the right arm of one of his opponents, actually rebounded to a distance not less than seventy or eighty yards, leaving a horrible contusion behind, and exciting universal admiration.”71†
The Aborigines had ingenious ways of extracting nocturnal animals such as possum and koala—both prized foods—from their daytime resting places. They first detected the animal by its smell, claw marks or droppings, and then confirmed its presence by inserting a stick or frond tipped with honey into the hollow tree or log. If hairs stuck to the honey, they knew the animal was there. Then they either climbed the tree to drag out the animal or smoked it out of its resting place.
Bats such as the flying fox and grey glider were so numerous in certain places that they blocked out the stars and moon when they flew. Hunters caught them during the day as they slept in the scrub. Two or three people carrying about a dozen small clubs would climb trees where the bats were sleeping. Standing on branches, they would frighten the bats and throw the clubs at them as they flew away.72
Reptiles including goannas (iguanas), lizards, frogs and snakes also found a place in the Aboriginal diet, as did birds of all sizes—emus, turkeys, swans, ducks, parrots and cockatoos. To catch flying birds such as parrots, the Aborigines set nets across trees and then threw boomerangs above a passing flock. Thinking these were hawks, the birds would dive down and find themselves caught in the nets. In the summer, hunters captured ducks by submerging themselves up to their necks in water holes and holding small branches to hide their heads. When a duck came close, the hunter would grasp its legs and drown it.73
Thomas Mitchell greatly admired the Aboriginal nets: “The meshes were about two inches wide, and the net hung down to within five feet of the surface of the stream… Among the few specimens of art manufactured by the primitive inhabitants of these wilds, none come so near our own as the net, which, even in quality, as well as the mode of knotting, can scarcely be distinguished from those made in Europe.”74
One Queensland settler found a “kangaroo net fifty feet long and five and a half in width, made of as good twine as any European net.”75 Huge nets were used in combination with miles of brush fences or even stone walls. In central Victoria, a massive system of stone walls dates well before the period of European contact.76
During game drives, the hunters drove the animals across a twenty-mile front, an effort requiring the cooperation of several tribes and involving two thousand participants. The kangaroos were shunted into a series of holding pens where narrow apertures could direct animals designated for slaughter one way and those to be released in another. The hunters killed only the male animals, which kept overall population numbers high. Studies in South Australia found that the harvesting of ten thousand males a year over eight years led to an increase of animals from twenty to fifty per square kilometer. Emu harvests were conducted in the same way.77
Animal foods were generally cooked, either over an open fire or steamed in pits. Kangaroo, for example, was laid on a fire and seared for a short period so that the interior flesh remained practically raw; at other times, a kangaroo was placed in a large hole, surrounded by hot coals, and sealed from the air. Sometimes meat was wrapped in melaleuca bark. Flying fox bats were wrapped in the leaf of the Alexandra palm for cooking. When the bats were cooked, the leaves were unwrapped, pulling off the skin and fur at the same time.78 Raw meat was sometimes tenderized by pounding.
No studies of the Aboriginal peoples make mention of any special preparation of bones into pastes or broths, as is commonly found among other traditional peoples throughout the world. Weston Price reported that the Aborigines made lime by burning seashells in a large fire for three to four days; Price speculates that the lime was probably used in food preparation. Insects eaten whole and ground-up moths provided calcium, as did the many plant foods properly prepared to neutralize calcium-blocking phytic acid. And perhaps they got calcium from milk, too. One traditional Aboriginal woman reported that if hunters could capture a female kangaroo carrying a joey, tickling the inside of the pouch produced a prodigious amount of milk, which they consumed with relish!79
Aboriginal agriculture fits the description of “farming without fences.” Various tribes cooperated in hunting methods that ensured an abundance of large animal foods, but smaller animals easily conformed to domestication. Village dwellers reared dingos (wild dogs), possums, emus and cassowaries; penned pelican chicks and let parent birds fatten them; moved rats and caterpillars to new breeding areas; and carried fish and crayfish stock across the country.80
Another area of land management involved the creation of havens for insect populations. The resourceful Aboriginals cultivated witchetty grubs by piling logs many feet high. Oak trunks pushed into the creeks and rivers attracted teredo grubs and harbored them until ready to harvest in a year’s time. The task of harvesting this nutrient-dense food went to the women and old men.81 Aborigines also ringbarked or girdled candlenut trees, removing a strip of bark around the trunk to make the trunks rot. White grubs would feed on the decaying wood and were then served as food.82
ANTHROPOLOGISTS TODAY grudgingly admit that the Aboriginal diet abounded in animal foods; but they continue to insist that their bush tucker was lean. Today’s reigning medical paradigm holds that saturated animal fats—which are solid at room temperature—cause heart disease and many other ailments, while liquid polyunsaturated oils protect against these diseases. The discovery that traditional peoples consumed high levels of saturated animal fat—as much as they could get—while enjoying excellent health and freedom from heart disease poses a challenge to researchers at pains to impose political correctness on ancestral diets.
An example is a 1986 study published in the journal Lipids, titled “Animal foods in traditional Australian aboriginal diets: polyunsaturated and low in fat.” From the abstract we read:
Australian Aborigines develop high frequencies of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases when they make the transition to an urban lifestyle. The composition of the traditional diet, particularly its lipid components, is a most important aspect of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that would bear on the risk of these diseases. We have examined the fat content and fatty acid composition of a variety of animal foods eaten traditionally by Aborigines from different regions of Australia. The muscle samples of the wild animals from all over Australia were uniformly low in fat… with a high proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids… The results of these analyses suggest that even when the traditional Aboriginal diet contained a high proportion of animal foods it would have been low in fat with a high proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and thereby could have protected Aborigines against cardiovascular diseases and related conditions through a combination of factors: low energy density, low saturated fat and relatively high PUFA content.*83
What these commentators miss are patterns of selective eating; game was so plentiful in Australia that the Aboriginals could pick and choose the choicest parts of the animal. They also observed nature and knew when animals were fattest. Except in times of drought or famine, the Aborigines rejected kangaroos that were too lean—they were not worth carrying back to camp.84
Kangaroos were fat when the fern leaf wattle was in flower; possums were fat when the apple tree was in bloom. Aborigines prized the highly saturated kidney fat from the possum and often ate it raw.85 Other signs indicated when the carpet snake, kangaroo rat, mussels, oysters, turtles and eels were fat and at their best.86 Fat from the intestines of marsupials and emus were favorites, and the yellow fat of the goanna lizard was considered a delicacy.87 Aborigines prized the fatty organ meats. Dugongs and whales provided plentiful fat to natives on the coasts. They also ate eggs from reptiles and birds. Researchers have concluded that fatty smoked eel likely formed a basis of trade with other parts of Australia.†
One overlooked source of fat in the aboriginal diet is insects. Fifty to 60 percent of the weight of the dugong moth is fat. During the moth season, the natives collected these insects in vast numbers from rock crevices, swept into nets or whisked onto kangaroo skins. They were cooked in hot ashes for a short time until the wings and legs were singed away. They placed the moth carcasses on a bark platter until cool, then collected and sifted them in a net until the heads fell off. The body was eaten whole or ground into a paste and made into doughy cakes that were smoked to preserve them; or they were placed in an oven made of burning sand, covered up and cooked for a few minutes. Observers report that the cooked insects look like beautiful white kernels and have the flavor of marrow.88 Settlers witnessed the Aboriginals returning from the moth harvest in great health, their bodies glistening with moth fat.
Crows assembled to take part in the moth feast, and they too became fat and so intent on their hunt, the festival participants could knock them on the head and eat them—a great delicacy, as the meat was plump and aromatic after the birds’ diet of moth fat.
The witchetty grub, or moth larva, inhabits the rotting trunks of trees. These succulent treats—often over six inches long—were eaten both raw and cooked. Fat content of the dried grub is as high as 67 percent. The green tree ant was another source of valuable fat, with a fat-to-protein ratio of about twelve to one. Termites provided an additional source of fat.*
In contrast to the premise that the Aboriginal diet was low in fat, a most remarkable article appearing in the journal Lipids describes the “Fat, Fishing Patterns, and Health Among the Bardi People of North Western Australia.”89
According to the authors, the Aborigines considered foods lacking fat as “rubbish.” They fished for different species of fish when they had the most fat lining the intestines.† This fat was painstakingly removed, melted in a shell or tin can set on the coals, and then drunk or used as a dip for the flesh of the fish. The Bardi harvested rock oysters during spring tides; oysters taken at other times were “rubbish.” An analysis found that the oysters harvested during spring tides were four times richer in fat. Analysis of fat from fish guts and livers, from oysters, and from turtle meat, fat and organ meats found that the predominant fat was saturated fat.
The Bardi peoples were fond of turtle, but only if the meat was fat. They could tell when a turtle was fat by the configuration of the crease in the front leg. But what if they were hunting at night? No problem. They waited for the turtles to come up for air at the water’s edge and knew when the turtles were fat by the smell of their breath!
“THE ABORIGINALS WORKED the waterways of Australia with endless ingenuity,” wrote Bill Gammage in his fascinating book The Biggest Estate on Earth. “They made nets of European quality, the mesh and knot varied to suit the prey. Duck nets with floats of reed and sinkers of clay spanned the rivers; fish nets half a mile long circled tidal flats. On the coast and inland, thousands of weirs, dams and traps of stone, mud, brush or reeds made fishing easy. Permanent fences of stone, brush and stakes made zigzag patterns in the streams. Wicker gates or woven funnels let fish or crayfish upstream on in-tides and trapped them on the ebbs. Grass fronds laid over shallow edges gave fish shade and made them vulnerable to capture.”90
Specialized nets for particular fish and crayfish required skill and patience to construct. Some took three years to make and were almost nine hundred feet long. Sturt saw a 300-foot net “of the very finest craftsmanship” strung across the Darling River.91
John McDouall Stuart came across people fishing at brush weirs in the harshest parts of the country.92 Another method of capture involved adding certain poisonous plants to the water. When the fish rose to the surface, they could be speared or even captured by hand. Not that they needed poison to catch fish; according to Weston Price, “Their skill at fishing probably exceeds that of any other race. They are so highly trained in the knowledge of the habits of the fish and the type of movement that the fish transmits to the water and to the reeds in the water, that one of their important contests between tribes is to see how many fish can be struck in succession with a spear, the fish never being seen, their only information as to its whereabouts being the change in the surface of the water and movement of grasses that are growing in the water as the fish moves… The experts bring up a fish six times out of eight.”93
Settler James Kirby saw an automatic fishing machine near Swan Hill: “A [native] would sit near the opening and just behind him a tough stick about ten feet long was stuck in the ground with the thick end down. To the thin end of this rod was attached a line with a noose at the other end; a wooden peg was fixed under the water at the opening in the fence to which this noose was caught, and when the fish made a dart to go through the opening he was caught by the gills, his force undid the loop from the peg, and the spring of the stick threw the fish over the head” of the fisherman.*94
Thomas Mitchell witnessed massive fish traps on the Darling River at Brewarrina in New South Wales, which some claim are the oldest man-made structures on earth: one archeological team calculated their age at forty thousand years, and considered that to be a minimum.95 Witnesses who saw the system in operation in the early 1800s were astounded by the efficiency of the traps, the efforts employed to maintain breeding stock and the enormous harvest. And the Brewarrina trap was only one of hundreds of such systems. Large numbers of people depended on fishing traps along most inland rivers. The structures incorporated ingenious engineering features that withstood regular floods. A stone locking system fixed the trap to the bed of the stream; the arch and keystone were two elements contributing to their strength.96
These large-scale fishing operations required considerable economic and social organization. The traps allowed breeding stock to pass through so that upstream fisheries could gain a share. Particular families managed and used particular ponds in the system, but those families had responsibilities to ensure fish to the families and systems upstream and downstream from their location. The system was integrated and sustainable.97
In arid regions, the resourceful Aborigines relied on wells capable of collecting water. Settlers described well covers made from large slabs of stone ground down to fit neatly over the wells to prevent animals from polluting the water.98 In a remote area of South Australia, the colonist Charles Sturt found a well that was “twenty-two feet deep and eight feet broad at the top. There was a landing place… and a recess had been made to hold the water… Paths led from this spot to almost every point of the compass, and on walking along one came to a village consisting of nineteen huts… Troughs and stones for grinding seed were lying about… The fact of there being so large a well at this point (a work that must have required the united labour of a powerful tribe to complete) assured us that this distant part of the interior was not without inhabitants.”99
Of course, fresh, pure water was vital to the survival of the Aborigines, both in the subtropical coastal regions as well as in the arid interior. Except in times of extreme drought, the natives drank copious quantities of water. Researchers have found that “In one of the driest habitats on earth, these people use about twice as much water per unit of mass as Europeans in the same environment.” An adult Aboriginal male could drink almost three quarts of water in thirty-five seconds.100 During times of drought, they obtained water from water-holding frogs and from certain plants.101
Kangaroo-skin water bags served for carrying quite large volumes of water. Paradoxically, these were not used in the driest areas, perhaps because kangaroos are relatively rare in the desert, and the animal’s vital nutrients—particularly fat-soluble nutrients—are lost if it is not cooked in its skin.102 Up to a gallon of water could be carried in certain large leaves folded up in ingenious ways.
As for seafood on the coasts, many Europeans observed large organized fishing expeditions in canoes, rafts, outriggers and boats with small sails. The women dove to capture mutton fish or abalone* which they cooked in their shells on hot coals or removed and pounded until tender. Dried, pounded abalone could be stored in large quantities for festivals; it also served as an important article of trade for these tribes. And it was the women and their children who constructed and farmed extensive clam gardens.
Crayfish catching was men’s work; the men would swim to a reef and hang on to the kelp while feeling for crayfish feelers with their feet. Once they detected the feelers, they would dive down and grab them, pulling the crayfish from its cave.103
Most amazing are reports of Aboriginals fishing in partnership with dolphins—observed by Foster Evans, a police magistrate in Geelong, as well as others at many Australian beaches, including Moreton Bay. The dolphins drove the fish ashore to make catching them easy for the men.104
Similar practices characterized the long tradition of whale hunting off the coast of New South Wales. Several observers documented ritualized interaction with killer whales, which encouraged the mammals to herd larger whales into the harbor, where they would be driven into shallow water and harvested. The local tribe set up this interaction with the killer whales with a ceremony where a man would light two fires on the beach and pretend to limp between them as if he were old and frail. They believed that this encouraged the whales to take pity on the man and bring the bigger whales to the bay for his use.†105
SETTLERS WERE ASTOUNDED by the order and beauty of the Australian countryside. “The face of the country is such as to promise success whenever it shall be cultivated,” wrote one admirer. “The trees being at a considerable distance from each other and the intermediate space filled, not with underwood, but a thick rich grass growing in the utmost luxuriency.”106 Most attributed such artistry to “careless nature,” little suspecting—or rather, reluctant to acknowledge—the part the Aborigines played in creating the pleasing landscape.107 There were exceptions: Edward Curr, pioneer squatter on the Murray River wrote, “It may perhaps be doubted whether any section of the human race has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia.” He knew that linking “wandering savages” to widespread land management contradicted everything Europeans thought about “primitive” people. He deliberately defied the European belief that the Aborigines were wanderers barely touched the land and were playthings of nature.108
Along with the digging stick, the main Aboriginal land management tool was fire. Ethnobotanists are only beginning to appreciate the vital role that fire played in increasing the food supply of the Aborigines. Early explorers often reported Aboriginal land fires. Many of the important Aboriginal food plants require regular burning if they are to attain their maximum production. Some desert plants require more frequent burning than others, resulting in what many have described as a “mosaic” of plant communities, all in different stages of fire recovery.109
According to Bill Gammage, “Fire was used to shape the land… It was a major totem, a friend. People knew when to use it and when not to. They knew if they released it according to universal law and local practice it would do what they wanted. If it did not then they, not it, had offended… Like songlines,* fire unified Australia. It locked the landscape into long-term widespread patterns, because neighbours obeyed the same law, and coordinated their burning or non-burning.”†110
Fire management—where and when to burn, and how hot the fires should be—came under strict control of the elders. They avoided the growing season of particular plants at all costs and advised neighboring tribes of any fire activity. These skillful burn techniques were responsible for the look of the landscape—from open plains to small copses with clear forest floors to belts of trees gracefully alternating with pastureland, even cul-de-sacs into the untouched brush where small animals found shelter to breed and large animals like kangaroos could be corralled and killed.
The natives burned great tracts to make sure the grass would come up “green and sweet” with the first rains, and to drive out game for hunting purposes.111 Frequent fires explained the absence of underbrush that gave Australia its parklike appearance.
No species could threaten or overrun another. Too many animals or plants prompted open season; too few led to temporary bans. Settlers described massive slaughter of kangaroos* or huge piles of dead eels—the Aboriginal method of keeping various species in check when they became too numerous. By contrast, widespread law insisted that no plant that was bearing seed could be dug up after it had flowered.
Burning also helped maintain the desert, increasing dry-adapted vegetation. In areas that have been abandoned, where burning of the country is no longer carried out and where the water holes are not kept open by digging and clearing, animal and bird life have largely disappeared.112
Even the practice of abstaining from hunting and gathering in the area of sacred sites contributed to the overall ecology of the Aboriginal environment. Such sites served as sanctuaries for animal life. According to anthropologist P. K. Latz, “These areas would be vitally important for the long-term viability of an area as immediately after droughts they would be a source of plants and animals to restock depleted areas, thereby ensuring a more rapid recovery of the home range’s biota.”113
Another area of land management involved the creation of havens for insect populations. Oak trunks were pushed into the creeks and rivers to attract teredo grubs.114 Sometimes wood was piled many feet high, allowing the creation of a harvest in a year’s time.
The land required constant maintenance or it reverted back to wilderness, something the indigenous Australian detested. Land not burned was not “looked after.” Land not cared for was “dirty country.”115
According to Thomas Mitchell: “Where a man might gallop whole miles without impediment and see whole miles before him… the omission of the annual periodic burn by natives of the grass and young saplings has already produced in the open forest lands nearest to Sydney thick forests of young trees… Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there, the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives to burn the grass, nor is fire longer desirable among the fences of the settlers.”116
Without fire and with the introduction of sheep, the vast yellow fields of yam daisy disappeared. Without clearing the brush through fire, the country became threatened by large, disastrous fires, as the Australians in Victoria suffered in 2009.*
To the Aboriginal, land care was the main purpose in life. He felt an overwhelming affection for his ancestral territory. Mountains and creeks and springs and water holes were the handiwork of ancestors and required homage in the form of constant care. According to the Aboriginals, the white man defiled this land. As one Aboriginal woman put it, “No longer do men pluck up the grass and weeds and sweep the ground clean around it, no longer do they care for the resting place of Karora.”117
According to Gammage, “The land is part of the Dreaming and must be cared for. This might require dramatic or spasmodic change (burning forests, culling eels, banning or restricting a food) and it certainly demands active intervention in the landscape. Ancestors do this still, obeying the Law and seeking balance and continuity. Humans should do no less.”118
SO THE NATIVE AUSTRALIANS had a highly organized social and economic structure, one that included construction of water complexes, ingenious land management, sustainable agriculture, trading and food storage—all of which allowed them to enjoy a plentiful, varied and nutrient-dense diet. What about the premise that the Aboriginals were largely nomads, wandering from place to place and living in the most rudimentary shelter?
THE TRADITIONAL VIEW holds that the Aborigines lived in simple lean-to shelters made of bark and sticks, but Thomas Mitchell described the houses as large and circular, “made of straight rods meeting at an upright pole in the centre; the outside had first been covered with bark and grass, and then entirely coated over with clay. The fire was made in the center and a hole left in top for the chimney.”119
In 1829, the explorer George Grey came upon a village on the Gascoyne River where the houses were “built of large-sized logs, much higher, and altogether of a very superior description to those made by the natives of the south-westerly coast.”120
Charles Sturt came upon a village of seventy domed huts, each capable of housing up to fifteen people. The houses had a coating of clay over grass and leaves. Smoky internal fires kept mosquitos away and small doorways served as a fly deterrent. Sturt described a peaceful evening scene where he heard the whirring of hundreds of mills grinding grain into flour: “The natives… sat up to a late hour at their own camp, the women being employed beating the seed for cakes, between two stones, and the noise they made was exactly like the working of a loom factory. The whole encampment, with the long line of fires, looked exceedingly pretty, and the dusky figures of the natives standing by them, moving from one hut to the other, had the effect of a fine scene in a play. At eleven all was still, and you would not have known that you were in such close contiguity to so large an assemblage of people.”121
Often the Aboriginals had two seasonal camps and two different styles of housing: large thatched, waterproofed and domed houses served for the wet season, and lighter, airier buildings for the dry. Houses on stilts made living comfortable in wet areas. While clay over grass and leaves was the most common building style, one settler sketched a village where the houses had stone foundations.122 On the southeast of the continent, whale bones served to support the domes. One account mentions a dome seven meters in diameter.123
Occasionally domed dwellings had a small veranda attached over the entrance with a single wall to provide protection for a fire lit in the doorway; small walls created yards for dogs or domestic animals and even sheltered areas for outdoor seating. Many had internal raised sleeping platforms, and some houses had partitions to create several rooms. Typically, each round house had a smaller round structure for food storage. Dedicated spaces outside the building were reserved for sleeping and resting during fine weather.
All large buildings and villages had cooking ovens and food preparation facilities, some as large as ten feet per side. Ovens and grain storage huts had walls that combined stones with clay mortar.124
When colonist Charles Sturt and his parched, hungry companions came upon an Aboriginal village in the 1840s, the natives offered water to the men and their horses and fed them with roasted ducks and some cakes; they gave them a large new hut to sleep in and sticks for making a fire. Compared to the suffering Europeans, the Aboriginals were living off the fat of the land and even eating cake!125
OF ALL THE PEOPLES visited by Dr. Weston A. Price during his historic research expeditions of the 1930s, none elicited more awe than the Australian Aborigines, whom Price described as “a living museum preserved from the dawn of animal life on the earth.” For Price, the Aborigines represented the paradigm of moral and physical perfection. Their skills in hunting, tracking and food gathering were unsurpassed. He marveled at their social organization, which allowed for the schooling of children from a young age, and respect and care for a sizable number of old people, for whom special foods that were easy to gather and hunt were reserved.*
Price’s photographs of Aborigines on their native diets illustrate dental structures so perfect as to make the reader wonder whether these natives were wearing false teeth.126 Early explorers reported the Aborigines to be “well formed; their limbs are straight and muscular, their bodies erect; their heads well shaped; the features are generally good; teeth regular, white and sound. They are capable of undergoing considerable fatigue and privations in their wanderings, marching together considerable distances.”127 Many observers reported their great dexterity and acute eyesight, which enabled them to see stars that others might see only with a telescope and animals moving at a distance of a mile away, which most people cannot see at all.
An early Australian settler named Philip Chauncy reported several examples of the extraordinary “quickness of sight and suppleness and agility of limb and muscle” in the Aborigines, including an Aborigine who stood as a target for cricket balls thrown with force by professional bowlers from only ten to fifteen yards away and who successfully dodged them or parried them off with a small shield for at least half an hour. Other natives threw cricket balls at great distances, and outdid “the best circus performers by bounding from a spring board in a somersault over eleven horses standing side by side.”128
Weston Price consistently found that healthy nonindustrialized peoples consumed a diet very high in vitamins and minerals and containing at least ten times the fat-soluble activators—vitamins found only in animal fat—of the typical American diet of his day. The Aboriginals obtained these from animal fat, organ meats of game animals (they ate the entire animal, even the entrails), as well as insects, fish and especially shellfish, including lobster, crab, crayfish, prawns, snails, oysters, mussels, mud whelk, abalone, scallops, sea urchins and periwinkles.129
Nevertheless, the vast materia medica of the Aborigines indicates they were not entirely free from aches and pains. Australian plants provided Aborigines with remedies for diarrhea, coughs, colds, rheumatism, ear infections, toothache, upset stomach, headache, sore eyes, fevers, sores, rashes, hemorrhaging of childbirth, warts and ulcers—as well as for treatment of wounds, burns, insect bites and snake poison.
The Aborigines also used herbs for contraception and sterilization, thus allowing them to space their children and prevent overpopulation. Men often had more than one wife, sometimes five or six. According to the escaped convict William Buckley, “If a family increases too rapidly, for instance, if a woman has a child within twelve months of a previous one, they hold a consultation amongst the tribe she belongs to, as to whether it shall live or not; but if the father insists upon the life of the child being spared, they do not persist in its destruction, and especially if it is a female.”*130
W. V. MacFarlane studied desert Aboriginal people in transition but still living mostly—but not completely—on native foods, and found that every member of the tribe suffered from chronic conjunctivitis, a sign of vitamin A deficiency.131 Even the smallest changes in diet and lifestyle made them vulnerable to disease. Like all the other indigenous groups Weston Price studied, the Aborigines succumbed to rampant tooth decay and disease of every type soon after they adopted the “displacing foods of modern commerce”—white flour and sugar, jams, canned foods and tea—that began to arrive after 1788. Children born to the next generation had irregularities of the dental arches with conspicuous facial deformities—patterns that mimicked those seen in white civilizations.132
The Aboriginal artist Yukultji Napangati, perhaps the youngest living person to have lived the nomadic desert life, made her first contact with modern Australia in 1984, when she and a group of young people were “discovered” and driven to a community of native people in Kiwirrkurra. She and her sister, Yalti, were interviewed for The Weekend Australian Magazine in 2014. Yalti recalls “the shock of sugar on the tongue, the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. ‘I ate it like this,’ Yalti says, picking up a 1 kg supermarket container of sugar… and tipping it to her mouth.”133 Sugar is the serpent’s apple, the expulsion from paradise.
Like many indigenous peoples around the globe, the modern Aborigine suffers greatly from the modern diet. He is prone to weight gain, diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism and gasoline sniffing, a major source of illness and death in modern indigenous communities. Many Aborigines recognize the need to return to native foods. Listen to this story from the Aboriginal storyteller Daisy Kanari:
Long time ago when Aboriginal people lived on the good and healthy bush foods in the bush, they lived without any sickness: they lived a strong and healthy life. But now it is different. This is what we think: when we were children our parents looked after us and fed us on quandongs, witchetty grubs, honey ants, rabbits and many more. These foods are good and it is what we grew up eating.
Then the Europeans came with their loads of food: of sugar, flour, milk, tea leaves and tins of meat. From then to now, people still live on European food. Today things are bad with petrol and alcohol. When our sons drink alcohol, they keep going and wander aimlessly. They do not come back to their mothers. Also with petrol: when children smell petrol over a long period of time, they die forever. Petrol and alcohol are bad things that have recently come into our country and lives.134
Some groups of Aborigines have returned to the bush—both in the desert regions and in reserves in coastal and mountainous areas. They may hunt with twenty-twos and carry water in buckets, but they have relearned the foodways of their ancestors. Some of their products have potential commercial value—from bean cakes and fermented drinks as snack foods, to insect powders as a nutritious food additive for both people and livestock, to medicinal preparations. Enlightened government policy would educate the Australian population as to the value of these items and create a market for them, thus allowing the Aborigines to support themselves with dignity of purpose in their traditional lifestyle.
And when it comes to land management, what an inspiring proposition than the idea that our main purpose in life is to make every inch of our earth, from deserts to arctic regions, teem with abundance, and superbly beautiful? We may need to use front-end loaders, movable electric fencing, and pigs rotated through the woods rather than fire to accomplish this goal, and we do this with a fully developed sense of our own individuality rather than as a tribal group with access to the Dreamtime, but the goal of both Aboriginal and modern people should be the same: to create beauty and abundance on the earth by honoring and supporting the natural world.