Bush Food: Aboriginal Food and Herbal Medicine
By Jennifer Isaacs
Published by New Holland (Australia) 2002
Excerpted from the book:
“A batwing coral tree flowers, its orange blossoms fall and women know it is time to go and dig crabs from their hides under the mangrove mud. Their fat, too, will be orange, and the flesh good and filling. Another flower blooms to warn that poisonous stingers are in the northern waters, while the milky white flower known as ‘oyster flowers’ tell people to move camp to the oyster beds, for the oysters are fat and white. … The winds, the blooming of the plants and seeding of grasses, rather than a fixed calendar of dates and months, herald the changes of seasons.”
…
“The Australian continent covers an enormous range of botanical environments: from tropical coast to rainforest, from open scrub to wet sclerophyll forest, from woodland to desert, and from temperate riverine environments to snowy alpine mountains. Aboriginal people once lived in all these areas and continue to live in most, utilising the natural foods and medicines unique to Australia. Their knowledge has not always been recognised, to the peril of those early European-Australian explorers who died of thirst and starvation close to permanent rock springs or under trees bearing thousands of edible seeds.”
The chapter goes on to tell of the early colonists simply giving up on native foods when they couldn’t find equivalents to the European foods they were used to.
There is also some discussion on who in an Aboriginal community holds knowledge about which types of foods:
“Sex roles are well defined in traditional Aboriginal communities. Women generally gather food; men hunt it. While men hunt large land and sea mammals and catch fish, women collect vegetables, shellfish, small animals and eggs. Women, of course, as bearers and rearers of children, must carry out all their food-gathering activities with children present. However, they gather food extremely successfully and provide up to 80 per cent of the food in the community. … Every day, women think about and discuss the whereabouts of plant foods within striking distance of camp, whereas men are preoccupied with preparing for the hunt.”
The book goes on to 16 chapters, listing and detailing seasons, environments, cooking techniques, and individual foods and medicines.
Useful and informative.
