The Oldest Foods on Earth by John Newton

Author:John Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2015-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

One night, stirring a pot of raspberry jam, my mind got to wander[ing] and I started to think about the food we were using and I asked Ian, do you know of any fruit we use that’s Australian? And everything he mentioned, I’d say no, that’s not Australian. And there was not one single Australian fruit or plant food that we could identify. That intrigued me.

There isn’t a culture of using these plants in our society. We haven’t valued Indigenous knowledge and the foods haven’t been part of our diet, so they haven’t been valued either. For some reason if goji berries have a history in Chinese medicine, that’s important. But Kakadu plums from up in the northern end of Australia [don’t] count.

The Robinses have forged relationships with Indigenous communities through their Outback Spirit Foundation, which operates separately from the business and works with communities to establish agricultural programs and youth employment.

Another producer, Outback Pride, owned by Mike and Gayle Quarmby, is based at Reedy Creek in South Australia, 300 kilometres south of Adelaide. The genesis of their business was very different from that of the Robinses. As their website puts it, ‘It was born from a need to take a positive journey following the tragic loss of a 20 year old son.’

Gayle Quarmby’s involvement goes back some time. Her father was Rex Battarbee, a watercolour artist who met, befriended and mentored a young Aboriginal man called Albert Namatjira at Hermannsburg in 1932. Namatjira went on to become Australia’s first famed Aboriginal artist. Gayle grew up with the Arrernte people and gathered bush foods with the locals as a child.

When they were deciding how best to move on after the death of their son, the idea of making a difference in the lives of young Indigenous people became their focus. Michael is a horticulturalist who specialised in the development of arid zone horticultural practices. And so they decided their combined knowledge could work for them in using the native foods industry to help provide jobs and training for Indigenous Australians in remote communities.

The Reedy Creek Nursery was the basis for this project. The core business of the nursery is native plant production for revegetation and forestry, which has resulted in a co-ordinated program in local communities which is the source of their raw materials. In his time at the Reedy Creek Nursery, Mike Quarmby has worked with around sixty-eight species of arid zone plants, testing them for commercial viability and ability to propagate. Of those, around thirty-five have been brought into production. He says:

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