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Bush tucker: Australia's native foods, from kangaroo to quandong

the gist

Bush tucker is food native to Australia that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have eaten for tens of thousands of years, including kangaroo, emu, witchetty grubs, crocodile, quandong fruit, lemon myrtle and warrigal greens. Its use shrank after British colonisation began in 1788, as introduced species and the loss of traditional land made many foods harder to reach. From the 1970s non-Indigenous Australians began to recognise the nutritional and culinary value of these foods, and a commercial bushfood industry grew. Kangaroo meat has been sold in supermarkets since the 1980s, and native crops are now grown commercially.

how it works

Many native foods depend on specific habitats and land management practices, so losing land to farming or grazing and introducing non-native species cuts access to them directly. Commercial cultivation moves some species onto farms, which makes them more widely available but changes how they are harvested.

so what

It shows how food traditions carry deep knowledge of land, and how colonisation can reshape what people are able to eat. Native foods are now a growing part of Australian cuisine, which makes their origins and Indigenous knowledge worth understanding.

more on this

Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo: Tourism NT, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons