I gazed upon the natives area of Wollongong's Botanical Garden with fresh eyes after taking part in the Bush Tucker Tour and lunch that was offered up as part of the Yours & Owls Fringe Festival last week.
Attendees were treated to a two hour tour of the garden with Clarence Slockee an education officer and Indigenous culture advocate at Sydney Botanic Gardens for over a decade, but is most widely recognised as a host of ABC's Garden Australia. Clarence's knowledge of local plants and their uses was extensive and exhausting.
We started with a traditional Welcome to Country from Clarence before Pirate, from Fred's Bush Tucker demonstrated how to prepare an cook a fresh fish using only found materials from the bush.
Clarence then took us around what was a small portion of the gardens, it became increasingly apparent that we weren't just learning about different edible plants and their uses, but about the resourcefulness, innovativeness, and ingenuity of the worlds oldest surviving peoples.
There was actually very little in the way of edible plants within the tour but the sheer number of uses native plants have is astounding. Certain palm fronds plaited a certain way makes an excellent rope, whilst a giant poisonous seed pod can have its seeds soaked and heated to a temperature where the poison is extracted, and the seeds ground into a flour for damper. In learning all of this the question that constantly played on my brain was 'how could white settlers possibly think that these people didn't have a civilisation or culture of their own?'
After the tour we settled back into the comfort of the Towri Garden Bush hut located at the top of the Botanic Gardens to enjoy slow cooked lemon myrtle barramundi in paperbark - Pirate made a rule of no cutlery and only shells for plates. He showed us the traditional way you were to accept and eat food the Dharawal way and was honestly some of the freshest fish I've ever eaten.
From pepper berries, to bush mint, to wild spinach and figs, a river reed that looks like a spring onion but tastes like celery to Gymea Lilies which can be eaten when green. They have a potato like stem and an artichoke like heart but turn into solid wood once the flower is blooming. The Australian bush has a wealth of flora that's edible, useful and sustainable if you know the right places to look.
