How Native Bush Foods Can Help to Reverse Climate Change
Terrain affected by natural disaster.
Words by Rushani Epa
Disclaimer: The Balam-Balam Project was created by CERES Joe’s Market Garden in conjunction with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation. The project aims to grow native bush foods in the market garden, employ an Aboriginal person to oversee the plots and engage in discourse with Wurundjeri people and the wider community. This practice is essential for the education of school-aged children who visit the market garden to engage with Aboriginal history and sustainability, and is more importantly to involve Wurundjeri people in matters pertaining to their culture.
Green peas slowly defrost on the floor of a supermarket aisle. The bag they belong to sits in the freezer, ripped apart and unable to sell. Coronavirus-fuelled panic buying is at its peak, and statewide food shortages loom.
“When you don’t have something on the shelf, you have people going out and panic buying, but you also have a lot more people saying ‘wow, we might have a food shortage’ so they grow their own things like vegetables instead,” says Wurundjeri Elder, Uncle Dave Wandin.
As times change, so do Australians' attitudes towards sustainability, with a majority being concerned with climate change and their own carbon footprint.
Uncle Dave Wandin is a member of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation, and is a passionate advocate of Indigenous land management. He believes it is vital to reverse climate change in Australia.
“If we didn’t have climate change, people wouldn’t be looking for alternatives. Climate change is making people think outside of the square.
We should be looking at bush foods because they are nutritious, and they don’t need the amount of cultivation, irrigation and all those aspects that our modern agricultural crops do.
“Every native plant I’ve come across has a purpose, if not for us to eat directly, for something else to live off whether that be the reeds in rivers which fish feed on and double up as their nurseries. When you turn a creek that meanders through the landscape into a straight drain you lose all that biodiversity, which then affects everything outwards from that creek bed. It’s about understanding the natural process and how much influence you can have on it without being detrimental to its actual cultural values,” says Wandin.
It’s evident that continuing to use European farming methods and a system foreign to the land will lead to further land degradation and environmental collapse, especially with the compounding impacts of climate change (severe weather events, more frequent and intense droughts, and fires). This calls for a change in the way the land is treated.
It’s important to understand some of the root causes of climate change in Australia, including land clearing. When land in Australia is cleared using methods like deforestation it destroys Australia’s native vegetation.
Australia’s native vegetation is vital to its climate. It binds and nourishes the soil, provides a home to wildlife, protects streams, wetlands, estuaries, and coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide and emits oxygen.
Uncle Dave Wandin. Photo supplied by Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations.
Due to land clearing, under 50% of Australia’s original wilderness still exists and approximately three-quarters of Australia’s 1,640 plants and threatened species have habitat loss listed as one of their main threats. It’s also contributed to insect attack, rising water tables, inappropriate fire management and more.
When British settlers first arrived, they believed the land was too barren and attempted to alter the country by clearing native vegetation, including the deforestation of native trees, to cultivate Western food crops, raise livestock and create room for housing and infrastructure.
This proved to be problematic for a variety of reasons. One such issue was hard-hoofed animals like sheep, goats and cattle trampling native vegetation, preventing seedling growth and compacting and eroding the soil with their hooves. Now, sheep and cattle make up 11 percent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and, in 1990, it was estimated that a quarter of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions were caused by deforestation. Emissions from land clearing dropped after 2010 but are rising sharply again.
Climate change is a natural outcome for a climate which has been profoundly impacted by land clearing.
Biodiversity and ecosystems in Victoria alone are now beyond the point of sustainability, and it’s time to start farming more sustainably to save what’s left of the land.
“We should be looking at bush foods because they are nutritious, and they don’t need the amount of cultivation, irrigation and all those aspects that our modern agricultural crops do,” he says.
Using only a pair of sacaters and welding gloves, Wandin and his then-partner set out one day to tackle a blackberry weed infestation covering his property. They managed to clear two acres of land in just a year and a half. Inspired by his work, the Department which he was employed by asked him to establish an Indigenous land management team in Victoria to work on conserving other plots of land.
Indigenous land management covers an array of tasks, some of which include: the control and monitoring of introduced weeds, pests, soil and threatened species, fire management, conservation of natural water bodies, and monitoring threats to biosecurity. Fire management is one such thing that Wandin has excelled at and, as a result, he aided to create Victoria’s first Traditional Owner Cultural Fire Strategy.
“We’re the first scientists of this country,” he says. “We survived for thousands and thousands of years by not being unwelcome on the land, because we didn’t extract more than what the land could actually give us,” he says.
We survived for thousands and thousands of years by not being unwelcome on the land, because we didn’t extract more than what the land could actually give us.
Connection to Country relates to all aspects of existence — culture, spirituality, language, law, family and identity for First Nations people. Many years before the British colonised Australia, First Nations people farmed the land and grew and harvested a variety of grains, tubers and fruits and built large and complex aquaculture systems.
“When looking at bush foods, especially tuberous foods, quite a lot of them are poisonous in their natural state and require careful preparation. How did we prepare them? How did we know they were poisonous? I’m quite sure we found out via trial and error, and our people got sick, and potentially died.
“When you look at [Aboriginal] women’s string bags that you see in museums, they had beautiful woven baskets, and other bags [dillybags] that look messy because they have holes in them, but in actual fact that was an important part of a harvesting and preparation process. Different bags for different foods were built in different ways. They would harvest foods and put them in their dillybags, and then they would put that bag in the river or the creek.
“They would put a peg there and leave it for however long was determined, usually a day, so the water would actually leech out the poison. Then you could go ahead and cook them up,” he says.
Native bush foods are like a superfood.
A popular bush food these days is murnong. Murnong is an endangered tuberous bush food but isn’t poisonous. Often referred to as a yam daisy, it’s bitter when eaten raw, but once cooked has a flavour similar to that of a sweet potato. It’s classified as a superfood, and is eight times as nutritious as the standard potato.
“Native bush foods are like a superfood. For the [small] size of them, their nutritional composition is much higher than common vegetables that you would buy from the supermarket on a much larger scale, but they store well,” he says.
“Murnong has always been better written about and more understood. Someone from the Merri Creek Management committee became so passionate about murnong to the point that they nicknamed him ‘Murnong Dave’. Because of Murnong Dave, they started to grow a little patch around Merri Creek and started a festival every year, which ran for 11 years,” says Wandin.
Like many other native plants, murnong doesn’t require the same level of cultivation and fertiliser introduced plants do, and are much more versatile and suited to Australia’s climate.
Murnong daisy. Photo supplied by CERES Fair Food.
“Murnong likes very nice, light soil. There’s stories of settlers travelling through the Merri Creek, where there was ample murnong, with their wagons and sheep, and their wagon’s axles would be covered in dust — that’s how loose the soil was. And, of course it got dustier as native vegetation was removed, then water would make it all boggy, and then sheep would follow and pack it all down. There’s very little undisturbed land on Wurundjeri country that hasn’t had those impacts, so you’ve got to unpack all of that soil to get started again. It starts with making that loose pliable soil which Emily Connors from Joe’s Market Garden has done, and that may be the way to go to preserve that plant,” he says.
Joe’s Market Garden is an organic market garden located in CERES Brunswick, and has long supplied its community with fresh fruits and vegetables. Resident farmer, Emily Connors, was supplied with some murnong seeds by the Merri Creek Management Committee and took it upon herself to work alongside the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation and create the Balam-Balam Project. The project focuses on growing murnong plots in the market garden to educate a wider audience on native bush foods, and to provide Wurundjeri people with access and education to their culture and heritage.
The murnong plot remains at the centre of the garden in a bid to remind the gardeners of the original custodians of the land, and they plan to grow various bush foods, and to employ an Aboriginal person to oversee the plots.
Initiatives like the Balam-Balam Project not only respect First Nations people and their culture, but also showcase an alternative to mainstream fruits and vegetables which are not only high in nutritional content, but can aid the battle against climate change in Australia.
To donate to the Balam-Balam Project please see the bank details below, and remember a donation as little as $10 makes a huge difference.
Account Name: The CERES Environmental Fund Bank Australia
BSB: 313 140
Account Number: 1209 6219
And, please include “Balam Balam” in the description.