AUSTRALIANS are rediscovering the culinary traditions of the Aborigines and three Victorians have an important part to play, discovers GRETEL HUNNERUP
In the parched cropping country of the western Wimmera, Matthew Koop's hectare plot of fruit trees sticks out like a sore thumb.
"There's not really an orchard for a good 100km in any direction," he points out, and indeed there's nothing else green as far as the eye can see.
Matthew believes he's Victoria's sole commercial harvester of quandongs: a tangy-fleshed stone fruit native to Australia's central deserts and southern arid regions.
Part of the traditional Aboriginal diet and enjoyed by the early pastoralists, wild quandongs fell out of favour when oranges, peaches and other imported fruits became readily available.
Over the past decade, Matthew has been working to change that.
"I was originally attracted to the fact my grandparents' generation knew quandongs well," he says.
"They would eat them straight off the tree, or make them into jams, relishes and sauces.
"I thought a demand for quandongs would arise from a realisation that there's plenty of interesting foods here that our ancestors used, but instead it's come from an interest in indigenous culture.
"The tide has changed and people are more accepting of it."
Matthew's 300-odd trees produce about half a tonne of quandongs each year, which are picked, halved and pipped, Cryovac frozen and delivered to top-end Australian restaurants and condiment manufacturers.
"Requests have been steadily increasing," he says.
While quandongs command a high price due to their rarity, Matthew says growing them isn't easy money.
"There's no body of scientific work to draw on because cultivating quandong trees is a relatively new thing," he says.
When Gil and Meredith Freeman enquired about growing bush foods on their small Gippsland property during the mid-'90s, they were met with blank stares.
"There was simply very little information around," says Gil.
"Back then nobody had tried to grow these things systematically."
Nevertheless they battled with the thick pasture grasses to pioneer an indigenous food garden now brimming with mountain pepper, warrigal greens, native mint, wattles for wattleseed, strawberry gum and peppermint gum for flavouring, and native fruits such as lemon aspen, Davidson's plum, native raspberries, black apple and Illawarra plum.
"We made mistakes along the way, like planting eucalyptus trees too close to the wattle for example, but it's been an exciting experiment," says Gil.
"We're interested in exploring what's edible in the Australian landscape and being proud of it.
"However, our main reason for growing natives is environmental; the soil doesn't have to be ploughed and the land isn't trampled by animals.
"We're restoring it to something resembling a more native state."
Trading under Tarnuk Bushfoods ('tarnuk' being an indigenous word for "food bowl"), the Freemans make a modest income out of selling their harvest to local restaurants and boutique smallgoods producers.
Due to the burgeoning interest in bush foods, they're finding lately that they can't field all the requests.
"We don't advertise and we're happy with our current level of operation, so we tend to hand them on to other people," says Gil.
"The bush food scene in Victoria remains fairly small compared to NSW and Queensland though, and we think it's important to build up numbers of primary producers."
For others interested in growing bush foods, Gil suggests doing a bit of personal research.
"Go to your local native nursery and find out what grows naturally and check out the Australian Native Food Industry Limited website for growing notes," he says.
To contact Matthew Koop email niniwell@optusnet.com.au
