Sydney's North Eveleigh precinct is an imposing assembly of cultural venues, filled with corrugated warehouses, rusty pylons and chunky concrete architecture. It is here, at the Yaama Dhiyaan culinary school – miles from rural Australia – where an unassuming-yet-driven woman named Aunty Beryl Van Oploo teaches students how to cook bush tucker – with an urban twist.

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“My motivation for running the school is to keep bush tucker alive by sharing my knowledge and letting people know what’s out there,” says Van Oploo, who is Aboriginal, yet derives her surname from her Dutch husband.

Yaama Dhiyaan, which translates as "hello family", has been running for more than four years. The kitchen is stocked with such native ingredients as kangaroo, emu, wallaby, wild turkey, crustaceans, bush potatoes, yams, quandongs, wild figs, lemon myrtle and river mint.

For 68-year-old Van Oploo, who grew up in Walgett in western NSW, bush tucker was an integral and pleasurable part of life growing up; she remembers fishing for freshwater trout with her “oldies”, cooking the fish on an open fire, and then sharing it with her large family.

“Now it’s gone a little bit upmarket," she says. “The only way we can share it with the world is to infuse it with other ingredients,” she says. The result is crocodile ravioli, emu skewers with rosemary and Illawarra plum sauce, kangaroo fillet with quandong sauce, wild lime and orange marmalade, and lemon myrtle butter biscuits, which Van Oploo sells at the monthly Eveleigh markets: “I sell them in a brown paper bag for five bucks. People can afford that, you know? Everyone else who sells biscuits down there has them in little boxes. We’re very casual.”

Only one dish taught at the school is truly authentic: fish baked in paper bark. “We tend to not do straight indigenous dishes, as there isn’t enough supply and the ingredients are very expensive.” Also, the traditional way in which food was consumed by the Aboriginal people varies significantly to today’s standards of TV dinners and packaged snacks: “We were hunters and gatherers; you ate what you caught and did so immediately.”

Recipes, per se, did not exist. And like much of Aboriginal culture, techniques for cooking and food preparation were passed down orally, from one generation to the next. “Those skills were part of our upbringing. That’s how we survived,” she says.

Van Oploo adds that indigenous fare – simply done, without Western accompaniments and sauces – is an acquired taste: “Tasting kangaroo for the first time is like trying Thai food for the first time. You start with a little bit.” Van Oploo’s kangaroo pies, which are also sold at Eveleigh markets, were a hard-sell when first introduced to market-goers, but are now so popular they sell out.

At the last two Slow Food Terra Madre conferences in Italy, Van Oploo was a member of the Australian contingent. There, she met with like-minded proponents of indigenous cuisine. She believes the Slow Food philosophy and indigenous cuisine are intrinsic. “More Australians need to get involved [in the Slow Food movement] because it puts fresh food back on the table and in the markets.

“Slow Food involves the farmers, and I’ve always been involved with the farm people. I worked on a property when I was 14. However, it wasn’t like it is today. It’s a whole different ball game now,” she says. “We need to get back to the old, simpler way of farming.”

Van Oploo is putting these sentiments into practice. A close friend of hers has lent her 22 acres of farmland on the Hawkesbury River near Windsor, where she plans to fill the property with native plants and set up a horticultural training school.

“We will grow as many native plants as possible. Quandongs, finger limes, river mint, you name it,” she says. “It is native country, after all.”