We come from the oldest food culture in the world. We've got the oldest bakers. We've got the oldest forms of aquaculture. And the thing is, a lot of Australians don't know that. So let's share that story so we can all feel part of it.Proud Bundjalung woman, chef, restaurateur and cookbook author Mindy Woods
As Mindy Woods points out, we have 6500 ingredients that are unique to this land. How many are we cooking with?
For millennia, Indigenous science ensured sustainable supplies of eels, and Australia is home to the world’s first bakers, says Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.
Indigenous ingredients are more than just foods. They can be medicinal sources, cultural tools, climate-change solutions and a celebration of traditional knowledge.
So some ingredients can be poisonous, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had their own processes of making it edible.Proud Mbabaram woman/Torres Strait Islander and nutritionist Sharna Motlap
Even Japanese comics have showcased the wonders of our native ingredients. And for chef Kylie Kwong, Indigenous produce was a great inspiration for her Billy Kwong and Lucky Kwong restaurants in Sydney.
For me, it was kind of like discovering a whole new culinary alphabet.Chef Kylie Kwong
The saltbush that Kylie added to stir-fries and her version of shallot pancakes is drought tolerant, hardy, and can live for over 100 years. Its seeds have been used in breads and its leaves can treat burns and wounds. Saltbush is naturally fire retardant, which helps prevent bushfires. And the plant helps restore soil that’s heavily salt-affected.
By pioneering a style of Cantonese-Australian cuisine that truly reflected where she was cooking – Gadigal Country – she also opened up the conversation about native ingredients.
Today, wattleseed and lemon myrtle might flavour menus, but finger lime, saltbush and other Indigenous ingredients have yet to become supermarket staples like tofu and hummus. Could greater acceptance of traditional foods pay off in widespread ways?
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation, I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country
Kylie Kwong: And they opened it up and out fell all of these beautiful, fresh Australian native plants … So for me, it was kind of like discovering a whole new culinary alphabet.
Mindy Woods: They are nature's superfoods without the trendy hashtags.
Sharna Motlap: So some ingredients can be poisonous, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had their own processes of making it edible.
Lee Tran Lam: From honey myrtle to bush tomatoes, water ribbons and lime berries, Australia’s native ingredients convey the diversity of this land. 65,000-year-old grindstones found in a Kakadu rock shelter reflect the long, rich history of First Nations foods here and even Captain Cook used Warrigal greens to save crews from scurvy. But witchetty grubs appear in Sweden’s Disgusting Food Museum and native ingredients are largely absent from supermarkets, so are First Nations foods misunderstood and unfairly overlooked?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you embrace olive oil, native ingredients and chocolate? Or skip the butter, salt and soy? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on native foods.
Whether you call them traditional foods, native ingredients, bush tucker or something else, what’s harvested here is unique. Australia’s a “megadiverse” country, home to around 700,000 species. Many are nutritious and multifunctional wonders. Paperbark can act as natural Band-Aids and cooking foil, while pepperberry has more antioxidants than blueberries. For millennia, Indigenous science ensured sustainable supplies of eels, and Australia’s home to the world’s first bakers, says Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe. Today, wattleseed and lemon myrtle might flavour menus, but finger lime, saltbush and other Indigenous ingredients have yet to become supermarket staples like tofu and hummus. Could greater acceptance of traditional foods pay off in widespread ways?
Mindy Woods: Jingella Jingy wallah nyari Mindy Bundjalung dubay Widjabul Nyangbal. Hello, welcome. My name is Mindy Woods. I'm a proud Bundjalung woman, native food chef, restaurateur and owner of Karkalla Byron Bay. I'm also the author of Karkalla at Home: Native Foods and Everyday Recipes for Connecting to Country.
I was really lucky as a child. I was actually part of an Air Force family so my dad was posted around Australia and abroad.
And every Christmas, every Easter, we would travel back home to Bundjalung Country where my beautiful nan, Margie Felton, was. And that's where I first connected with native food. Nan would take us out on Country, down to the beautiful beaches around Byron Bay. We'd be harvesting pipis, getting our yugaries. We would be out cracking oysters from the rock shelves.
You know, I was quite fair-skinned compared to the rest of my family so I was easily sunburned – everybody else was tanning up and looking beautiful and I was looking like a little red rock lobster, so my nan would take me up into those beautiful dunes and she would pick karkalla, she would rub it on my skin, because karkalla for us isn't just a native plant, it's also a medicinal source and then she'd say, ‘get up into that you know dunes and find those bush lollies’ and of course under the karkalla, there's a beautiful fruit which tastes like salty strawberries, we’d find it under those beautiful little flowers and would share it out amongst our cousins.
I'm very fortunate to have those experiences, you know, as a child because I didn't realise how much it would direct and create passion around my future as a chef and as someone that really wants to advocate for native food, you know, in our beautiful country.
Lee Tran Lam: On Great Australian Walks on SBS, Mindy offers karkalla to TV host Julia Zemiro, who savours its lychee-like taste.
Mindy Woods: And it's almost like a dragon fruit. Some people say it tastes like salty kiwi fruit or a salty strawberry. And we as mob just call it bush lollies and I really love that because you're getting those little sugars, you're getting the salts. It's hydrating. It tastes delicious.
Lee Tran Lam: Karkalla is known as beach banana, sea fig, or pig face.
This is an Indigenous ingredient and traditional food – but Mindy prefers you don’t call it bush tucker.
Mindy Woods: It's very tunnel vision – all that conjures in your mind is witchetty grubs and kangaroo [laughs] like that's what people think native foods is about. We have 6500 ingredients that are unique to this land we now call Australia. 6500! And I really challenge any of our listeners out there to think, how many of those native foods can you name? People always say lemon myrtle. I love that. That's deadly. We love our lemon myrtle, but it's more than just an antiseptic. It's more than a cleaning product or something we put in our shampoo.
Lee Tran Lam: In The Oldest Foods On Earth by John Newton, the slow uptake of Indigenous foods among the wider population is attributed to “food racism”. “It is only one of the many kinds of racism directed against the Aboriginal people, even today,” he writes.
In 1981, Edna’s Table was one of the first Sydney restaurants to use Indigenous foods – bush tomatoes and native thyme were added to dishes without fanfare or marketing. In the ’90s, the owners relocated and listed First Nations foods on the menu. The backlash from regulars was shocking: diners rejected what they considered ‘bush tucker’ – despite enjoying these very ingredients in the restaurant’s previous incarnation.
In 1984, French-born chef Jean-Paul Bruneteau opened Rowntrees, a Sydney restaurant that also embraced native foods. Then came Riberries, but like other restaurants serving Indigenous ingredients around this time, it didn’t survive.
One of the best breads I’ve ever had in Sydney was the wattleseed and fenugreek loaf at Indigenous-run bakery Native Foodways in 2023. It, too, sadly hasn’t lasted. I remember manager Corey Grech telling me he once ran a program that instilled culinary pride in Indigenous kids. “They grew up, you know, being told that if you ate bush food, you’re dirty,” he said.
Like any ugly prejudice, it’s wrong – there’s much to celebrate about First Nations cooking.
Mindy Woods: We come from the oldest food culture in the world. We've got the oldest bakers. We've got the oldest forms of aquaculture. And the thing is, a lot of Australians don't know that. So let's share that story so we can all feel part of it.
Lee Tran Lam: The Budj Bim eel traps fed people sustainably for many millennia and Kakadu grindstones from 65,000 years ago suggest the world’s first bakers originated here: Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe discusses this on Jess Ho’s great SBS podcast, Bad Taste, where he talks about making flour from ancient native grains – like Mandadyan Nalluk – which is Yuin for "dancing grass".
Mindy’s right: bush tucker doesn’t evoke the full spectrum of Indigenous foods, found in rainforests, deserts and everywhere in between.
Mindy Woods: When you think of First Nations Australia, we are as rich and diverse as Europe when you look at it on a map. When you're in Europe and you travel from France across Italy – you've got different language, different culture, different food and it's very much the same way.
What you'll find – the beautiful thing about our native food is that you're going to get a real taste of Country. So when you're out along those coastlines and you're eating those beautiful coastal succulents, because of the salty water, because of the sea spray you're going to taste that beautiful salinity coming through that natural salt that sits in those environments.
When you go out on Country, in the desert country, and you're eating saltbush – you're going to taste that salt that's coming up you know from that arid dry country. You're going to taste the flavours of Country and that's what I want people to realise – how unique, how diverse and how brilliant these foods are. They are nature's superfoods without the trendy hashtags, because of the crazy conditions they grow in. They're really nutritionally dense. So these plants really have to fight for survival, you know. So they're drought tolerant, they're pest resistant, they don't need herbicides, pesticides. They're the way that nature intended it.
Lee Tran Lam: These ingredients are battle-hardy and you can taste it.
Mindy Woods: The only thing that I would recommend is everyone start with a very small amount because these are intensely flavored, which means you only need a pinch to make a big difference in your food. And anise myrtle, cinnamon myrtle – we've got all these spices people just don't even realise it exists. We've got our own native lemongrass.
Lee Tran Lam: These foods can be potent in flavour and impact. In Warndu Mai, Rebecca Sullivan likens Kakadu plum, “with its extremely high vitamin C content”, to nature's flu jab.
Davidson plum contains high levels of vitamin C levels.
Mindy Woods: It grows abundantly up through Bundjalung country and up north through Queensland. Our traditional name for Davidson Plum is ooray [pronounced or-ray]. Ooray, isn't that beautiful? You know, we people often say, oh, you know, it's too difficult to learn these traditional words for these foods.
And I say, well, come on, let's think about it. We have choy sum, we have lasagna, we have spaghetti. These are all words that have been introduced. So let's really embrace these beautiful traditional names for these foods.
Lee Tran Lam: She says native foods aren't just foods.
Mindy Woods: They were a medicinal source, they were often a cultural tool – that's thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that was handed down through song, through dance, through storytelling.
You take something like the native hibiscus, it had four or five cultural uses: you can eat that beautiful flower, you could dry it down and use it as a tea. You use the bark to make a fishing net. And some of the nets that were found on Bundjalung Country were over 100 metres long. Isn't that incredible? You can use the sap out of it for abrasions on your skin, because it's got antiseptic properties. But it's something I really want to celebrate as well because it makes us so different. Let's start shining the light on what we have in our own backyard.
Lee Tran Lam: Especially when there are 6500 ingredients to draw from.
Mindy Woods: So think about 6500 as a number and think about how many of those foods we're using in our everyday cooking. Definitely less than 20. They're here, they're endemic to this land.
Lee Tran Lam: The Guardian’s review of Mindy’s book, Karkalla, describes her recipes, where “bush tomatoes find their way into an XO sauce for pipis; wattleseed and anise myrtle become a tadka for dal; lemon myrtle stars in a summer-ready margarita”. Yvonne C Lam writes: “This is how Australia could and should eat, if we leaned into First Nations expertise.”
Mindy is inspired by Bundjalung Country’s diversity: as rainforest moves into Saltwater Country, you’ll find lemon aspen and sandpaper figs, along the coastline, she draws on sea blite and Warrigal greens.
Mindy Woods: The list is absolutely endless and what I love about that is, that connects me to the past.
Lee Tran Lam: As a Saltwater Woman, she embraces one of the oldest lifeforms on earth: seaweed. She joyfully calls herself a seaweed freak.
Mindy Woods: Mob know at home when that, when that, those big storms are coming up and we've got swells out in that ocean. That next day I'm down there first thing at daybreak because I absolutely love seaweed.
People think I'm mad. I find the smell of seaweed so appealing because I know that is the taste of the ocean and you know we've embraced Japanese cuisine like no other in this country right? We love our sashimi, we love all these beautiful things – but of course mob have been using seaweed for thousands of years: it's giving us a lot of those minerals and vitamins that we can't actually naturally source from a land-based diet. And for me as a chef, I love it because it's got that incredible umami, that natural salt, that savouriness, that is a flavour bomb in any food, because I use it extensively in my restaurant, Karkalla.
You'll find me down at the beach, collecting that golden kelp.
Mob have been using it for thousands of years, mob would actually go out in their beautiful little canoes out on Saltwater Country. So they would put that beautiful fresh seaweed on the bottom of their canoes – they would actually build a campfire on top of it. So they had a live fire, pulling up that fish, pulling up that crab and they're cooking it straight on a fire, laid with a beautiful seaweed. You can only imagine that beautiful fresh seafood being cooked on seaweed.
Lee Tran Lam: Kelp has been around for millennia, but it’s also vital to our future.
Mindy Woods: You know, seaweed is one of those things that grows in incredible abundance. It's incredibly important for carbon sequestration. But above all, it tastes so delicious. So don't be scared of seaweed, you mob. Get out there, find out about it. Don't take too much. Dry it out on your clothesline. You’ll find it [laughs] out of my backyard – I've got these bunches of golden kelp hanging down there. In my restaurant, I hang it above my stove, my open coals, because the aroma of that and beautifully naturally dried out seaweed is like nothing else. And I just love exploring the uses of seaweed in my food.
Lee Tran Lam: Some native foods are hard to find, because they’re wild harvested in small amounts, or have limited seasons, but there are more accessible ingredients you can turn to.
Mindy Woods: Push aside that black pepper and that dusty old white pepper that you've got at home. I want you to reach for native pepper. Our Tasmanian pepperberry is so intense and loaded with flavour. If you love that kind of prickly, aromatic heat of a Sichuan pepper, it's got it and it's jam-packed in there. It's got this beautiful purple hue that you can cure food with as well.
Pepper leaf is a great substitute for white pepper. So when I'm thinking like salt and pepper tofu, salt and pepper calamari, any of those things, go for a native pepper. It is going to absolutely blow your mind.
And then of course, lemon myrtle. Use it in your cooking. Use it as a tea. Use it in your stocks and your stews the same way that you would a bay leaf. So push that bay leaf away and start reaching for lemon myrtle. It's going to add that beautiful lemony scent to anything you cook.
You know, we have so many beautiful rich cultures that we can draw on in Australia, we're multicultural, I love that. And all I want people to realise is let's not leave our First Nations culture, our First Nations food behind. And when we can use them in our everyday cooking, when we can infuse the foods that we really love with these beautiful native ingredients, what we're creating is a truly authentic Australian cuisine.
Lee Tran Lam: Let’s hear from a chef who has done exactly that.
Kylie Kwong: Hi, it's Kylie Kwong. I used to be a chef and the restaurateur of Billy Kwong and Lucky Kwong, my two former restaurants in Sydney. I'm currently an associate at the Powerhouse in Sydney.
Lee Tran Lam: Kylie was running acclaimed Cantonese restaurant Billy Kwong when she was first inspired to use native produce. What sparked that interest is still clear, many years later.
Kylie Kwong: I'll never forget René Redzepi's keynote address at the Sydney Opera House in 2010.
Lee Tran Lam: He’s the chef from Copenhagen’s Noma – which was named World’s Best Restaurant a few months earlier; it would ultimately win this title 5 times.
Kylie Kwong: And we were also keen to hear what the world's number one chef had to say. When he started speaking about his philosophy on the importance of using native ingredients in the cooking of the country we were in, it was an absolute light bulb moment for me. He started speaking about how native ingredients are the direct expression of a country's flavour, sense, memory, history, tradition, culture. And it was just so incredible. And I remember sitting on the edge of my seat thinking, ‘Kylie, why aren't you using Australian native greens in your Chinese-style cooking?’ I mean, I was midway through my career and this was all new information for me. I remember when he actually walked on stage and he said, ‘hey, everyone, I've been in Sydney for a week. I've been in Australia for a week. Where's the kangaroo? Where's the emu? Where's the Warrigal greens? Why aren't you guys using, you know, the native produce?’
Lee Tran Lam: A few chefs were using finger lime and dorrigo pepper before Rene’s memorable speech.
In 1988, Jean-Paul Bruneteau’s menu of barbecued crocodile and wattleseed pavlova won an award at Tokyo’s International Food Festival. At his Sydney restaurant, Riberries, he served French-style soup flavoured with witchetty grubs: he’d grown up with snails and saw culinary parallels with this ingredient.
This wichetty grub soup was immortalised in Oishinbo, one of Japan’s most popular comics of all time. In 1997, it praised this dish as the "creation of a new culture".
Oishinbo also covered Indigenous ingredients back in 1993, with characters eating honey ants in the Northern Territory. These insects store honey in their body, so consuming them, according to Oishinbo, is like enjoying the best bonbons – light, elegant, a dessert direct from the landscape. This Japanese comic placed honey ants in the spotlight 3 decades before it appeared at a top restaurant, like Melbourne’s Attica. The sweet insects there were harvested by Tjupan women and served on tableware resembling Kalgoorlie dessert ant tunnels by Claire Ellis.
The fate of Mark Olive’s Midden reflects evolving attitudes to native ingredients. The Australian Food Timeline notes when it first appeared in 1996, this showcase for Indigenous produce “struggled”, but when the Bundjalung man tried again, in 2023, it was a bigger success. The award-winning restaurant has gained international attention for its dishes, like strawberry gum panna cotta.
Let’s rewind to 2010, and Kylie’s introduction to native ingredients.
Kylie Kwong: And I made a few phone calls and tracked down Mike and Gail Quarmby, who were the original founders and owners of Outback Pride, which was a beautiful and very special organic bush foods nursery in South Australia.
That was one of the greatest weeks of my life. Mike and Gayle arrived inside little Billy Kwong with this huge big suitcase full. And they opened it up and out fell all of these beautiful, fresh Australian native plants: Warrigal greens, bower spinach, karkalla, Geraldton wax, saltbush. And I was mid-career. So for me, it was kind of like discovering a whole new culinary alphabet. It revolutionised everything we did at Billy Kwong from that moment onwards. It revolutionised not just the menu, but also the way we saw the world. And of course, when we started learning about Australian native ingredients, we wanted to learn from the traditional owners.
And that is when I connected with my incredible longtime friend, proud Kamilaroi woman, Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo. It's when I connected with proud Cudgenburra/Bundjalung man, Clarence Slockee, and a whole lot of the other First Nations food community who I'm very proud now to call my friends and mentors and colleagues.
Lee Tran Lam: How did Kylie translate her Cantonese dishes using native ingredients?
Kylie Kwong: Instead of the ubiquitous beef with black bean and chilli, I replaced that with red braised caramelised wallaby tail. We did san choy bow. Instead of using pork mince, we replaced it with finely diced wallaby fillet. We did steamed vegetable dumplings. So instead of English spinach, we replaced the English spinach with Australian native spinach, Warrigal greens.
We used the same recipe template, if you like, that had been used, you know, in my homeland in China for thousands of years. And we simply replaced those ingredients with Australian native ingredients. Now to me, that makes perfect sense. It's like, why aren't we all doing this? Why aren't we using the produce that is literally grown in our own backyard?
For me, it was a way that my staff and I could acknowledge, honour and pay respect to the First Nations people of Australia and open up that very important conversation.
One of the other dishes that we created during that very, very exciting creative time was the crispy saltbush cakes. So we all love, you know, the Chinese-style shallot pancakes that we find in all of the street stalls through Beijing. Of course, they are filled with finely sliced shallots or scallions. And I thought to myself, let's take that concept, let's fill it with beautiful saltbush leaves.
First of all, I love the colour. They're this beautiful glaucous grey colour. And then the leaves themselves are really distinct. They feel like fabric. And the flavour is delicious. It's got this lovely natural savoury flavour. So that worked perfectly with inside the saltbush cakes, which we then deep-fried and then served as a kind of like snack with our Billy Kwong chilli sauce.
Lee Tran Lam: Her crispy saltbush cakes were named one of the 40 defining dishes from 40 years of the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, and she served them for over a decade. How did this dish come about?
Kylie Kwong: At the time, I had an amazing dim sum chef working with me. I said, let's try and do something with this saltbush. He and I worked together for a long time on the saltbush cakes recipe, which is simply just plain flour, salt, a little bit of baking powder, LOTS of butter. Butter is the secret.
And of course, beautiful saltbush, saltbush leaves. And he just kind of came up with this beautiful shape.
If you can imagine a simple doughnut and just getting your palm and just squashing that doughnut, that will give you a kind of clear image of the size and the volume. It was a really beautiful crunch, but the saltbush cakes were at once really crunchy and fresh because you had to deep-fry them in clean oil.
They had that wonderful savoury, almost creamy flavour of the saltbush. And then of course, the butter kind of oozing out down your chin. And then, you know, with a big splosh of Billy Kwong chilli sauce. So they were absolutely delicious.
Lee Tran Lam: Kylie closed Billy Kwong in 2019, but she kept championing native foods at her next restaurant, which was named after her stillborn son.
Kylie Kwong: When I had my restaurant Lucky Kwong, it was situated in South Eveleigh on Gadigal Country. Fortunately for me, Clarence Slockee looks after all of the green space at South Eveleigh. It's a precinct in Redfern.
He helped create this beautiful organic vegetable garden, which was literally 50 metres’ walk from Lucky Kwong. So every morning, my chefs and I would be able to walk to that garden and harvest the most beautiful, fresh native Australian ingredients: Warrigal greens, native bush mint, Geraldton wax, sea parsley, bower spinach, karkalla.
One of the great discoveries was the native bush mint. So it's this tiny little green leaf known as native thyme, but colloquially known as native bush mint. It's kind of eucalyptus in flavour. It is ambrosial. It is this tiny, tiny, tiny little green leaf that goes, that really packs a punch.
I also use it when I'm roasting a chicken instead of rosemary or roasting a lamb. At Lucky Kwong, I used to do our Asian-style coleslaw. I would, instead of using the round leaf mint, I would integrate the native bush mint into that salad, which was beautiful. The local karkalla, a few leaves of baby Warrigals.
As Clarence used to remind me, he used to say, ‘KK, when you're offering this dish to your diners, you can literally say, you are having a taste of Gadigal Country. This is what South Eveleigh tastes like.’ We are giving people literally a taste of that Country and that land.
Lee Tran Lam: Kylie’s great-grandfather Kwong Sue Duk, arrived here from China in the 1850s. He was a herbalist and, like her, used local ingredients in meaningful ways.
Kylie Kwong: Before I became a chef, I actually wanted to be a homeopath.
There was all of that beautiful learning and education around the healing qualities of plants. And then many years later, I discovered Australian native plants and I made that connection.
It really made me realise how important and powerful we chefs, cooks, restaurateurs can be in our messages about the world. You know, socially, culturally, environmentally, politically, in terms of what we're offering people on the plate, but doing it through the simple gesture of beautiful food. So people would look at the food and they would say, ‘what is that green leaf? It's so beautiful. I've never seen that before.’ And we would say, ‘that is saltbush.’ And then we'd be able to open up that conversation.
Lee Tran Lam: The saltbush that Kylie adds to stir-fries and other dishes is drought tolerant, hardy, and can live for over 100 years. Its seeds have been used in breads and its leaves can treat burns and wounds. Saltbush is naturally fire retardant, which helps prevent bushfires. And the plant helps restore soil that’s heavily salt-affected.
Kylie Kwong: I remember when we were serving all of these Australian native ingredients and of course I wanted to learn about the most delicious ingredient which was the live green tree ant. And so I used to source my live green tree ants from Australian Insect Farm, which was run by Jack and Sue [Hasenpusch] who had a farm in Far North Queensland. We would receive this big white bucket with all of these holes in it, of this huge, big, live green tree ant nest. As soon as you lifted that lid, it was just out of control. And I rang up Auntie Beryl and Clarence and I said ‘traditionally, how are these live green tree ants eaten?’ I would like to offer them to my guests. I didn't charge people. I wanted people to have the experience because they were so delicious and fascinating and an incredible, incredibly powerful entry point into the conversation about First Nations traditions.
And so you literally just hold the live ant in your hand and you squeeze the head and put the abdomen, which is this huge big green abdomen, put it in your mouth and it just literally bursts with the most amazing, punchy lemony sherbet-like flavour. There was certainly a lot of kind of squawking and screaming at the table at Billy Kwong, but I tell you what, it made an impact in terms of opening up the conversation.
Lee Tran Lam: Looking at traditional foods made her rethink her dishes – for years, she’d served crispy-skinned duck with European blood plums.
Kylie Kwong: I'd actually never really thought about it any deeper than that, except that the two ingredients go very well together. When I discovered Australian native plums, that was it. I've never looked back and I've always used plums which grow in the Byron Bay hinterland. And what a beautiful story that is. But first and foremost, they work from a culinary perspective. So to be able to reflect on, you know, this 65,000 year-old heritage and bringing that together in a complementary way with my Chinese heritage that goes back thousands of years was really something very, very special.
I'd really love to see all of the different kind of cultures within Australia take this up. You know, like imagine doing a Japanese-Australian restaurant or an Italian-Australian restaurant or a Middle Eastern-Australian restaurant.
Lee Tran Lam: In high school, I had just one class that covered native foods: we made shortbread with wattleseed and cooked kangaroo. But no cultural context was given. I didn’t learn that the blossoming of wattle is related to the migration of eels or that light-footed kangaroo is a sustainable protein – it doesn’t affect topsoil like heavy hooves of introduced cattle.
But dining out today, I’m happy to see native ingredients flavouring more menus: I’ve ordered Warrigal greens kimchi cheese toasties, sipped lemon aspen pub squash, and enjoyed mango dotted with finger lime.
Kylie Kwong: I love now that we're seeing more and more Australian native ingredients used in a lot of restaurants and, you know, at market stalls and in food stalls and even in you know some of the supermarkets. The ingredients are becoming more and more every day.
I'm really inspired by First Nations chefs and cooks around Australia. For example, the wonderful young chef, Luke Bourke, he and his brother, Sam and Luke Bourke, whose ancestry stems from Tasmania's Palawa people.
They grew up in Western Sydney and what I'm inspired by is their passion, their absolute passion to share their First Nations culinary culture and traditions with people. Luke is currently the sous-chef at Rockpool Bar and Grill and his brother is working at Baker Bleu.
Jack Brown, currently the head chef at Berowra Waters Inn, again so passionate about sharing his Aboriginal culture. And of course, the unstoppable force of nature, that is Nornie Bero, who is the founder and chef of Mabu Mabu, and from the Torres Strait Islands.
Lee Tran Lam: And there’s Koori chef Chris Jordan, who runs Three Little Birds in Meanjin/Brisbane. He appears in the seafood episode of this podcast’s first season.
He teaches incarcerated youth how to cook, using honey myrtle, sunset limes and other native foods. I remember his Sydney Biennale workshop, where everyone got to crush anise myrtle, which evoke black jelly beans, or handle cinnamon myrtle, which is used to make tools.
Then there were bunya nuts – so tough, they had to be sliced with a pipe cutter from Bunnings.
I remember chef Beau Clugston explaining at the Noma Australia pop-up that bunya nuts are from the dinosaur era and very hard to grow. When there was a successful harvest, First Nations communities would throw massive bunya nut parties to celebrate.
Kylie ran Lucky Kwong for three years and her three-decade-long hospitality career has led to an Order of Australia and Good Food Guide 2024 Legend Award. She now works for the Powerhouse and its Parramatta museum will open in Western Sydney in late 2026.
Kylie Kwong: When the Powerhouse is actually finished, we're going to have this beautiful big rooftop garden.
And we're going to have a whole section dedicated to Australian native edible plant species. And of course, Clarence Slockee will be helping us with that, you know, advising. So when we have this garden, I would love to ring up my ex-head chef and say, ‘please come in, and let's do a collaboration with Luke and Sam and the other people I've mentioned – let's recreate the saltbush cakes, but the Western Sydney version.’ Let's really make it the saltbush cakes of this time and place, which is what it's all about.
Lee Tran Lam: We’ve heard about the culinary possibilities of native foods – but what about their health impact?
Sharna Motlap: Hi, my name is Sharna Motlap. I'm a proud Mbabaram woman from Far North Queensland and also Torres Strait Islander from Hammond Island. I'm a nutritionist. I'm a research fellow at Northern Institute with Charles Darwin University and I'm also working with the HEAL Network, so that's Healthy Environments and Lives, which is a huge network of researchers all focusing on climate change.
So I grew up right near the beach in Slade Point, in Queensland. One of my earliest memories is actually spending time at the beach swimming and fishing and then also watching my mother eat freshwater oysters straight off the rocks. Occasionally we would also bring back buckets of periwinkles to boil and eat up.
We also had ceremonies and special occasions such as birthdays and weddings and these events always revolved around food and dance. In preparation for these special occasions, the men would hunt turtle and dugong, kup murris would be prepared to cook up meat and vegetables.
You'd take care of the elders – by teaching the kids at a very young age, they will grow up to hunt, prepare these foods for their elders. So when I was younger, I didn't quite understand the value of all of it, but it always seemed a bit magical to me. The traditional songs, the dances, the food all combined together in what felt like one big party. But as children and being around these conversations and traditions, turns out we were always learning without knowing that we were learning.
Lee Tran Lam: For a long time, Indigenous ingredients have been overlooked or misunderstood – The Oldest Foods On Earth examines how Western-style rations and government policies disconnected First Nations communities from their traditional food systems, leading to health problems, such as diabetes, and other issues.
But in recent years, there’s increasing awareness of appreciation of First Nations knowledge and culture; Dark Emu, for instance, has sold over 360,000 copies.
Sharna Motlap: I love that Indigenous knowledge is gaining the recognition it deserves. There's so much evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were bakers, farmers, designers, healers, astronomers, the list just goes on. And surely but slowly, these Indigenous knowledges are also being implemented in different ways here and there. So we're seeing it in healthcare systems, we're seeing it in housing design, for example.
Native bush foods are being hyped as superfoods, which is not surprising because there's lots of foods that have medicinal qualities as well. The Kakadu plum is probably the most famous example. It has the highest concentration of vitamin C in the world.
Lee Tran Lam: The fruit has many health properties – one US cosmetics brand even attempted to patent Kakadu plum extracts, but was knocked back.
Sharna Motlap: More and more people are seeing that Indigenous foods not only have incredible nutritional and health benefits, but also these foods provide cultural, social, and psychological benefits. I feel as though food and culture cannot be separated. They are part of ceremonies and they are a connection to Country. For some people, eating traditional foods tastes like home and that's quite beautiful.
Lee Tran Lam: Research in The Lancet outlined the health gaps that affect Aboriginal people, such as higher suicide rates and shorter life expectancy than other Australians, and showed the positive impact of ‘cultural camps’: when First Nations people identify native foods and connect with traditional knowledge and Country, it’s beneficial for their health.
Sharna Motlap: A lot of people are excited about Indigenous foods and are excited about the potential that they have in climate change and food insecurity.
Lee Tran Lam: In Sharna’s award-winning work, she’s created a poster revealing the health effects of bush peanuts, green plums and other native foods.
Sharna Motlap: There's actually a really great story about yams as part of that poster called The Art of Tracking.
It's my supervisor and my mentor, and she's a Mak Mak Marranunggu woman, and she was taught to collect the yams, and they had three different categories in her culture. So we had the old woman yam, the young woman yam, and the infant yam. And then this knowledge was passed down from her grandmother to her mother to her, and you were only allowed to take the old woman yam, and that's a sustainability law.
It’s all very complex when you look at traditional food systems. There are laws around sustainability, laws around waste, there's laws around sharing.
These systems have protected the health of people and the Country. It's a relationship that's quite sophisticated and it's very deeply embedded into our culture.
Now think about all this knowledge and now think about how big and vast the Australian continent is. Traditional food systems are different across Australia. How would you eat in the desert is completely different to how you would eat living on the coast. Indigenous knowledges are localised and contextual and what's going to work in one area may not work in another.
This diversity is so important because when we're talking about climate change, these solutions tend to be one size fits all.
And this knowledge already exists and has existed for thousands of years. So today what we know is that this information is here, we know where it came from, and we also know that these systems are rooted in Indigenous knowledges of the land.
Lee Tran Lam: Turning to native foods makes sense in many ways.
On The Conversation, Dr Evangeline Mantzioris (who has appeared in our soy and olive oil episodes) notes that kangaroo “produces lower methane emissions and has one-third the levels of saturated fat than beef, making it a healthier and more environmentally friendly alternative”.
Sharna Motlap: The advice I will give to people is to do their research about these foods for a couple of reasons. One, some ingredients can be poisonous, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had their own processes of making it edible.
Lee Tran Lam: Cycads, for instance, are toxic, but First Nations people turn it into flour that’s safe to consume.
Sharna Motlap: Also, just make sure that the foods are sourced ethically. Is the business Aboriginal owner-operated? Have the communities been properly consulted at every step of production and commercialisation of these foods? And are the profits going back to the communities?
Lee Tran Lam: As SBS reports, “less than two per cent of native foods come from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or businesses” and the macadamia has even been called the “Hawaii nut”. Supporting the First Nations supply chain can create benefits for communities behind the ingredients.
I love lemon myrtle in chocolate and tea and wattleseed makes every dessert better. There are so many native ingredients I’ve yet to try: bush carrots, sunset limes, chocolate lilies. Is there anything Sharna is especially enthusiastic about?
Sharna Motlap: So I'll admit as a nutritionist, I actually have a very big sweet tooth and I'm excited to try more of the native fruits that can be turned into jams, relishes, chutneys, syrups. So a couple of these fruits are the Davidson plums, which are from the rainforest in Queensland, so up near my way, native gooseberry and the riberry. So all these foods are actually super high in vitamin C and other antioxidants.They've been used to help with things like inflammation and viral infections. So if I can have, like, a little sweet treat that also helps me internally, I love that.
Mindy Woods: Food can be a really important vessel for us all to feel a sense of connection, a sense of belonging here. Our old people are really special. You know, I always say I can't believe how resilient, how gracious and how generous they are. They want to walk forward together. You know, my elders, my mob has definitely given me permission to keep that invitation open. And I think native food is going to be a real way that we can all connect.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford and Joel Supple for their contributions and guidance. A major shout-out also goes to Caroline Gates for helping launch the show. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
This is the final episode of the second season of Should You Really Eat That – catch up on the previous episodes covering chocolate, soy, butter, olive oil and salt. Or hear about rice, bread, tea, coffee, cheese and seafood in season one. Listen on your favourite podcast app and if you loved the show, please spread the word, write a review and tell people what you enjoyed about this series.
