Jess Sinnott is collecting lilly pilly's from a Sydney park.
The Yuin and Wailwan woman is the founder and managing director of Koori Kinnections, a business that offers cultural tours and workshops about bushfoods.
She carefully picks the bright pink berries from a lush dark green plant.
“I'm going to pick some so I can talk to the visitors here about its traditional uses,” she says.
It’s a short walk from the park where the lilly pilly is growing to the Eastwood library where a group is waiting for Jess to teach them about bush food.
Jess walks into the library with the lilly pillies and puts them in a bowl on a table spread with other bush foods, such as bunya nuts, finger limes and lemon myrtle leaves.
The group is gathering to learn about native plants in the Eastwood library, but not from books. They're touching, smelling and tasting bush foods, like lemon myrtle that’s been made into a cordial by Jess.
'Delicious' is how the participants describe the cordial with passers by also stopping to listen to some of Jess workshop and take some of the lemon myrtle cordial.
A woman smiles as she sips the drink she says it’s has a “very refreshing naturally lemon taste.”
Learning by sharing bush food
“My purpose for today is to really connect with some of the visitors to the library, and especially visitors who may be from overseas or second generation Australians, to educate them more about our culture and to spark that thirst for knowledge when it comes to our culture," says Sinnott.
Participants say they're keen to participate and learn more about First Nations culture through hands on experience.
Jess calls up volunteers to crack open a bunya nut using stones to bash open the hard nut.
Then Jess passes the nuts around to make sure everyone gets a taste.
This kind of interaction is key to the workshops that Koori Kinnections has been running for more than a decade.
Jess says that sharing knowledge about food and culture is more important than it may first appear.
“When we're looking at people having more understanding of our culture, we're going to see a lot less racism and we're going to see more access to services, and we will see a lot more reconciliation.”
In between a feed of damper one of the participants tells NITV that “we absolutely need to know more about the Aboriginal culture and food and all sorts of different ways of living".
"We are a multicultural country but we don't get enough Aboriginal information.”
Another participant Angelia Figueura came to Australia from Kenya in1974.
"When I first came to Australia, I went on a bushwalk and they had bush drinks and bush damper and I loved it and when I saw this at the library I thought I must book it.”
The group chat happily as they connect over a library of bush foods.
For Jess it’s been a positive way to communicate how to care for country while teaching about culture and bush foods.
It’s another successful day from this 100 percent Aboriginal owned business that also has a 100 percent rate of Aboriginal employment.
