Australia

This year we have just started working with the Indigenous Harvest Association (IHA) in the Kimberleys to help them commercialize some of their Australian indigenous foods. I particular we are working with Winawaal (Bruno Dann) one of the directors of IHA who has been instrumental in bringing back the aboriginal traditional system of land care. Following is an excerpt of an article that we wrote for a US magazine :

Following is a quote from Winawaal, which serves as one small scratch on the surface :

Today I spend my time caring for the land and carrying on the traditions of my old people. Nyul Nyul people are coming back to country through programs set up by the government but it is still notenough to be really successful and we are looking for outside help. I use the elders our professor's knowledge of the land for our land caring practices. Fire has become a real problem because when the Nyul Nyul people left the land it was not managed by anyone. Strip burning in the right season does no damage to the bush or wildlife. We prune deadwood off the trees and clean up excessive fuel creating cold burns. Leaves stay green on the trees and birds nests are safe, lizards and snakes have time to leave, the bush honey fly still has flowers to make honey and it is only the grass on the ground that is burnt. Fire can be a friend or a deadly enemy if it is not controlled. We knew this and that's why we were prepared and kept our country clean. The government have never thought of asking us how we cared for country. They were so ignorant to think we knew nothing about a land we inhabited for thousands and thousands of years. It is only today that some people are showing an interest in our land caring techniques.

In our culture every living thing has a purpose on this earth and we respect them. My Grandfathers, Gulloords and Grandmothers, Mimis could communicate with nature and knew about the medicines available to us in our country. It was a shame they didn't get to share their knowledge because it might have helped a lot of people today.

I am walking with Winawaal, an Australian aboriginal from the Nyul Nyul tribe, through his country about 200 km north of Broome in the remote Kimberleys region of north west Australia. It is when we are walking through the bush that Winawaal begins to open up sharing some of the knowledge about his sacred land that the elders of his people have passed down for thousands of generations.

To the uneducated eye the bush looks quite uninteresting just scrubby shrubs and low wooded trees. Whereas for Winawaal and his people this is paradise, containing everything they need to nourish and sustain their bodies and souls in a perfect state of contentment.
It is the wet season and the sky is a constant play of dark menacing clouds dumping showers of rain and fluffier billowing white clouds interspersed with sunshine. The landscape is filled with greens, not the deep greens of the forest but rather lighter more vivid greens. It is gubinge season and we are wandering through the bush looking for the elegant looking gubinge trees.
Gubinge is one of the aboriginal superfoods it has been confirmed to be the highest natural source of vitamin C on the planet even higher than the camu camu berry of the peruvian amazon. It is a bush plum, iridescent light greeny yellow in colour about the size of an olive with a seed in the middle very similar to an olive. When Winawaal holds out a handful of them to me they kind of glow against his dark skin. Curious I began eating them on the first morning as we were picking, finding their tangy astringent flavour neither particularly attractive nor distasteful. On the second day of picking I found myself eating more and more of these little plums and then I realized that I was craving them. I also noticed how energized I felt and light and happy. Neither was I as hungry as I normally would be especially when camping in the bush.

It reminded me of when I was working with the mayans in Xoconusco in Chiapas, Mexico walking through the forest picking cacao pods and eating the fruit and seeds inside. I was hooked perhaps not so much to the taste but to the feel good factor that then began to be associated with the taste. I found the gubinge not as racy as the cacao, softer but still with a tangible mood and energy lift.

Above : the elegant looking gubinge trees

While it was the gubinge that called me to visit this remote and exotic part of Australia, the thing that most impacted me on my visit was the traditional culture of landcare that Winawaal was working so hard to resurrect again. I remember when I was at university in the late 80’s a good friend of mine was writing a thesis trying to show how the aboriginal people “cultivated” the land because this was a crucial part of establishing native title to the land in the eyes of the current legal system. A lot of white Australians have a kind of romantic view of the Australian aboriginals as a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer culture and I guess this is what it looks like from the outside. However once one begins scratching the surface a highly sophisticated and evolved culture begins to reveal itself.

On our walks through the bush Winawaal would be constantly stopping and telling different stories about the bark of this tree and the sap of that tree, then about different landscape features and the leaves, flowers and animals and I could see that there was no end to the depth of knowledge and insight his culture had about the country they lived in. At the end of my stay with Winawaal I had the profound insight that the aboriginal culture’s relationship to the land was one of service, of serving the land, rather than the common western approach of exploitation or having the land serve us.

We have been working with wildcrafted foods for several years now. Sourcing various wildcrafted foods from indigenous groups in Mexico, Peru and China. Truly wildcrafted foods are beyond organic foods in many ways. However we have also seen the term wildcrafted begun to be used quite loosely and now we see the importance of developing standards – like the international organic standards – whereby wildcrafted operations can be audited to ensure that they are truly wildcrafted, using sustainable techniques. This is becoming more and more important with the growing consumer demand for “wildcrafted foods”. An independent certification standard would protect consumers from being misled by non-transparent marketing campaigns and protect natural resources that are in demand from being abused.
We believe a truly wildcrafted operation has to be managed by indigenous communities in their traditional way of managing the land. When a product is wildcrafted in this way it is charged with the power of the traditional indigenous cultural practices. Although these vary widely between each ecosystem and culture the general principles are: that the essential spirit of the product is honoured and the ecosystems in which they grow are also honoured and this creates the highest quality product. A great example of this is the tests showing higher levels of vitamin C in gubinge grown in the wild in the traditional manner compared to the plums grown with modern irrigation and other horticultural techniques.