Forget turkey and mince pies. This Christmas Australians are being urged to serve native foods such as smoked kangaroo with wild lime and brandy sauce and wattle seed pavlova.
Despite an abundance of unique fruits, nuts, and meat that have sustained the country's Aboriginal inhabitants for centuries, Australians are only now embracing native food, with some supermarkets starting to stock indigenous produce this year.
This step into the mainstream has inspired campaigners who have struggled to get indigenous foods onto the nation's dining tables and destroy the image of native food as simply juicy fat witchetty grubs, protein-rich bogong moths, and honey ants.
"For 200 years of white settlement there's been resistance and ignorance about indigenous foods and it's only in the past year the market has started to take off," said Juleigh Robins, founder of native food group Robins Australian Foods.
"But it is so logical to use indigenous food, with foreign crops and livestock contributing to severe land degradation problems. I think in the next year or so we'll see a major increase in the use of native foods in Australia and overseas."
When the British first colonized Australia in 1788, the ill-prepared settlers didn't know where to find food and overlooked the fact that the continent's indigenous Aborigines had successfully lived off the land for up to 60,000 years.
The British arrivals didn't identify the millions of wild kangaroos or emus as edible protein, preferring to eradicate them and instead raise cattle and sheep with which they were familiar. They also shunned native plants, which were rich food sources, and converted the land to European agriculture to raise cattle and plant traditional orchards for European-style fruits.
Old habits die hard and until the 1950s Australian cooking was synonymous with British food. But gradually the influence of Asian migrants spread to Australian kitchens, with a Chinese restaurant becoming a standard fixture in every country town.
But bush tucker is still regarded as eccentric and niche, with the industry only worth about A$17 million (US$13 million) a year. Tourists are often keener to try unique Australian fare while the locals still opt for beef rather than kangaroo.
Growing interest from the five million overseas visitors to Australia every year has spurred some restaurants to focus exclusively on native foods, using such ingredients as bush tomatoes, lemon aspen (a citrus-flavored leaf), and lemon myrtle (a small fruit) on emu, crocodile and stingray.
This has generated a new respect for native foods within Australia, where Aboriginal art was also largely shunned until it earned international accolades.
Some supermarkets in Britain and Germany have started to stock sauces and pickles made from indigenous foods. They are marketed as healthy, organic and environmentally friendly, and distributors from France and Ireland are also entering the market.
Aware of the market's potential, the Rural Industries Research and Development Corp has set up a five-year plan to develop the native food industry which now involves about 500 mainly small businesses, from harvesters to restaurants.
"There is significant interest from export markets in Europe and North America. This interest is fostered by the success overseas of Australian wines, meats and seafood," the group, funded by the government, said in a recent report.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this