A taste of Kakadu
Forget witchetty grubs: Indigenous cuisine is hot right now. It has herbs and spices Craig Tansley has never heard of.
‘Don’t tell them it’s horse poo,’’ Bininj woman Mandy Muir leans in close and whispers to me. ‘‘We’ll keep them thinking it’s buffalo and keep the buggers on their toes.’’
We’re traipsing up and down narrow, red dust trails: city folk a long way from our urban comfort zone. In truth, we’re actually not far from the Patonga Homestead Aboriginal Community, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily safe in this part of Australia.
Bush tucker round here comes in all shapes and sizes: it grows on trees, and it’s spread across the earth. We’re foraging for the tastiest bush tucker we can lay our hands on and the only thing that will stop us is if we’re attacked by Kakadu’s most dangerous local, the wild buffalo.
Muir tells us she saw a few out this morning – and we’ve just been shown fresh tracks in the earth – so when we stumble on a patch of still-steaming dung the size… and shape… of a rugby league football, the group draw their own conclusions.
‘‘If we see a buffalo, you’re on your own, I’ll be running,’’ Muir warns. But she leans in conspiratorially again: ‘‘They’re way more likely to get attacked by these, I reckon,’’ Muir puts her hands in the ochre dust and drags up a handful of green ants which she puts straight in her mouth.
‘‘Feel free to eat them, they’re not for everyone, but I love them,’’ she says, chewing and pursing her lips to spit out the heads.
This patch of terra firma is like a supermarket without a check-out. Muir’s plucking black plum berries – showing us which ones will poison us (‘‘not that one, it’ll cut your throat’’) and which berries are as sweet as local honey.
There’s herbs and spices I’ve never heard of, and the planet’s latest superfood craze, the Kakadu plum. We pick it all and take it back to the homestead to mix it with the black bream and barramundi two local blokes caught this morning in the billabong up the road from here.
Local Bininj chef Ben Tyler, who heads up Kakadu Kitchen with business partner Kylie-Lee Bradford, is in charge of the feast, he’s sprinkled what we’ve gathered onto the fish, then he’s tossed them whole onto white-hot coals in a newly dug fire-pit and covered it with paperbark leaves.
It’s taken a long time – 219 years to be precise – for an annual food festival celebrating Australian Indigenous cuisine like this one. A Taste Of Kakadu will celebrate its second year in May and has already become Australia’s premier traditional food festival. There’s nowhere better in Australia for nonIndigenous people to get their heads – and their mouths – around the nuances of the ancient diet.
For five days, visitors will journey across Kakadu to study the landscape which inspired the diet of Indigenous Australians. And for five days, they’ll eat the animals – and the dishes they come served up in – that Indigenous people have eaten for tens of thousands of years.
‘‘There’s so much food out here,’’ local Indigenous woman Patsy Raiclar tells me. ‘‘People don’t realise things about us, they don’t know we’ve been making our own bread since before the Egyptians did. My grandparents’ grandparents taught them all these things, and their grandparents before that, all the way back 65,000 years.’’
Tyler says Indigenous food is the future for Kakadu, and A Taste Of Kakadu is the key to that. ‘‘With the mine shutting down [the main uranium mine at Kakadu – Ranger – is set to shut down by 2021], showcasing Indigenous food is what