NEXT BEST THING
Australian agricultural innovation relies on the combined harvest of old knowledge and new thinking, says Bruce Pascoe.
Inside BRUCE PASCOE ’s grass-roots efforts to revive Australia’s native-grain production.
I’ve been a farmer, so it wasn’t such a huge decision to start Black Duck Foods. I’d been harvesting native grain for a few years and growing tubers. I realised I needed more room, and a place where people could visit and learn about production methods. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew people were going to adopt Australian native grains, so I decided to make sure we had a foot in the door, to show the government that you don’t need employment schemes for Aboriginal people, you just need to create jobs.
I decided to concentrate on plants I had learned about in the public record, that people had witnessed Aboriginal people using. We’ve since expanded into finding foods that we haven’t found described anywhere, and to growing those as well.
We’re not trying to invent Australian cuisine – we’re trying to bring it back. There have always been Australian food products ignored by Europeans. Take abalone – it wasn’t till the Japanese showed an interest in it that Australians stopped calling it mutton fish. Now, Australians are far more interested in eating better and more healthily.
Our most recent harvest was of the grains of a grass called spear grass, which we call garrara nanuk in Yuin language. It’s our first harvest of it and we’ve had a really terrific result. We had a whole bunch of kids hanging around the harvest while we were working, for the smell. It’s a really nutty, warm aroma –like your best memories of walking into a bakery when the oven’s still on. Australians who’ve lived near grasslands will remember it on really hot evenings.
The harvester we use was designed by Aboriginal people, and we call it marndhu – bandicoot. The more you learn, the more refined the product becomes. Marndhu 2 will be built with Aboriginal involvement in the design, construction, and engineering. I’m hoping Australia will get excited by it. We also grow kangaroos grass, and the third grain is mamadyan nalluk, the dancing grass, which we harvested last winter, after the fires. It has set seed again this year, but the winter production of grain is five times as prolific as the other two seasons that it grows in.
We’re learning as we go about the science of the plants on Black Duck. For instance, our yam production depends on this little tiny fly that sleeps in the flower. And a recent study shows that the bloom on the flower of kangaroo grass has a really important impact on our gut.
Right now we’re looking at a little panicum we’re calling kunjin narnuk. I think it’s a really interesting plant, but we haven’t been terribly successful with its reproduction. We’ve harvested a few handfuls, and we’re going to have another crack at germination.
We’re also establishing seasonal and reproductive cycles. We’re growing four species of murrnong, which all flowered and seeded in January, and they were beautiful to eat. But we know from the Wat Jairo language that there’s a word which describes when the yam is bitter. We’ve noticed that sometimes the yam is unpalatable. So we suspect that we’re noticing the same thing that Aboriginal people have noticed.
Murrnong grew pretty extensively south of the ranges, and in eastern Australia – when the explorers found the murrnong and the grasslands, they stretched to the horizon in all directions. But it also grew to the north of the ranges in some parts. But the species changes, and by the time you reach the west and the north, you’re looking at a completely different tuber, dioscorea asteofolia, because the country is different, and its people had domesticated a different plant.
Asteofolia is a plant from Arnhem Land, which people in Western Australia accepted as a trade item and deliberately cultivated by replicating its growing conditions with enormous success, as the explorers wrote. The science is all pretty rudimentary so far, but we can see these things in the field. The more we can study them, the better off we’re going to be.
These plants are Australian plants. When we’re growing seed stock, we make sure we keep the young plants damp. But we don’t fertilise and after a fortnight in the ground we don’t water either. The whole importance of these plants is they need no fertiliser, no pesticide, no water, other than what the country can provide agriculturally. This is significant, because it will make marginal farm lands viable. You can grow tubers year after year – the older they get, the sweeter the flavour. The historical record shows that people were constantly harvesting, but leaving the plant in the ground: lifting the plant, harvesting, pressing it back into the earth and moving on.
The plants love our soil and they love fire. This year we’re harvesting a grass that grew in forest that was burned in 2020-21’s summer. It didn’t grow there before because the canopy was too thick. Pre-colonial forest had fewer trees: bigger trees, but more sunlight on the ground, and that’s what these grasses have responded to this year. We have to produce the forest in which they can grow, so we’re experimenting by cutting out a section of forest, to bring our number of trees per acre down to a dozen. It might take 30 years to do that – this is generational science. We’re trying to replicate what the old people burnt over 120,000 years. I’ll be gone, but my son and my granddaughters won’t be.
In 2019 we tried traditional burning practices over winter and we couldn’t get the fire to burn. So we need to burn in more dangerous seasons using cultural methods. We have a plan underway to burn towards the beginning of this autumn but we’re all a bit nervous of fire at the moment. We’re a bit gun-shy.
Everyone’s going to make money out of Australian grains. But they’re Aboriginal domesticates, and Aboriginal people deserve an opportunity to benefit from it. We’re not trying to exclude non-aboriginal farmers from using these products, but Aboriginal people deserve to be part of the industry as well. We currently employ seven or eight Aboriginal people, thanks to philanthropists – and to Andrew Bolt, the journalist, who doubled the sales of Dark Emu. And we’re so busy we can’t even consider failure. We just keep working and keep exploring.
“These plants need no fertiliser, no pesticide, no water, other than what the country can provide.”