On the bush tucker trail in WA

Travel & Touring | WA Things to Do

12 July, 2022  By: Fleur Bainger

Wardandi Bibbulmun elder Dale Tilbrook pours a steaming cup of home brew lemon myrtle tea and swirls it with local honey. She breathes in the fragrance deeply and exhales with a list of astonishing attributes. “It has intense lemony, almost limey flavours, it’s full of calcium and it has huge antioxidant properties,” she says. “It’s also a powerful anti-bacterial and anti-fungal.”

It’s one of a slew of native ingredients WA’s Aboriginal people have been using for tens of thousands of years. Salty samphire, tart quandong and tangy Geraldton wax leaves have long been familiar to the Aboriginal palate.

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Increasingly, bush tucker is showing up on restaurant menus and on garden centre shelves. Awareness of WA’s bush foods is growing as chefs embrace bush flavours and the public’s appreciation for low food miles turns to hyper-local sourcing. In many ways, Western Australia is playing catch up with the culture of our land’s custodians. “Traditionally, fresh, local and seasonal was how it was,” says Dale. “We invented it.”

Nutritional goodness

Co-owner of Maalinup Aboriginal Art Gallery in the Swan Valley, Dale sits surrounded by the leaves, seeds and nuts she talks about during her bush tucker discovery workshops. Visitors are encouraged to touch, smell and taste the plants that traditional owners commonly selected for both nutritional and medicinal benefits – health was understandably at the forefront for people who lived off the natural environment.

Dale picks up a sprig of saltbush and offers a silverygreen leaf to sample. “We Aboriginal people would harvest them, grind them down and use them to make little bread cakes, or mandjaly,” she says. “Saltbush goes well with lamb and mutton. It’s full of protein in the leaves and the seeds.” Next, she pulls out a glass jar of roasted wattle seed, which wafts coffee and caramelised white chocolate notes – a natural mocha.

“Wattle seed is rich in protein, high in magnesium and high in dietary fibre – what’s not to love?” she says. “A lot of food is medicine, and medicine is food.”

As the elder offers a strand of sea parsley, she hints that WA’s Aboriginal people might also be the pioneers of the plant-based diet movement. With women in charge of food gathering and preparation, the ingredients favoured – seeds, roots, fruit – were the most easily accessible.

“About 80 per cent of food that was prepared by women was vegetable,” says Dale. Men hunted for meat, a slow process that was conducted less frequently, reflected in the dietary mix.

A seasonal bush supermarket

Colonisation altered Aboriginal consumption practices dramatically, particularly in Perth.

“All along Derbarl Yerrigan (the Swan River), there were huge yam gardens. They’re marked on maps dated to 1829; they were called warrains,” Dale says.

But the location of these native riches was problematic. “They occupied the good alluvial soil, and that was what the Europeans wanted. It was also where you gained access to the river, because back then it was the main transport artery, so it didn’t take long for Aboriginal people to be pushed from their traditional gardens,” she says.

Pre-colonisation WA’s Aboriginal peoples foraged and hunted a range of bush foods far beyond the well-known kangaroo, goanna and emu diet. It’s a practice that continues today.

As well as wildlife, nature’s supermarket encompasses plants, seafood and grubs. The food harvested varies in line with what’s available in each region of WA.

Specific things live and grow in some areas, whereas other foods can be found right across the state.

For example, the boab tree, and its edible tubers and nuts, are only found in WA’s tropical north. Succulent, pigface, meanwhile, used for its nutritional fruits and the medicinal juice in the leaves, is widespread along the WA coast.

The time of year also plays an important role. The Noongar people of South West WA adhere to a six season calendar. The calendar’s shorter seasons allow for more subtle changes to be observed. Each period denotes the best time of year for particular foods, as well as which ones to leave, existing in harmony with nature.

Bunuru signifies the ‘second summer’ felt from February to March. It’s when living by the coast and fishing is best, when the endemic Zamia palm produces its edible cones and when jarrah trees flower. As the land cools for Makuru, the June to July winter period, people shift inland, hunting marsupials both for food and warmth, with their furry skins turned into cloaks.

Bush tucker tours in WA

Aboriginal culture is being shared right across the state, with many interactive tours including bush tucker in an authentic, sensory-based way. Dale Tilbrook’s enlightening bush tucker talk and taste experience (daletilbrookexperiences.com.au) is held at the family gallery, as well as at Mandoon Estate.

North of Broome, towards the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, Bardi man Terry Hunter can often be found sourcing and then cooking oysters using spinifex. He shares these ancient skills on his Borrgoron Coast to Creek Tours, which lead from his home on Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm - Australia’s oldest continuously operating pearl property.

In the Pilbara, Clinton Walker of Ngurrangga Tours (ngurrangga.com.au) weaves mud crab spearing on the flats of Hearsons Cove into his tours of Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula). He might also pull over his four-wheel drive to pick bush coconuts from the bloodwood tree, showing the grub that lives inside, en route to the gorges of Millstream Chichester National Park.

His Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi family has lived in the Pilbara for more than 2500 generations, passing down a wealth of information on the land’s bounty.

In the Margaret River region, Wadandi man Josh Whiteland snaps off fragrant bush herbs, points out forest fruit and cooks kangaroo meat in the coals on his on-country Koomal Dreaming tours (koomaldreaming.com.au). His traditional practices add another dimension to Margaret River’s gastronomic spread.

Dining out on bush tucker

As WA’s dining scene has matured, so too have the ingredients chefs access. Perth’s leading fine dining restaurant, Wildflower designs its menu in line with the sixseason Noongar calendar, changing its multi-course lineup every two months.

You might find crisped saltbush or dusted quandong elevating more recognisable ingredients, while marron is delicately enhanced with lemon aspen. Wildflower’s opening chef, Jed Gerrard took his ethos to the Ritz-Carlton’s Hearth restaurant. While he has since moved to Margaret River’s Will’s Domain, native ingredients continue to subtly elevate Hearth’s carte.

Swan Valley distillery-restaurant, Old Young’s has wholeheartedly embraced native produce. Chef Rohan Park has sought advice from Dale Tilbrook, as well as ingredients from suppliers such as Marvick Farms, Kimberley Wild and Creative Native. He stokes culinary curiosity via kangaroo tartare with a little-known endemic shrub called youlk, crocodile chorizo sprinkled in ground rosella leaf and ceviche elevated with samphire and Geraldton wax. The expansion of flavours is like going from black and white television, to colour.

Pop-up dining company, Fervor takes the meaningful embrace of indigenous Australian flavours to another level again. Founder and chef, Paul Iskov teams up with Aboriginal people to forage and source the ingredients ahead of his degustation-style dining events, often held in remote WA destinations. He’s a huge fan of green tree ants, bunya nut and yams, all frequently on his captivating menus.

Growing your own

Old Young’s now grows plenty of its own native produce – something home gardeners are also embracing. Dale Tilbrook advises that many leafy greens are easy to cultivate. She suggests having a go with local beach herbs, sea celery and sea parsley, as well as Geraldton wax, which can grow into large bushes, and saltbush, a plant so hardy, if you chop it back, it grows out even bushier.

Another one to try is lemon myrtle, a Queensland native. “It’s an understory rainforest tree, so it wants to be sheltered from the sun and the easterly wind,” Dale says. Her other tip is to keep your eyes peeled at native nurseries and garden centres. “My advice is, if you see a plant you want, buy it there and then, because it won’t be available all year round.”

Images: Tourism Western Australia