15/01/2025
A STAPLE FOOD ALMOST LOST TO COLONIAL FARMING AND GRAZING
Yam Daisy, Aboriginal names Murnong and Nyamin (Microseris lanceolata)
For as long as anyone could remember, there were only a couple of places left where foragers were guaranteed to find murnong, a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut.
One was a cemetery on Forge Creek Road in the town of Bairnsdale, Victoria, where the plant’s bright yellow flowers could be seen clustered around gravestones; the other was along a nearby railway track, where a line of tall fences protected the bullet-sized root and its shoots from grazing animals.
Before Europeans arrived in the 18th century, the grasslands and rocky hillsides of Victoria had been covered in murnong; it grew so thick that from a distance it seemed to form a blanket of yellow. For the peoples who lived in south-eastern Australia over tens of thousands of years, including the Wurundjeri, the Wathaurong, Gunditjmara and Jaara, the importance of this one root is hard to overstate. Without murnong, life in this area would have been precarious, perhaps impossible. But by the 1860s it was as good as extinct, making its retreat into cemeteries and sidings, places where either the dead were resting or the living kept away, and knowledge of the plant was lost to generations of Aboriginal people.
In 1985, a botanist in her sixties, Beth Gott, marked out a plot of land at Monash University in Melbourne. It was to be a garden dedicated to Aboriginal wild plants. Gott had become interested in indigenous foods and medicines during fieldwork in the Americas and Asia, and on her return to Australia she embarked on the most thorough study of Aboriginal plant knowledge ever conducted.
From her base at Monash, she catalogued more than a thousand species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones picked from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks.
After years of study, she concluded that one indigenous food in particular had been crucial to pre-colonial life in Australia. Some Aboriginal people called it the yam daisy, but most referred to it as murnong. Gott set out to find the plant in the wild, and grow it in her garden, but finding murnong wasn’t easy and uncovering its history was just as hard; so much knowledge had been lost, much of it through violence.
Her source material, perhaps ironically, included the journals of the early colonists. As she uncovered documents, she built up a picture of murnong’s presence in the open spaces and woodlands of southern Australia, where it grew in the “millions”. In 1841, George Augustus Robinson [the Chief Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip] wrote how murnong was picked by women “spread over the plain as far as I could see them… each had a load as much as she could carry”.
Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the swollen tubers can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots. When broken, every part of the plant exudes a milky liquid that leaves fingers stained. Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape.
Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts in which reed baskets filled with murnong, stacked three feet high, were cooked over fire. The only time of year when this didn’t happen was winter, when the tubers were less succulent and often tasted bitter. But across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never-ending.
But in the first decades of European settlement,farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years. Awaiting the sheep were thousands of square miles of pristine grass and vegetation, and the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hoofs compacted the soil.
In 1839, just four years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tongeworong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. “Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],” Moonin said, “plenty eat it murnong, all gone the murnong.”
The state-appointed Chief Protectors of the Aborigines, who were in a position to see how quickly things were changing in the Aboriginal territories, were aware of what was happening to murnong. One alerted his superiors to scenes of starvation. In the eyes of most of the Europeans, however, murnong was little more than a w**d, and so the indigenous people were left looking on as more livestock arrived and swept through the landscape, eating up their supplies of food. Then, in 1859, rabbits were brought to Australia. If there had been any wild murnong left, the herbivores finished it off.
As Beth Gott was growing Aboriginal plants in her garden at Monash in the 1980s, an expert in public health based in Western Australia named Kerin O’Dea started taking indigenous people back to the wild. Her hunch was that Western foods were contributing to obesity and Type 2 diabetes among the Aboriginal population. In a simple but radical experiment, she took ten middle-aged, overweight, diabetic and pre-diabetic Aboriginal people from cities to spend seven weeks in a remote part of the bush and live as hunters and gatherers, including digging up tubers.
Even after this short period, all had lost weight and had seen the symptoms of their diabetes reversed. O’Dea concluded that it wasn’t necessary to revert to a traditional lifestyle to tackle diabetes, but incorporating features of that lifestyle, including dietary ones, could bring great benefits. By then, however, many indigenous ingredients, along with murnong, had become endangered.
Now, things are changing. Murnong is making a slow return to our consciousness and cooking. Aboriginal community gardens now have plots dedicated to the plant, and harvest celebrations featuring digging sticks and ceremonial dances are being revived after 200 years. One of Australia’s most celebrated chefs, Ben Shewry, sourced some seed and now grows murnong in his garden. “It’s the most important ingredient I serve,” he says, explaining that customers are blown away by how delicious the plant tastes and moved by its story.
Some of the seeds used to grow murnong came from places where it had retreated to in the wild, including Bairnsdale’s railway sidings and cemetery; others were sourced from Beth Gott’s Aboriginal garden. Now, murnong’s future lies elsewhere: in the hands of growers and gardeners spread right across Victoria, and inside their kitchens as well.
Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, by Dan Saladino ($43.99, Jonathan Cape), out October 19.
Our Source: 'Australia’s forgotten food' by Dan Saladino, The Australian (Full article worthy of a read) https://bit.ly/3BNa0U2
