Bush food experts to build tucker garden

Bush food experts are coming together to build a new tucker garden on the Bundiyarra Aboriginal Corporation grounds in Rangeway.

The initiative will restart the partnership between Bundiyarra and the Drylands Permaculture Nursery, which last joined up in 2003 to create Dora Dann’s bush tucker field guide Waranygu Bayalgu: Digging for Food.

With assistance from the Northern Agricultural Catchment Council’s Aboriginal participation team, and consultation with Mrs Dann’s family, Bundiyarra has begun the planning for a “Waranygu Bayalgu Bush Garden”, which was inspired by Mrs Dann’s book.

The garden will be built with help from Skillhire through Work for the Dole, and through consultation with the Bundiyarra volunteer board and elders.

Project lead Donna Ronan said the garden was an effort of the entire Bundiyarra team, and it was always a family dream to build this kind of garden to support traditional food and medicine within the community.

“We’re going to be growing bush tucker food — so that will entail our family going out to mum and pop’s country and doing some food collection, but our garden will also have normal annual fruit and vegetables as well,” she said.

“This will help the traditional people be able to look after the country again and reinstil in that knowledge in our kids — keep that history alive.

“It will be kind of experimenting as well, as far as figuring out what we can grow.”

Ms Ronan said she had no idea when they would be able to harvest the first crop, but in April there would be a seed collection trip with garden specialists to help select the right plants to suit the conditions.

“In the future we’re planning there will be a bush tucker cafe, but we’d like to supply the community as well, so it depends how well it goes,” she said.

Drylands Permaculture Nursery managing director Julie Firth said spending so much time in the desert meant she had a natural interest in bush food.

“So far Drylands has done a soil assessment so we know what kind of plants we can grow on the property — for example, desert plants need a very specific kind of soil, so we need to make sure we design the garden to have those conditions if we want to support plants from inland as described in Dora’s book,” she said.

Ms Firth said the garden would help educate future generations about traditional practices.

“We’ll be putting gin a range different plants, acacias that they used to eat for seed and small fruits, but also plants that have cultural significance,” she said.

“The bundi wirnda was a plant harvested for sticks, which used to burn for days and days, and they’d carry fire from one place to another, from camp fire to camp fire.

“Another type of stick would be banged on the ground by women searching the river for potatoes, if they heard a hollow spot they knew that’s where they had to dig — otherwise they’d have to look for yonks, but by using the sticks as a sounding board they were able to actually find them.

“These things hold great significance to the land and people but the big thing is people are forgetting, Dora is 95 now, and we need to preserve these traditions while they can still be taught.”