Review…
Foragers’ field guides take wild foods to the seashore
PUSHED by strong winds, the dark clouds stream across our southern skies and release their load of moisture as dark curtains of cold rain falling on on a landscape of grey hills and mountains.
The rain came in the early hours and now, in the morning, the forest has that soggy, wet feel, that close mugginess that is the exudate of moist soils and wet vegetation. Morning’s mist lingers and brings a quietness to the forest. Drops fall on us as we follow the narrow track. The person ahead bumps against a tall shrub and dislodges a cascade of cold water that falls on our heads and down our necks.
We are moving upwards, following the stony track through the subalpine forest. Most of us have put on our waterproof parkas, knowing that the forest would be dripping wet from last night’s rain, but exertion makes us a little too warm as we unzip and try to find a comfortable temperature balance between the fuggy warmth inside our parkas and the cold air outside.
The tall spiky tops of Richea pandanifolia rise above the wiry shrubs. There are those bushes, too, with the bright white berries. What are they, someone asks? Snowberry, comes the answer. A snack food of the mountains.
Snack food? True. Gaultheria hispida can be eaten raw. So can ants delight — Acrotriche serrulata —and cheeseberry, the native cherry (Exocarpus cupressiformis) of the eucalyptus forest understory and the orange matcurrant (Coprosma moorei), the ground-hugging plant of the alpine regions.
There are more, many more edible plants here in the forests, fields and byways of our southern island. Some are lowland species of the drier eucalyptus forests. Some inhabit the spaces between the tall Eucalyptus regnans, the mountain ash of the moist mountain forests. Others we find where the trees thin and the tall eucalyptus gives way to stunted snowgum. Still others make a home above the treeline, up in the alpine zone of our mountains where they cope with summer’s heat and winter’s snows.
In their Tasmanian Bush Foods-A Short Guide to Tasmanian Edible Plants, the Plants of Tasmania Nursery tells of how Hobart women would venture “up on to Mt Wellington to collect baskets of these berries (the white snow berry, Gaultheria hispida) for their summer pies. The practice was so prevalent that eventually Hobart City Council banned it to protect the bush.”
In that tale lies a lesson for those of us who forage for food and the others products in Tasmania’s wild places. Too many foragers, foraging too often, can soon denude an area of its wild foods. It is probably more a problem over on the mainland with its higher population and higher number of foragers. Rees Campbell, the author of Eat More Wild Tasmanian, a book about Tasmanian wild foods and the recipes made using them, says we can sidestep overharvesting by growing the edible species in our gardens. Those might be home gardens or community gardens where the edible plants form what in the permaculture design system’s approach to urban garden design is known as Zone Five — the space set aside for nature, including native plants.
Publications broaden interest in Tasmania’s wild foods
I put it in the 1990s that interest in Australian wild food, what we commonly call bush foods, became a thing. There had been interest before that of course, but it was that decade which saw an upsurge in interest. Suddenly, identification guides by the Cribbs and Tim Low were in demand. Vic Cheffikoff worked with NSW Aboriginal people to harvest, commercialise and popularise the wild harvest. I saw this interest where I worked part-time as a national park ranger and bush guide in Royal National Park and in parks to the south administered from Royal.
On the walks and other adventure actitities that I and others led, including the two-day camping transit of the national park along the Coast Track, we would encourage people to think about the wild food and materials resource and how the Dharawal people, whose homeland the region was, might have used them.
Now, we have a slowly growing number of books about Tasmania’s wild foods. Rees Campbell’s Eat More Wild Tasmanian is one of these that went into its second edition last year. Her hardcover book brings together information about edible wild species and recipes using them, and in doing so highlights their value. She also worked with Tasmanian Aboriginal sources to identify the species by their traditional Aboriginal palawa name (palawa is the name for Tasmanian Aboriginals).
Her book exemplifies the comment about recipe books by American chef, Michael Symon, when he said that…
Recipes are important but only to a point. What’s more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.
In August this year Rees published a supplement to her book that takes our interest in wild food onto lutruwita-Tasmania’s beaches. I am not talking about fishing, which in this state is a common means of sourcing wild food. I am talking about that stuff washed up on to our beaches, sea wrack, seaweed. Entitled The Seaweed supplement to Eat More Wild Tasmanian, the book is an identification guide as well as a guide to eating, and discusses topics like precautions and the potential for land and sea-based seaweed farming. The book contains a glossary, an index, references and further reading. Being wire-bound, it can be opened flat when following recipes and in the field when foraging the seaweeds.
Rees’ Eat More Wild Tasmanian is the only one of its type that includes plant information and recipes that I have come across. It supplements more-modest publications like the Plants of Tasmania Nursery’s Tasmanian Bush Food-a short guide to edible Tasmanian plants, a 24-page, A5 format booklet with small colour photos of 47 species and descriptions of the plants, the ecosystems they occur in and their uses as food. Tasmania’s Natural Resource Management North, which is associated with the National Landcare Program, published an informative, double-sided, six-fold sheet with colour photos, uses and cautions on Tasmanian wild foods that is distrubuted free. Entitled Edible Native Plants of Tasmania, the brochure has a photo of copperleaf snowberry on its cover.
Tim Low’s 1991 Wild Food Plants of Australia, still in print, identifies Tasmanian species among its national coverage. Its colour photos, field notes and uses listings make Tim’s book one of the more useable on the topic.
Stimulated by modern history
Why this hubbub about Australia’s, Tasmania’s in particular, wild harvest?
I see it as an offshoot of the popularistion of Australian native plants that I trace back to the 1980s. It is a focusing of that interest for those with an interest in ethnobotany and anthropology, Aboriginal culture and history in particular. In its popular form we can trace that back to the movement for Aboriginal emancipation starting in modern times with the Guringi campaign at Wave Hill against the absentee English landowner Vestey. What began as an industrial dispute garnered broad support to become Australia’s first successful Aboriginal land claim that set the scene which culminated in the Whitlam Labor government’s introduction of land rights and the setting up of the Ministry for Aboriginal Affairs.
In a more abstract sense the interest in wild foods can be seen as an element in a reappraisal of European peoples’ place on our ancient continent. Manifesting in a variety of ways, including the campaigns to preserve wild regions which culminated in the unsuccessful campaign to prevent the submergence of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder below a dam impoundment and the successful national campaign to prevent the flooding of Tasmania’s Franklin River below another dam impoundment, this reappraisal brought the popularisation of Australian native plants, both in their wild state and in gardening.
The move to marketise wild foods and pharmaceuticals like tea tree (Malaleuca sp. farmed and processed for its oil) and to farm them is to be expected in a market economy. Chefs had a substantial role in this process when they started to use edible native plants in their cooking. All of this brought with it an increase in public interest. The nursery industry came along a little later and now even Westfarmers’ national hardware and nursery corporation, Bunnings, sells seedlings of wild foods, as does its competitor, Mitre 10. Scientists came to the game, too, analysing wild foods for their nutritional value.
Further stimulating the surge in interest in the wild harvest has been the growing interest in bushcraft. Bushcraft is nothing new. The word itself is Australian and has been adopted around the world. Bushcraft includes the skills possessed by bushwalkers and others who travel in wild places, however it includes in its extended form the knowledge and skills needed to spend extended periods in the bush. One of these is a knowledge of the wild harvest — fish, animals and vegetative resources.
What value Tasmania’s wild foods?
What are the values of the wild harvest? I asked a research assistant, Poe AI and here is its summary:
“Wild food has been an important part of human diets for thousands of years, and it continues to provide nutritional and cultural value to many communities around the world. For many indigenous cultures, wild food is an important part of their traditional knowledge and is closely tied to cultural practices and spiritual beliefs.
“Wild food is often more nutrient-dense than cultivated food, as it tends to contain higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. Additionally, wild food can provide a sense of connection to the natural world and a deeper understanding of local ecosystems.
“The cultivation of wild food can also have environmental benefits, as it can promote biodiversity and reduce the need for industrial farming practices.
“Overall, the value of wild food extends beyond its nutritional benefits and serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving and respecting the natural world.”
Not a bad summary. It contexts our interest in wild foods in its broader context of nutrition, culture and natural systems.
A resource for beachcombers
The Seaweed supplement to Eat More Wild Tasmanian supplements three additional books of interest to Tasmanian beachcombers.
- The Seashells of Tasmania-a comprehensive guide, by Simon Grove, includes photographs and describes shells by type as well as how to start a shell collection.
- Between Tasmanian Tide Lines-a field guide is published by the Tasmanian Marine Naturalists Association in association with the Tasmanian museum and Art Gallery. It introduces the intertidal zone and uses drawings for identifying seaweeds as well as for seagrasses, sponges and worms, crustaceans and molluscs, fish, crabs and the other life forms we find on our beaches.
- Beachcombing-a guide to seashores of the southern hemisphere, by Ceridwen Fraser, is a colour photo-illustrated book that presents information in a less formal way than the previous two field guides. Published by CSIRO, the book introduces the coastal dynamics or tide and wave, flotsam and jetsam, plastics, currents and the multiple sea creatures including sea birds and marine mammals as well as the seaweeds for which the ocean is home and whose acquaintence we make when they are washed onto our beaches. Although this is not a recipe book for our beach finds, the author includes a recipe for kelp ragout.
Rees’ Seaweed supplement complements these books by taking identification into the kitchen and making a meal of what we find.
Gardeners already harvest sea wrack for fertiliser. This is legal, Rees notes. Up to 100kg can be taken by individuals per day.
Field guides for the curious, the cook and the beachcomber
The value of all of these books lies in encouraging us to explore our bushland, our mountains and our seashores, and in so doing to recognise their value as natural systems. Rees’ Eat More Wild Tasmanian and her Seaweed supplement take this further by linking wild foods with the traditional culinary uses that bushland and marine vegetation have been put to. On reading her books we realise that we, too, can incorporate these previously ignored food sources in an authentic Australian, particularly a Tasmanian, diet and cuisine.
Here in lutruwita-Tasmania (Tasmania’s official dual naming policy includes palawa terms drawn from palawa kani, the constructed language under development that includes traditional terms) we are moving into the southern spring. Soon, more people will be taking to our mountain trails as the cold dissipates and what snow we had this year melts to flow into rills and creeks, highland lakes and lowland rivers. Will they notice those bright red berries beside the tracks? Those bright white snow berries? Will they know that they are edible? And, when they wander Tasmania’s long empty beaches and come across seaweeds and seagrasses the tide has stranded on the sand, will they think of cooking them?
The books
Eat More Wild Tasmanian; 2022, Rees Campbell; Fuller's Publishing, Hobart, ISBN 978 0 6481240 0 9.
The Seaweed Supplement to Eat More Wild Tasmanian; 2023, Rees Campbell; Rees Campbell with support from Fullers Publishing, Hobart. ISBN 97806 48218098 0 00.
Tasmanian Bush Food-a short guide to edible Tasmanian plants; Plants of Tasmania Nursery, Ridgeway, Tasmania.
Edible Native Plants of Tasmania; Natural Resource Management North, Tasmania.
Beachcombing-a guide to seashores of the southern hemisphere; 2021, Otago University Press/CSIRO Publishing, Australia. ISBN 978148631498.
Between Tasmanian Tide Lines-a field guide; 2010, Tasmanian Marine Field Naturalists. ISBN 0 9578101 0 5.
The Seashells of Tasmania: a comprehensive guide; 2019, Simon Grove; Taroona Publications, Hobart. ISBN 9780646809267.
Fiction… more or less…
