What we're doing here with these plants are all the things that were discovered
over sixty thousand years by Aboriginal people called the Bibbulman. The
Bibbulman means the people with the very big chest which are the people that had
the most food in most areas of Australia. There was limited food, but for
Bibbulman they had a lot of food so their name translates to the people who got
fat. And those people had all of these foods each one of them is different. When
the first white people came here they discovered that there were not enough
western foods that they knew about and only the Aboriginal food. So they had to
find things like this which is called a native bush tomato. A bit
embarrassing for Australia, that's not a very big tomato but it has three times
the vitamin C of any food in the world yet. So it's one of the highest vitamin C
foods known and three times the vitamin C of an orange.
Mrs Bussell discovered foods like that; she discovered seeds and nuts.
Mrs Bussell, the first European woman to live here, had 14 children before she was
40 and she had to discover how to use this type of food which was a native
peach. You eat the outside tasting like peaches or stew them with honey or sugar
if you had any. The inside looked like a tiny brain and if you grind these you'll
get a seed, the seed tastes like coffee and if you put it in flour,
Mrs Bussell found she could make a cake, and the cake would be called
native biscuit and that biscuit tastes like croissant.
So for Mrs Bussell and the aboriginals they weren't left out here with no food.
They were able to make foods and this one can be carried around if you're lost
in the bush, full of water, and you won't starve because you can
carry around a sweet biscuit. Other foods included Rosella or hibiscus flowers. And
hibiscus flowers tasted like strawberries when they found them in the bush.
Also, there were medicinal plants including this one which is called Gotu Kola,
and if you taste it, it tastes like parsley and reduces arthritis. There was
native celery and the celery was cooked with kangaroo to make stew. And
here is tea tree oil that when you grind it makes antiseptic for your
cuts, for your nose and for your skin. Which are the trees behind me and the
trees are up to sixty thousand year old paper bark trees and some of them get to
6,000 years old and live underwater. Their skin is made of paper and their
leaves are made of oil. The other foods that we have here - the aboriginals
used to get big worms make them into paste and this is your witchetty grub
paste. They would cook this paste or just put it on shellfish or on their biscuit
or on their native seeds and nuts and this tastes a bit like hummus or ground
peas. They didn't go without spices. They had these things called belyunga and
belyunga means hot on the way in and hot on the way out. So the aboriginals
had spices and they would spice their food accordingly. Finally they had
kangaroo and they had emu and these are smoked because for aboriginals you
cannot keep raw meat for more than a day or two as there are flies and dingoes. So
they would smoke their meat almost to the stage of jerky, and then they could
walk around with dried meat or put it in caves and there was no off food. All of these
things the first white people had to eat, and they lived only just borderline,
because there was really nothing to make you overweight.