Australia is home to a wide variety of unique plants and wildlife. For over 60,000 years, Indigenous Australians (also known as Aboriginal peoples) have been taking advantage of the natural resources Australia has to offer and creating unique traditional recipes known as bush tucker or bushfood. To learn more about Aboriginal methods of hunting, foraging and cooking, I signed up for a bush tucker tour in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. During the tour, our Aboriginal guide showed us many different plants traditionally used by Indigenous Australians, including lemon myrtle, blue flax-lily and the lilly pilly bush. These plants have a variety of uses beyond simply eating. Aboriginal Peoples use plants as medicine, soap, whistles and seasonal indicators for hunting. After my tour, I headed over to the iconic Sydney Opera House to dine on authentic bush tucker at Midden by Mark Olive.
At Midden, I ordered the signature "Indigenous Australian Grazing Plate" which included regional cheeses, wild thyme hummus, smoked kangaroo steak, emu meat, tandoori crocodile, olives, pickled vegetables, marinated artichoke, roasted macadamia nuts, quandong paste and Tasmanian mountain pepper leaf flat bread.
