Native ingredients reveal a story of abundance long obscured by colonial tastes and it's time Australia truly savoured it, writes Michael Cohen.
A FEW SUNDAYS AGO, I went to the Australian Native Food Festival at Carriageworks in Sydney, expecting an afternoon of polite curiosity -- the kind of event that promises self-improvement more than pleasure.
I imagined I'd sample some unusual ingredients, feel faintly virtuous for supporting Indigenous producers and return home satisfied that I'd done my bit.
Instead, I found delicious food.
The first surprise was the native raspberries: plump, perfumed and vividly sweet. They weren't the austere bush foods I'd imagined, but full of life and flavour. The jams made from native fruits were every bit as lush and complex as the finest European preserves.
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Australia's rich Indigenous heritage, including astronomy, superfoods and even a monument older than Stonehenge is being ignored.
Then came the revelation: a lemon myrtle slice created by Bek Shephard, a Wiradjuri woman from Narromine who runs Edible Native Landscapes. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best pastries I've ever eaten -- delicate, citrus-bright, perfectly balanced. That single slice demolished an entire cultural myth I hadn't realised I'd absorbed.
For generations, Australians have been told - quietly, almost subconsciously - that native ingredients are second-rate. We've learned to think of them as tough, bitter, or impractical curiosities: foods that were somehow tasteless, meagre, or pithy. That prejudice isn't random; it's the residue of settler colonialism, which depended on remaking the land - and our tastes - in the image of Europe.
To claim and transform a continent, settlers had to make its existing abundance seem inferior. Wheat replaced wattleseed, sheep replaced other native proteins, English gardens supplanted bushland.
Settler colonialism was never just about taking land; it was about transforming it - through agriculture, architecture and appetite - to resemble the landscapes of Europe. Farming itself became a cultural performance, turning the foreign into the familiar, the wild into the "civilised". Imported crops were not just food sources but emblems of belonging, designed to make the colonisers feel at home.
Native foods, by contrast, were portrayed as primitive, unreliable or inconvenient. A cuisine that belonged to this place would have implied that the people who lived here had a civilisation of value -- and that was something colonial ideology couldn't allow. By excluding and refusing to use native ingredients, colonial society didn't merely overlook Indigenous knowledge; it hastened its disappearance.
Foodways are living culture and when they're ignored, the culture that sustains them begins to vanish.
The suppression of native ingredients was no accident. European agriculture became the economic engine of the colony, while Indigenous food systems - sustainable, seasonal, adapted perfectly to the environment - were dismissed. The narrative of "poor soil" and "meagre resources" concealed a different truth: that the continent's ingredients were excluded not because they were lacking, but because they didn't fit into the economics of European supremacy.
Even today, most Australians can name kangaroo as "that one native meat", but few could describe the taste of finger lime, wattleseed or bush tomato. We live amid one of the world's most biodiverse landscapes and yet remain strangers to its flavours. The poverty was never in the soil -- it was in imagination.
That's why my experience at the festival was so moving. What I tasted wasn't a novelty act or an exercise in virtue; it was good food, full stop. Bright, complex, alive. The dishes didn't ask for reverence or apology -- they asked to be enjoyed.
We shouldn't eat native food as penance, as though we're paying off a moral debt. That only repeats the old hierarchy, turning Indigenous knowledge into something ornamental or worthy rather than essential. We should eat these foods because they're excellent -- because they speak the language of this land, because they grow sustainably where we live and, above all, because they taste wonderful.
Events like the Australian Native Food Festival aren't just culinary showcases. They're quiet acts of restoration -- reminders that decolonisation can happen through the senses as much as through politics. Each bite connects us, literally, to the ground beneath our feet.
When Bek Shephard serves her lemon myrtle slice, she's not only offering dessert -- she's overturning centuries of invisibility. She's proving that Australia's landscape was never barren, never lacking and that its flavours can rival anything imported.
To rediscover native food is to acknowledge that this continent has always contained abundance, beauty and pleasure of its own. The act of tasting becomes a small act of reconciliation -- not with guilt, but with gratitude and with joy for what was here all along.
Michael Cohen is a Sydney-based Jewish Australian writer who previously contributed extensively to international newspapers, offering both articles and conceptual material. He now focuses on human rights issues.
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HEALTH INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA FOOD NATIVE FOODS Australian Native Food Festival native ingredients Indigenous cuisine decolonisation colonial history native raspberries lemon myrtle wattleseed bush foods Share Article