Agricultural Information, It’s In All the Explorers’ Journals

There’s an incredible amount of information, agricultural information, to be gained from Australian aboriginal people if we care to look. It’s in all the explorers’ journals. Charles Sturt, when he was looking for the inland sea, climbing sand dune after sand dune after sand dune. Paul, is already dead, the surgeon of the group. The horses can only walk in a straight line. Sturt is half blind from scurvy. A lot of the other men are disoriented by scurvy.

They climb one sand dune, they look down into a valley, and they’re hailed by 400 aboriginal people who rush forward and give them water, which they got from a well they had dug. They then turned to an animal they had never seen before, a horse, and they give that horse water. They then feed Sturt’s party with roast duck and cake. In the dead heart of Australia, they feed them with roast duck and cake. Sturt says, and Mitchell also said this of the same plant in a different part of the country, but Sturt said the cake that he ate there was the lightest and sweetest he’d ever tasted.

We’ve got about a hundred cooking shows in Australia today. This has never been mentioned. You know, they’re looking for an advantage all the time in all this quinoa and all this stuff from exotic countries and here in Australia, we still do not know the name of the plant that went to make the sweetest and lightest cakes an Englishman had ever tasted. Now, the English can’t cook. We know that. It may be that he’s impressed by not much, but we suspect that that is true because we’ve cooked with this plant now and it’s aroma is fantastic. It’s taste is incredible, and it’s only surpassed in my mind by kangaroo grass. The flavour of that is extraordinary. We’ll be eating these breads in two or three years. We’ll be eating murrnong probably the same length of time and we’ll be growing it in our back yards.