"The whole concept of The Outback is a mix between Australian contemporary cuisine and native
bushfood, with hints from British and Italian cuisine, blended in a 100% fine dining adventure."
Some of this research has indirectly influenced the menus of particular restaurants specialising in an Australian 'bushfood' cuisine.
1996 Wild Lime: Cooking from the bushfood garden, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
The Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, which includes the Daintree Rainforest, provides many essentials to life in Australia, including clean air and fresh water, climate regulation (carbon storage and sequestration; precipitation through the cloud forests), pollination, protection against extreme events like cyclones, Indigenous cultural heritage (
bushfoods, medicines, materials for craft, creation and place stories) for the 20,000 Indigenous people who live in and around the area, and cultural experiences through tourism.
Much of their time may be spent in economically productive ways, for example, in caring for their country and harvesting bushfoods. Airman tells us the Kuninjku people he has observed are simultaneously 'highly dependent on the state' and 'also highly engaged with the customary and market sectors that keep them very active and that form the foundation of their productive economy' (Altman 2005a: 126).
Taking this argument to the extreme, Aboriginal children's time might be better spent out in the bush learning how to gather bushfoods than in the classroom practising reading and writing.
(1983) The nutritional composition of Australian Aboriginal
bushfoods Food Technology in Australia 35 (6) : 293-98
Beyond the millennium Australia looks like topping the world's new cuisine charts with its indigenous
bushfoods from the outback.
Areas like growing
bushfoods and marketing
bushfoods.
You can take on-site bushwalking cultural tours, discovering local
bushfoods, creation stories and Aboriginal connections to the country.
The programs involve visits to sites, bush-tucker walks, an art gallery, craft workshops and the sale of crafts and
bushfoods. In 1999 a seventy-bed accommodation block ('Nuralamee') was constructed and opened at Yarrawarra, which supplements the existing Cultural Centre.
Telling tourists how (Rainforest) Indigenous peoples ate
bushfoods and utilised the natural environment, as a past practice, seems to contradict the image of Indigenous culture as 'alive and authentic' (Miller 1996:47).