Description
In 1995 I was offered a job teaching horticulture on remote Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley. It was hands-on-training; planting shade trees, landscaping and growing food. The program aimed to ease the monumental transition for people coming from traditional Aboriginal life to the civilised world. Fruit and vegetable gardens on communities would address diet-related health problems, create jobs and reduce welfare dependence. By including bush foods in these gardens, the program would maintain a link to traditional culture, being lost at an alarming rate with each new generation. [...] So, for the next 25 years I worked with traditional elders and community leaders creating gardens and setting up bush food plantations. It was a revelation. Many Australians can’t imagine what traditional culture was like or the traumas people suffered in transitioning from it to the modern world. Many have had little contact with Aboriginal people and find our history in dealing with them confronting. ‘Closing the Gap’ remains one of our nation’s greatest challenges. Merridoo Walbidi, a great friend and the inspiration for this book, has a brilliantly simple answer when he says, “Out cultures must walk together to make a better world for everyone”. Born deep in the Great Sandy Desert in the early 1950s, his sentiment invites all Australians to embrace and celebrate our Indigenous heritage as their own. And rather than a token gesture, “walking together” with cultures that for eons thrived in an unforgiving land is smart. […] For tens of thousands of years, during their hunting and gathering migrations, the first Australians managed the plant communities and freshwater wells across their homelands. When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove firestick farming was being practised across Australia. It had been developed over 45,000 years, following the extinction of the mega fauna and the shrinking of the vast forest that sustained them. But, within 200 years of European settlement the smouldering firesticks that maintained a mosaic of habitats for so long had all but vanished.… (more)