According to award-winning Indigenous writer, Bruce Pascoe, and the information he has uncovered in his research, Aboriginal Australians were the world’s first bakers. Using native Australian grains which they cultivated, harvested, ground, raised and cooked, they produced breads like this – looks just like a dense dark rye we are familiar with.
National Reconciliation Week
I want to share this film with you at the start of National Reconciliation Week here in Australia (May 27 – June 3). The focus of this year’s campaign is:
“to highlight some of the lesser known aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, histories, cultures, and achievements,prompt Australians to ask themselves: ‘what are some of the things I don’t know about our shared history?'”
“Don’t Keep History A Mystery: Learn. Share. Grow” explores history hidden just beneath the surface, ready and waiting to be uncovered. This National Reconciliation Week learn more about the Australian story.
A hidden history…
What Bruce Pascoe has to share in his keynote presentation at the 14th Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Canberra last month and in his landmark book, Dark Emu, shatters the concepts that are commonly held about life in pre-colonial Australia. The assumption is that Aboriginal Australians were a wandering people that relied solely on hunting and gathering for their survival.
Another completely different story is emerging. Bruce Pacscoe argues that the evidence was always there, but it didn’t fit with the story people wanted to tell about how the colony of Australia began.
He talks about massive regions of farms tended by Aboriginal people, villages of 1000 people, of aquaculture farming technologies developed over 6000 years ago, of bread being baked. We didn’t learn this at school!
Bruce Pascoe at the 14th Australasian Permaculture Convergence, Canberra Australia, April 2018
Bruce Pascoe explores the hidden history about Aboriginal ways of life, and suggests the way forward in regenerative agriculture in Australia is to take another look at what Aboriginal people were farming, to learn the plants and methods used to grow them, to bring them back into production in a significant way. Please listen to his talk (28:45), introduced by ABC Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis, and share widely. Let’s learn something new this week about our shared history.
(Note: Please excuse my little wobbles in the first minute. I realised no-one was filming this talk and quickly tried to get myself set up with just my phone and no tripod.)
Watch my earlier chat with Wiruungga Dunggiirr Aboriginal Elder about culture, permaculture and the Dreamtime.