weeds and permaculture

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by Peter Warne, Jan 3, 2005.

  1. Richard on Maui

    Richard on Maui Junior Member

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    Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee said it pretty well as regarding Bush tucker didn't he?
    I don't actually subscribe to that point of view but it was astonishingly well put.
     
  2. peter hardwick

    peter hardwick Junior Member

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    weeds and permaculture

    Richard,

    Go and try glace riberries (a lilly pilly) dipped in dark chocolate and tell me it's s**t! N.B. yes, non-native chocolate and riberries (seedless preferable with glace) are made for each other.

    Pre 1990's Hogan could get away with it : criticisim is a "good" front for ignorance.

    It's clear there was a culinary equivalent of "Terra Nihilus" (the prescription that no people existed in Australia) as well.

    It's interesting the parrallels with Aboriginal art and native food - both most appreciated OS.

    Read my earlier posts on anglo colonialisim - the bit preceeding the path to weed hell paved with good intentions.
     
  3. funkyfungus

    funkyfungus Junior Member

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    Food selection is a core cultural value. I dont think its fair to overly criticise the issue in retrospect.
    Just like languages are conserved through the ages so is the art of cuisine. and its true across the world.
    New foods take a long time to filter across cultural membranes and they dont always do so and even then are adapted to the new cultures preexisting tastes. This is true whether it be colonial jam making, the use of spinach substitutes not employed by aboriginal cooks or even later on in the parallels of Australianised Italian, Chinese or Middle eastern cuisine.
    We were two very different cultures even more so then than today and neither was particularly happy to have to share space let alone cuisine.
    so i dont think its far to bash previous generations for not embracing native ingeredients.
    The time for that is now as the country redefines itself in its multicutural context, that is where there are many more than 2 mainstream cultures in Australia.
    but the native ingredients also have to compete with and complement the influx of high quality ingredients used by other cultures.

    Thats cos they see our best. export quality. And they see Australia presented as an image or icon rather than the vast and regionally/climatically complex place it really is
    much the same as few of use truly comprehend the complexity of another country, even those we share close cultural ties with.
    any example will do...
    When u r actually here and amongst it its a bit more overwhelming
    For example in the southwest of WA the cultural relevance of a davidsons plum or native ginger is much diminished from that in SE qld
    A regional flavour there would be better based on the medley of exotic, endemic and australian crops that can be grown there, lets suggest
    overseas exotic - almonds, grapes, stonefruits,Citrus, pome fruits, beef , lamb, grains and pulses
    local endemic - Kickup bush, native yam, marron, koonac, dhufish, native parsley, samphire, black bream, quandong
    non-native but australian - macadamia, yabby, silver perch, + other east coast bushfoods suited to local production

    And there are special considerations. And example being the Lady williams apple. While the species is exotic the variety is home grown.
    from a seedling nera donnybrook i think. This is a regioanl flavour as or more worthy of conservation and promotion as any east coast bushfood
    same goes for our other special contributions to exotic species eg. Queensland or beudesert blue pumpkins, Bowen mangoes, Granny smith apples and so forth. These are as native as any other cos they arent found elsewhere.

    will do also. Lets not forget the serious weed issue developing by translocation within the continent of environmental weeds though
    eg
    Acacia melanoxylon, baileyana, longifolia and others
    Eucalyptus spp. inl cadaghi, camaldulensis, gomphocephala and others
    Geraldton wax, lilly pilly. brachychiton sp and many more
    Bushfood crops whether hard seed acacias or especially berries have just as much potential to become environmental weeds
     
  4. peter hardwick

    peter hardwick Junior Member

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    permaculture and weeds

    Funkyfungus,

    By the time the British had arrived in Australia they had a highly sophisticated formula for colonization – including a faulty legal concept to justify replacing indigenous people with white settlers. Definitions of terra nullius, included whether indigenous people had government, law, religion, and most significantly (according to colonizing powers), whether indigenous people cultivated the soil.

    In the early days of the Australian colony where self-justification for stealing indigenous lands would have been very intense, for government to acknowledge - or even explore the possibility that native foods could be cropped would have been getting close to the bone of contradicting terra nullius. Initially terra nullius was a British government outlook, but eventually aspects became very much part of the colonial psyche.

    The basic argument went something like this: the bush was useless (accept for timber). By clearing it they were converting the useless bush into productive agriculture land. And in their mind, it justified stealing the land off indigenous Australian’s who were not making full use of that land – in white settlers eyes. It's not a 'black armband' view of history. That's the way the arguement went. It was self-serving, and became deeply embedded in the way the landscape was managed over the last 200 years.

    I remember the intense antagonism that I got from some farmers in the early 1980’s when I started publicly suggesting that bushfoods had potential as crops. I was directly contradicting the idea that the bush was useless. For some it was a bitter pill because they felt it implicitly debased their family’s hard work over generations, including clearing the rainforest. But to be fair, many farmers were also equally excited with the idea of bushfood cropping, and had many stories to tell about the folk use of native foods.

    In the old days farmers looked for the cues from the government on what to grow, but one gets the impression that the government established a pattern of ignoring native food crops (including macadamia until the 1960’s – despite a small local industry since the 1880’s) and that attitude was perpetuated without question until the 1980’s.

    The reasons for this bizarrely slow native food crop up-take was not simply just a matter of lack of familiarity, two different cultures, and the number of available overseas crops (sure – these factors played a role as well). And also indigenous Australian’s didn’t cultivate food in familiar rows that would interface with non-indigenous understanding.
    But 200 years was a hell of a long time to such an ethnobotanical blind spot!

    Bushfoods were an uncomfortable contradiction for colonial Australia, and I’ve seen people struggling with that contradiction. But I’m not sorry for calling a spade a spade - native foods just inherently expose the false morality of terra nullius. But one day bushfoods won’t carry this baggage. They’ll just be another food.

    The high levels of bushfood appreciation OS is probably going to result in the eventual mainstreaming of bushfoods in Australia. It happened with Macadamia’s and Aboriginal art. OS recognition activates domestic recognition.

    On the issue of Australian food plants being weeds elsewhere, of course this is a serious issue that needs consideration with each species. The main point, other regions elsewhere on the planet could be incorporating their local native foods to create self-perpetuating food systems providing a basis for exciting cuisines while avoiding invasive weed problems, and in-turn providing specific habitat for endangered wildlife. A principle where ever we are.
     
  5. funkyfungus

    funkyfungus Junior Member

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    Thats an interesting and mostly compelling argument (its simplified as history never is but otherwise - yeah)

    I agree about the attitudes to do with the bush, about the value of indigenous usage in support of colonisation
    (interestingly the same attitude prevailed and may still prevail in older autsralians about justifying the theft of palestine from the palestinians - that the arabs never did anything with it anyway. It seems to be the easiet way ti justify the means to some people of some warped manifest destiny)

    You might be interested in future with a Native Oyster mushroom im growing
    It was cloned from a WA peppermint tree (Agonis flexuosa) in denmark WA but seems to adapt to eucalypts as well still cotinuing experimnets
    its a cool weather fruiter
    Its name is Pleurotus australis

    ill post a link when i get a succesful tek up and on my site
     
  6. Peter Warne

    Peter Warne Junior Member

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    Peter your overview of the history of the ethnological blind spot rings true - it fits with the history of colonisation as we know it.

    There's just one thing that I'd like to add on the subject of the impression some of us have of being underwhelmed on our encounters with bush foods. I too felt this with my limited trials of bush foods, and I have spend time wondering how such foods could sustain a whole people. Especially since I thought I was quite good at learning about the foods of other cultures. I have lived and worked in Asia for about 15 years, and with my family and my wife's excellent cooking we have assimilated the foods of all the places we stayed into our normal family diet. That includes Malay food, Indian, Chinese (various kinds), Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian and so on. My wife is also French with family in North Africa, so there's a whole other range of inputs.

    All that seemed irrelevant compared to bushfoods - why? Because the culture of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia is so-o-o-o-o different not only from ours, but also fundamentally different from all the Asian or European cultures we have got used to, in the respect that the Aborigines are still very close to being an authentic hunter-gatherer culture. Wherever you go, whosever food you try, it is nearly always bought from a market or a supermarket, and nearly always grown through the local system of cropping and animal husbandry. Right now I can look out of my study window at the Blue Knob Range, and I look at the forest which blankets the hills, and think: what sort of life would it be for a people who live of the natural products of that forest, and nothing else?

    That to me explains why bushfoods are more than just unusual for us, they are from a deeply different way of life.

    That said (and it is getting a bit rambly), I now look forward to expanding my acquaintance with bushfoods and making the most of the chance to experience all that newness. There's heaps to learn.

    I'll stop there. While writing this I have burnt our north African pan cooked flatbread which I was cooking for lunch, so I'd better go and scrape the burnt parts off.

    Peter
     
  7. peter hardwick

    peter hardwick Junior Member

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    weeds and permaculture

    Funkfungus, I’d certainly like to hear more about the native oyster mushroom. I’ve heard bits and pieces about edible fungi investigation work in WA. I’ve been considering some of the local East Coast fungi as candidates for edibility, but not being a fungi specialist, I’m very wary of mycotoxins – considering their reputation.

    Just on the terra nullius issue. It’s worth being precise about how the term ‘terra nullius’ as it applied in the Australian context. Although it was a flaky legal concept used by European colonizers from the 17th century – it was not actually used by Cook when he claimed the East Coast of Australia for Britain. Terra nullius is used retrospectively to describe the political attitude of the British government, and an outlook that eventually became inculcated into Australian culture.

    The point, that it's likely that one of the unfortunate impacts of this de-facto terra nullius was the devalueing of native foods. As a result no one knows how many food plants with crop potential may exist in Australia. Although to help define peremeters, one estimate says that 20% of the Australian flora was used as food. That's at least 2,400 species! We now have 1% of those being cropped (24 species).

    I think every patch of native habitat, not just in Australia, should be viewed as a potential source of valuable biota, and should be respected as such. I’d doubt that the biota of any habitat on the planet has been fully investigated for human benefit. Maybe some obscure rainforest fungi will be found that can decompose toxic waste. Who knows?

    And of course ideally all life forms should be respected for their right to exist regardless of direct benefit to humans.
     

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