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WOMEN IN AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURE
Putting it on the agriculture agenda: bush foods and blockchain
Alice Springs and the deserts of Central Australia don’t sound like a food basket, but they are for businesswoman and bush foods innovator Rayleen Brown.
As the chairperson of the First Nations Bush Food & Botanical Alliance Australia, she has been working in the native food indus- try for almost 25 years. Rayleen is now part of an alliance lobby- ing for a merge between bush foods and blockchain to ver- ify traceability across the food value chain. It’s also about the ethics of non-Indigenous people prof- iting from intellectual property (IP). Indigenous women as food foragers have developed this know-how over their people’s 65,000-years of living on Aus- tralia’s ancient soils. Men’s role is to carry the harvest and they also have connection with story and songlines. Rayleen’s ancestry is inter- twined with that. Her mother’s clan is Mulvian clan Muringar people, based at the top-end of the western side of the Northern Territory. “Nana was removed from her people and put into an Alice
After finishing high school in Alice Springs, she and her hus- band had five children and lived on a hobby farm over the border in South Australia. When she re- turned to Alice Springs, Rayleen
Springs mission, so that’s how we came to be here. My mob is the strength I draw from and makes me want to work on pro- jects to connect with my people up north,” says Rayleen.
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