The Australian Farmer

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the australian farmer

of ingredients as they move across the food-value chain.” The COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions of 2020-2021prompted Rayleen to close her café and catering business, putting off her 20 em- ployees. She now sells Indigen- ous food products online, runs seasonal educational tours, and has taken more of a national purview to spotlight intellectual property rights for the bush food industry. As the chairperson of the First Nations Bush Foods & Botanical Alliance Australia, Rayleen’s helping organise a na- tional conference to be held in April 2023. It aims to address the many issues and barriers that Indigenous people face around the world regarding intellectual property and intellectual eco- logical knowledge. “This industry was built on this knowledge, yet we only repre- sent a very small percentage of business and there are very few benefit-share agreements in place across Australia. Our organisation hopes to support and strengthen indigenous businesses in the in- dustry and build an ethical frame- work for industry to work within,” Rayleen says. Among her supporters is Nat- alie Somerville, a South Austral- ian broadacre cropping farmer, former agronomist, and now the president of Australian Women in Agriculture (AWiA). The AWiA was set up in 1993 to raise the visibility of women in agriculture so they could formally contrib- ute to the agenda.

For them, wild harvesting could involve shaking or brushing an acacia tree to release and collect the seeds, then carrying them in a coolamon – which is simply an Aboriginal container made of wood or bark. And with the bush tomato, they always leave some fruit for the bush turkey to eat – each type of plant has its own ani- mal totem and story.” “Those women were so resilient in carrying that story forward from generation to generation. I felt that what was missing from the bushfoods industry was the hist- ory behind the plant and its use. It goes back to humans surviving on land without a lot of water.” At the time, already major food manufacturers were innovating with products sitting on Coles and Woolies’ supermarket shelves around Australia. “A lot of our native seeds have travelled away from this land in agricultural and harvesting tech- niques very different to the way it’s done here. Indigenous women don’t understand why plants are grown in a straight line, and re- quire water, fertilising, spraying and tending or even genetic modi- fication when those same plants on country have built up their own resilience and don’t need those regimes.” “We need to protect the bio- diversity in this country or risk, as we have seen already with lemon myrtle and macadamias, foiling a huge economic oppor- tunity to overseas. That’s why we’re looking to the blockchain which can prove the provenance

worked as a project officer for the Aboriginal Land Council, help- ing distribute royalty funds from mining on Aboriginal lands. The work involved flying out to remote areas to help with cultural meet- ings and women’s law. And that’s where her life pivoted. “A friend at the council asked me to help him run a workshop for 100 Indigenous teachers, and I spent a week cooking for them in a tiny domestic kitchen,” says Rayleen. Despite being sore afterwards, the experience sparked her to then set up and run a food busi- ness with an Indigenous friend. It took a year to turn that idea into Kungkas Can Cook, a café and catering service, to celebrate bushfood. “When setting up the busi- ness in 2000, we really wanted to have that point of difference by showcasing our beautiful bushfoods,” says Rayleen. “We wanted to change people’s per- ception of bush foods and not for people to think of it as roadkill or weird-looking grub.” Their business infused flavours of wattle seeds, bush tomatoes, local quandongs (a small desert tree), and “anything we could sustainably source from local In- digenous people”. “The ladies from whom we sourced had English as a third or fourth language and were har- vesting in a traditional sense the same way that had been done for many thousands of years with just bare hands and simple implements.”