Bush tucker

Bush tucker, also called bush food, is any food native to Australia and historically eaten by Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but it can also describe any native flora, fauna, or fungi used for culinary or medicinal purposes, regardless of the continent or culture. Animal native foods include kangaroo, emu, witchetty grubs and crocodile, and plant foods include fruits such as quandong, kutjera, spices such as lemon myrtle and vegetables such as warrigal greens and various native yams.

Traditional Indigenous Australians' use of bushfoods has been severely affected by the colonisation of Australia beginning in 1788 and subsequent settlement by non-Indigenous peoples. The introduction of non-native organisms, together with the loss of and destruction of traditional lands and habitats, has resulted in reduced access to native foods by Aboriginal people.

Since the 1970s, there has been recognition of the nutritional and gourmet value of native foods by non-Indigenous Australians, and the bushfood industry has grown enormously. Kangaroo meat has been available in supermarkets since the 1980s, and many other foods are sold in restaurants or packaged as gourmet foods, which has led to expansion of commercial cultivation of native food crops.

Aboriginal Australians have eaten native animal and plant foods for the estimated 60,000 years of human habitation on the Australian continent, using various traditional methods of processing and cooking. An estimated 4,999 species of native food were used by Aboriginal peoples. With much of it unsafe or unpalatable raw, food was processed by cooking on open fires, boiling in bark containers, pounding vegetables and seeds, or hanging bags in running water.

Bush tucker provided a source of nutrition to the non-indigenous colonial settlers, often supplementing meagre rations. However, bushfoods were often considered to be inferior by colonists unfamiliar with Australia, generally preferring familiar foods from their homelands.

Especially in the more densely colonised areas of south-eastern Australia, the introduction of non-native foods to Aboriginal people resulted in an almost complete abandonment of native foods by them. This impact on traditional foods was further accentuated by the loss of traditional lands, which has resulted in reduced access to native foods by Aboriginal people, and destruction of native habitat for agriculture.

The 19th century English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing of Australian plants, remarked that although bushtucker is "eatable," it is not "fit to eat". In 1889, botanist Joseph Maiden reiterated this sentiment with the comment on native food plants being "nothing to boast of as eatables." The first monograph to be published on the flora of Australia reported the lack of edible plants on the first page, where it presented Billardiera scandens as, "... almost the only wild eatable fruit of the country".

Apart from the macadamia nut, with the first small-scale commercial plantation being planted in Australia in the 1880s, no native food plants were produced commercially until the 1990s. The macadamia was the only Australian native plant food developed and cropped on a large scale. Hawaii, however, was where the macadamia was commercially developed to its greatest extent.