How Australian Chefs and Farmers Are Rediscovering the Ingredients That Have Been There All Along

From kangaroo grass to Kakadu plums, native foods are redefining diners’ taste buds and deepening their connection to the land

Photographs by Stephanie Rose Wood

April/May 2026

Roo Satay, a dish at Attica, in Melbourne, featuring a skewer of grilled red kangaroo and rice studded with native fruits and wattleseeds, which were traditionally ground into flour for bread. Stephanie Rose Wood

Kangaroo grass covers the hillside at Yumburra, Bruce Pascoe’s farm in the East Gippsland region of Victoria. In this sparsely populated rural corner of southeast Australia, the native weed doesn’t warrant much thought. It’s a sturdy bulwark against erosion, and catnip for livestock and marsupials hopping in from the forest.

To Pascoe, though, the 78-year-old author of a groundbreaking and controversial history of Aboriginal agriculture, Dark Emu, it’s something more profound—a portal to Australia’s past, when kangaroo grass blanketed the continent, before imported pasture grass arrived with sheep and cattle, and the Indigenous inhabitants ground its seeds between stones to make flour for flatbreads cooked on hot coals.

Pascoe’s book, first published in 2014, paints a portrait of life before European settlement that diverges from many history books. Australia, he argues, was not populated exclusively by nomadic hunter-gatherers living off what they scrounged from the land, as some 18th-century English explorers had described it—a characterization that was later used to justify rapid conquest. Pascoe, while digging through archives at the Victoria State Library in Melbourne, found historical accounts that told a different story, of encounters with people living in permanent settlements and using complex systems of agriculture and aquaculture, with stone farming tools and fish dams and irrigation trenches.

Bruce Pascoe in front of a bottlebrush tree in the garden at Yumburra, his farm in Victoria. The writer was already well known in Australia when his 2014 history of Australia’s Indigenous agriculture, *Dark Emu*, placed him at the center of the country’s growing native foods movement. Stephanie Rose Wood

Key takeaways: Australia is home to more than 6,500 native edible plants and animals

Native Australian communities long practiced early forms of farming, bread-baking and aquaculture
With a revival in ancient growing and cooking techniques, chefs are having fun with rediscovered ingredients: kangaroo prosciutto, wattleseed ice cream, green ants for a citrusy zing

In the journals of Major Thomas Mitchell, an explorer and surveyor who traversed eastern Australia in the 1830s and ’40s, Pascoe read of grass “piled in hayricks,” so that the desert was “softened into the agreeable semblance of a hay-field,” of seed “made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread,” and of land patches that “resembled ground broken with the hoe.” George Grey, another explorer of the same period, wrote of encountering “frequent wells” and land “perforated with holes the natives made” to dig up yams. In Western Australia, a settler named Jesse Hammond wrote of encountering a wicker fence built across a stream and a platform above it where local people “stood to catch the fish as they swam through the race.”

Synthesizing these accounts and others, Pascoe’s book became a pop-history best seller in Australia—and a political lightning rod. Most of what it describes, he writes, disappeared as European settlements and agriculture subsumed Aboriginal land and food culture. “People would say, ‘When we first came to this country, you could run your fingers through the soil because of the intensity of the agriculture that had been going on.’ Other people were saying, ‘We saw Aboriginal people driving kangaroos in a mob,’” Pascoe told me, on a springtime visit to his farm. “I didn’t learn that in my history classes—any of that. It had been hidden from us deliberately.”

Red-necked wallabies in Victoria. Like their larger kangaroo cousins, wallabies long provided a rich source of protein for Aboriginal people, but the marsupials began appearing on restaurant menus only in the past few decades. Stephanie Rose Wood

Pascoe, a well-known public intellectual since the 1980s and the author of more than two dozen books of fiction, poetry and history, with an unruly white beard and a wide, furrowed face, says that he likewise grew up with holes in his family’s story. Raised in and around Melbourne, he learned about his Cornish ancestors, who had come to Adelaide in the 19th century to work in the mines on Australia’s south coast. But only much later in life did he hear from relatives that he had Indigenous ancestry too. He had also long dreamed of living off the land. When he was a young schoolteacher and just starting out as a writer, he lived on his own 770-acre farm, raising cattle. “I was playing at farming, because I loved it,” he told me. The experience stuck with him even after he moved back to Melbourne, where he worked as a researcher for Victoria’s Department of Education and later as a professor of Indigenous agriculture at the University of Melbourne. Then, in 2018, he bought Yumburra. In the years since, along with his life partner, Lyn Harwood, 74, also a former schoolteacher, and a pair of Australian cattle dogs, Pascoe has worked to revive long-ignored Aboriginal foods and cultivation methods.

The 140-acre farm, a former cattle ranch, was cut from old-growth rainforest along the banks of the Wallagaraugh River. Pascoe is now working the land to grow a host of indigenous, edible plants. Kangaroo grass, almost entirely forgotten as a staple of the Australian diet (“27 percent protein,” he boasts), is threshed into flour that’s sold to local bakers and a few chefs in Melbourne through his culinary enterprise, Black Duck Foods, which seeks to influence Australian agriculture toward environmental sustainability and greater social inclusivity.

In a small garden behind his home, caged to keep out kangaroos, wallabies and wombats, Pascoe has planted neat rows of chocolate lilies, vanilla lilies and bulbine lilies, native perennials with squat finger tubers dangling in bunches from the roots. He dug one out and handed it to me to taste. It was extra crunchy, like a radish, and subtly sweet. “You can chop it up and use it in dumplings, use it in a salad, eat it raw, fry it, bake it, put it in a curry,” he said. “They’re very forgiving plants in cooking, because they hold their texture.”

In a makeshift nursery nearby, potted saplings of native quandong and kurrajong trees were beginning to sprout. When they mature, the quandongs will produce a tart fruit with twice the vitamin C of an orange; the kurrajongs will produce edible roots with a sweet, coconut taste.

“We bought this farm in order to try and educate Australians about their food,” Pascoe said. “It doesn’t look like a conventional farm. It’s wild food, a lot of it.”

In the nearly 250 years since the so-called First Fleet carrying 850 British convicts established the first settlement in what would become Sydney in 1788, Australia has drifted steadily away from its native bounty. Subsequent waves of migration brought foods from everywhere else—pork pies, lamb roasts, shrimp wontons, lasagna. The original foods, eaten on the continent for thousands of years, were largely forgotten, as Indigenous communities came under assault, their languages outlawed, their belief systems eroded. “The first thing that goes is culture,” Pascoe told me. “Genetically you’re Aboriginal, but you have no knowledge unless it’s passed on to you.”

Bunya pine seedlings in the nursery at Yumburra. The nuts are eaten raw, roasted or ground into flour, and resemble chestnuts in flavor. Stephanie Rose Wood

By the mid-19th century, many Indigenous communities had been forced off their ancestral lands and were living on government rations of white flour, refined sugar and tinned beef. In the popular imagination, the wild foods of the continent—some 6,500 edible plants and animals have been documented—were reduced to survivalist fare, known by the blanket colloquialism “bush tucker.” An archetype emerged of the Aussie bushman—most memorably caricatured on film by Crocodile Dundee in the 1980s—as a rugged individualist with enough Aboriginal food knowledge to survive alone in the Outback. On Australian television, there was “Bush Tucker Man,” a former Australian Army officer named Les Hiddins, who from 1988 to 1996 traveled through remote regions surviving on snakes, lizards and mangrove worms.

But over the past 40 years, as Australians have grappled with the legacy of policies and attitudes that decimated Aboriginal culture, some native foods have begun making in-roads into wider notions of Australian identity. There has been a reappraisal especially in the restaurant world, with chefs adding native finger limes and lemon myrtle, bush tomatoes and Kakadu plums, kangaroo steaks and emu sausages to their kitchen arsenals. While popular tastes can be slow to change, a handful of chefs and TV personalities have broken through to the mainstream—many of them outsiders, it turns out, who are perhaps less burdened by the cultural baggage of growing up in Australia.

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine April/May 2026 issue

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This article is a selection from the April/May 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Jean-Paul Bruneteau, whose family moved to Australia from France when he was 12, debuted one of the first restaurant menus to mix European cooking techniques with Australia’s native ingredients when, in 1983, he took over Rowntrees, located in a Sydney suburb. Bruneteau started his cooking career in the Australian merchant navy, and he got the idea for the reimagined restaurant while traveling the world. “It dawned on me that wherever I went, I could eat local cuisine,” he told me recently. “If I was in Thailand, I could get Thai food; in Germany, I’d get German food. But whenever I came back to Australia, I always thought, ‘Well, we don’t really have an Australian cuisine.’” At one port of call in New Zealand, he tasted the foods of the native Māori people, and a light bulb went off. “I thought to myself,” he said, “‘Hang on a sec: What did the original people in Australia eat?’”

He returned home from his tour of duty and began researching the traditional Aboriginal diet. As Pascoe would do decades later, Bruneteau read through accounts from early explorers and settlers. “This was pre-internet,” he said. “So it meant libraries and historical texts.” He began to track down ingredients and experiment. “Every time I tasted something, I was wowed,” he said. “It was amazing. I thought, ‘Why isn’t this used? Why don’t we know about this? There’s a cuisine in this.’”

At Midden, crispy-skin barramundi, also known as Asian sea bass, from a sustainable fish farm in the Northern Territory town of Humpty Doo, is served with potato salad, bush tomato fondue and sea succulents. Stephanie Rose Wood

At Rowntrees, the “first Australian restaurant with a fully native concept,” as Bruneteau describes it, he served barbecued witchetty grubs (wood-eating moth larvae with a “nutty” taste) in peanut sauce. He introduced urban Australians to quandongs and lemon myrtle (a tropical shrub with lemony leaves), and he successfully lobbied the government of New South Wales to approve the use of kangaroo meat in restaurants. “It was pioneering work, and I loved it,” he said.

By the 1990s, a full-fledged native foods movement seemed to be gaining momentum. “In ten years, Australia’s cuisine is going to be so new, so different from the rest of the world, that it’s going to have an effect like nouvelle cuisine in France ten years ago,” Bruneteau predicted in the Montreal Gazette in 1990. “Bush Tucker Catches On,” read a headline in the Christian Science Monitor the following year, touting the hot new trend in “Outback cuisine.”

But while niche businesses sprang up supplying native ingredients—promoting, especially, their “superfood” nutrient-rich qualities—no explosion in restaurants focused on native foods materialized. When Mark Olive, an Indigenous chef from a sprawling suburb called Dapto on the coast of New South Wales, opened his first solo restaurant in Sydney in the mid-’90s, serving crocodile meat lasagna and kangaroo loin with pepperberry sauce as a stand-in for steak au poivre, the new enthusiasm was already waning.

Olive called his restaurant Midden, after historical feasting places found along the Australian coast where Indigenous people left behind scattered and buried fish bones, seashells and other mealtime detritus. His restaurant lasted only two years. “People couldn’t understand what I was trying to do,” he told me recently. “It was way ahead of its time.”

Chef Mark Olive in the kitchen at Midden, his restaurant in the Sydney Opera House. Stephanie Rose Wood

A gregarious, performative figure, Olive went on to study film and TV in Melbourne, and he found better luck promoting native foods when he successfully pitched a show to Australian TV called “Outback Café.” In the first episode, which premiered in 2006, he foraged for native ingredients and pieced together a telegenic spread: a salad of cold yabbies (a native crayfish), pizza topped with smoked kangaroo, ice cream infused with wattleseeds. “It introduced Australians to a lot of indigenous herbs, spices, things they’d never heard of,” he said. “That’s where my career started.”

The program ran for just two seasons, but it helped make Olive a celebrity. He has appeared regularly on television since—as a judge on the cooking competition “The Chef’s Line,” as a co-host of the foraging-focused “On Country Kitchen”—and has traveled the world as a sort of cultural ambassador. “It’s been a good 40 years I’ve been working with this stuff,” Olive told me, of his experience promoting native ingredients, “and it’s only since reality TV started, 13, 14 years ago, that it’s moved forward.”

For a while, Australians seemed most interested in engaging with native foods on television. Jock Zonfrillo, a Scotsman who settled in Australia in 2000, was another chef—and another outsider—to make a name for himself by celebrating native ingredients on Australian TV. Like Bruneteau, he had been startled to learn that the country had no widely recognized precolonial cuisine to speak of, and he began visiting Indigenous communities to learn about foods most chefs ignored. In 2013, he opened his flagship restaurant, Orana, in Adelaide, serving an elaborate tasting menu heavy on native ingredients.

In 2014, I spent a week in the Outback with Zonfrillo, in a remote corner of the Kimberley, in Western Australia. We slept under the stars and ate the wild food around us. A friend of Zonfrillo’s cooked us a feast of kangaroo tail, the sinewy, gelatinous meat roasted in a pit he’d dug in the ground. Zonfrillo spoke of his dream of creating a network of food suppliers through a foundation he intended to start, and of plans to catalog everything in a database of native foods. Zonfrillo’s fame skyrocketed as he opened new restaurants and became a fixture on Australian TV. As a judge on the cooking-competition program “MasterChef,” he remained an evangelist for native ingredients. But three years ago, after public reports of financial mismanagement at his foundation, Zonfrillo was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room at the age of 46. (Although his cause of death was never made public, family and friends have suggested that Zonfrillo, who was married and had four children, died unexpectedly of natural causes.)

Today, Australia’s most prominent restaurant showcasing native ingredients is run by another transplant, chef Ben Shewry from New Zealand. His restaurant, Attica, is a high-end yet understated gastronomic gem, nestled between a massage therapist’s studio and a veterinary hospital in a sleepy inner suburb of Melbourne called Ripponlea. In 2005, Shewry responded to an ad for a head chef job at what was then a modest neighborhood bistro. “It lacked a clear identity,” he recalled recently. “The owner didn’t work in hospitality and wasn’t even present most of the time. He told me to make it whatever I wanted.”

Shewry introduced a new menu that fused references from his eclectic background as a chef—a mix of Thai, French and Australian influences. It was more autobiographical than of any particular place. Soon the restaurant was racking up raves, and food pilgrims flooded Ripponlea. A decade ago, Shewry began a decisive shift, inspired in part by meeting Pascoe, who was promoting Dark Emu, at a food and ideas festival. “That book had a profound effect on me,” Shewry told me. “It totally flipped the script. It dismantled the lie of Aboriginal people being solely hunter-gatherers and presented them as farmers—which, of course, they were. It was so obvious. It was right there.”

Shewry had already been experimenting with ingredients he foraged himself. “I poisoned myself multiple times,” he told me. But Pascoe introduced him to Aboriginal elders who taught him the traditional uses of the foods he’d been collecting and other intriguing ingredients. He learned how to turn bunya nuts—the world’s largest pine nuts—into a chestnutty purée, how to grill fish wrapped in bark from the paperbark tree, how to harness green ants as a tangy, peppery seasoning.

Attica’s chefs now cook almost exclusively with native ingredients. “We haven’t used hard-hoof animals here for some time,” said Shewry, chatting in the restaurant’s dining room. “We prefer to use wallaby and kangaroo and emu and crocodile.” Guests would begin arriving for dinner in a few hours. On a wooden tray, he’d laid out a selection of produce from the restaurant’s larder. He held up a golf-ball-size fruit with bright purple skin. “This ooray plum is intense,” he said. “It’s sour on an almost unprecedented level—it makes an amazing jam.” (The fruit is also known as a Davidson plum, after a 19th-century sugarcane grower, John Davidson, but Shewry prefers the Aboriginal name. “Davidson was a notorious murderer of Aboriginal people,” he said. “Herein lies the trickiness of our country.”) There were also sprigs of saltbush, a wild, salty shrub that grows on beaches and in deserts across the country, and red champagne finger limes with tiny, sour pearls (sometimes called “citrus caviar”) bursting out from under their ruddy skin.

A white chocolate cream dessert at Attica topped with a rare honey, known as sugarbag, harvested near the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. The tangy honey is produced by small, black, native Australian stingless bees. Stephanie Rose Wood

My 12-course dinner that night included a miniature map of Australia playfully constructed from thinly sliced raw fish, with tiny dollops of native produce deposited around various corners of the country—smidgens of muntries (tiny berries from South Australia that taste like spiced apples), of Geraldton wax (the soapy, herbaceous leaves of a shrub from Western Australia), of warrigal greens (a native spinach from New South Wales and elsewhere), of rainforest cherry (a tangy, sweet berry from Queensland). A buttery tart shell came filled with pepperberry cream and a sprinkle of green ants from the Northern Territory, adding a citrusy zing to the dish, which was served on a plate with hyper-realistic ants painted on it. Crocodile rib meat arrived on flatbread, in a sort of sweet-and-savory gyro smeared with macadamia nut yogurt and native honey. A classic Australian meat pie was stuffed with stewed kangaroo and paired with a shot of Dark Emu Lager, a local beer brewed with native grass seeds and named after Pascoe’s book.

Shewry has forged personal relationships with many of his suppliers, who are often isolated and working with very small quantities. “We don’t really have a consistent supply chain for some of these foods,” he said.

It may seem odd, then, that some ingredients I first tasted a decade ago have become big business, but not in the way chefs like Shewry would hope. Demand has come instead from the pharmaceutical and beauty industries—think skin creams made with finger limes and Kakadu plums and shampoos infused with river mint. At the same time, Aboriginal-owned businesses have been mostly left out of the expanding native foods and botanicals sector, accounting for just 2 percent of all generated revenue, according to a recent estimate.

Pascoe is working to even the playing field. To pass down traditional knowledge, he explained, Aboriginal elders sometimes encourage younger generations to gather plants for interested outsiders, such as cosmetic industry representatives who show up in Aboriginal communities. “They more or less donate those plants, and then the cosmetics industry thinks that’s the price,” Pascoe told me. “So we’re having to educate the market to be a bit more respectful.”

Ash Penfold, of Gather Foods, hosts a “Bush Tucker Talk and Tasting,” highlighting native ingredients and their culinary and cultural roles in Aboriginal history. Stephanie Rose Wood

One morning, in Perth, in Western Australia, I met with the founders of Gather Foods, an Aboriginal-owned business, in their kitchen in a historic building of the Aboriginal Advancement Council, a civil rights group. The company launched in 2016 as a catering business before expanding to include events, food production and a wholesale arm selling a wide range of native spices, herbs, jams and sauces. “We started the business really to take the narrative back around native food,” Gerry Matera, a co-founder and a trained chef raised in a small town south of Perth, told me.

Along with funneling native ingredients into corporate catering gigs, Gather Foods hosts “Bush Tucker Talks and Tastings,” experiences that offer tips on using, sourcing and growing native edible plants, with an option to include traditional dance performances and smoking ceremonies. The hope is to “get people thinking a little bit differently about native foods,” as Matera explained it. “Our ancestors have been here for over 60,000 years, and people should know that.”

The company works with a network of farms around the country to source native ingredients, which it slips into a range of sleekly packaged commercial products: pints of chocolate wattleseed ice cream, jars of chile-and-desert-lime-flavored roasted nuts, bottles of gin infused with saltbush and sunrise lime. This year, on the waterfront in Fremantle, just south of Perth, Matera and his team are opening their own culinary complex—with a café, a retail shop and an event space—and they have been working on exporting their products globally. “I feel like we’re at the tip of an explosion,” Matera said. Like many champions of indigenous Australian ingredients, Matera sees Pascoe as a personal hero. “All that he’s about is bringing native food to the forefront,” Matera told me.

A high school student in a cooking class — High school student Xavier Farmer prepares a yeast-free bread known as damper during a cooking class at Gather Foods. Stephanie Rose Wood

In 2024, Pascoe published a new book, Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, chronicling both life on his farm as it emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and the public reaction to Dark Emu, with pastoral sketches by Harwood. Since buying the property, he’s tackled his share of logistical challenges, from staff and equipment shortages to devastating wildfires, while launching an agricultural business from scratch. He’s made his life more difficult by hewing closely to Indigenous growing techniques. “We’re not applying fertilizer except in the very early stages, not providing much water, because part of the argument is these practices are sustainable, and the old people did it with what was available, so we have to do it with what is available.” He uses fire as a land management tool—“fire stick farming,” the Aboriginal community calls it—conducting controlled burns to clear out invasive vegetation and encourage new growth.

The weather was turning windy. Harwood was preparing lamb stew for dinner. Nearby, a mob of kangaroos emerged from the forest to graze. As we spoke, Pascoe noticed smoke rising from the riverbank, and he popped down to investigate. The embers of a fire lit earlier that day had come back to life, jumping onto the dock where he moors his motorboat in the river. He grabbed a bucket and doused the burning planks, then rushed back up the hill. He returned a few minutes later with a vat of water and a powerful hose, and soon the fire was out.

A spread in the Gather Foods kitchen displays indigenous foods, including sprigs of saltbush, a wild, salty shrub that grows on beaches and in deserts across the continent. Stephanie Rose Wood

Kangaroo grass farming, it turns out, is rigorous work, and the business has been a struggle. But Pascoe has hope. “It’s very boutique at the moment,” he admitted. But sooner or later, he felt sure, it would catch on. “And, if we have anything to do with it, there will be cultural acknowledgment, and Aboriginal people will benefit.” To hasten that change, in early 2025, Pascoe brought on new partners at the farm, handing day-to-day management over to members of the local Indigenous community, and he has set in motion plans to transfer ownership.

damper bread — At Gather Foods, damper is made with self-rising flour, yogurt and wattleseeds, and served as rolls alongside whipped butter and jam made from quandongs, also known as desert peaches. Stephanie Rose Wood

A few years ago, in the Sydney Opera House, Olive opened a new incarnation of Midden, more than 25 years after closing the first. It’s a more ambitious version of the original restaurant, serving kangaroo prosciutto, crocodile tandoori, Geraldton wax panna cotta and cocktails made with green-ant-infused gin. Among restaurants, it may be the most high-profile bridge yet between ancient and modern Australia—another step toward bringing native ingredients into the mainstream. At the restaurant’s inauguration, in July 2023, Olive spoke to some 400 well-wishers, who included his 94-year-old father. Recalling his early days as a chef, Olive told the crowd, “If you said to me that an Indigenous bloke from Dapto would one day open a restaurant at the Sydney Opera House, I would’ve said, ‘That’s mission impossible.’”

How Australian Chefs and Farmers Are Rediscovering the Ingredients That Have Been There All Along

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