From Kangaroo grass to wheat: Europe arrives in Australia

                      Wild emu at the edge of the New South Wales Outback (TWC).

Gifts of bread

Aboriginal stories credit Captain James Cook with bringing bread to Australia.  The stories tell about all of things that the mythical "Cook" brought: clothes, axes, animals, and bread and flour. Even though few tribes encountered  him in person, they still have Cook tales. The Rembarrnga people of Arnhem Land, where he never ventured, tell of the "real" Captain Cook, their ancestor law-man from millions of years ago. When that Captain Cook is killed, the story teller says that people tried to make him another way, and many "Captain Cooks" (i.e., white settlers) arrived.

              Captain Cook statue in Sydney, Australia (March 4, 2018) (TWC)

Cook's first expedition on the Endeavor in 1770 spent nearly two months in Queensland repairing the ship after it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.  Percy Mumbulla (an Aboriginal living in New South Wales) tells how Cook arrived at an island there in a large ship.  He gave Mumbulla's ancestors clothes and hard biscuits. After he left, the ancestors threw the gifts into the sea.  In his journals, Cook confirmed Mumbulla's report, saying that the Aboriginals saw the gifts as things "they had no manner of use for."

Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway of Queensland tell a second story of Cook's arrival bearing bread:  "Captain Cook and his group seemed to stand up out of the sea with the white skin of ancestral spirits, returning to their descendants. Captain Cook arrived first offering a pipe and tobacco to smoke (which was dismissed as a 'burning thing... stuck in his mouth'), then boiling a billy of tea (which was dismissed as scalding 'dirty water'), next baking flour on the coals (which was rejected as smelling 'stale' and thrown away untasted), finally boiling beef  (which smelled well, and tasted okay, once the salty skin was wiped off). Captain Cook and group then left, sailing away to the north, leaving Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway's predecessors "beating the ground with their fists, fearfully sorry to see the spirits of their ancestors depart in this way."

Growing wheat

The English soon returned to Australia in force. In 1788, England now bereft of American colonies to which it could ship criminals, landed a boatload of convicts at Botany Bay (Sydney).  Within a few months of their arrival, the prisoners turned farmers began to grow wheat. It took  several years of hunger while they learned how to farm, found decent soil, and tried planting new varieties of grain, but by 1799, the colony cultivated 6,000 acres of wheat.

                          A harvested field in New South Wales, February 2018 (TWC).

 As was the case around the world,  wheat culture in Australia evolved significantly during the 19th century. Early Australian farmers trying to clear ground and plant wheat lacked any sort of sophisticated equipment. Until the first plows arrived in 1797, the convicts and settlers used hoes and spades. The farmable areas near the coasts of the continent were forested, and often hilly. After cutting the trees, farmers hitched teams of oxen to wooden plows. An innovative farmer by the name of Mullens drove spikes into a V-shaped log, which his horse dragged along the plowed soil. The cultivator loosened the dirt and dropped the seeds in behind it. Iron plows didn't arrive until the 1850s.

A few years later, the Australian government paid Richard Bruyer Smith 500 pounds sterling for his invention of the "stump-jump" plow. Smith's plow went along as usual until it came to a stump or rock, at which point a hinge mechanism allowed the share and mould board to lift over the obstacle and come down on the other side. A new Australian wheat variety, "Federation," greatly increased production after 1903 when it was first marketed. New seeds, new machines, and the networks of railroads that were largely in place by the 1880s made wheat farming possible on a large scale.

                        Wheat sheaves, around 1884 - 1917, Sydney, Australia.



Cooking and eating wheat

     During the second half of the 1800s, English in Australia might well have turned to Eliza Acton's The English Bread Book for their bread recipes.

The English and other settlers adapted to their new environs. Occasionally they ate indigenous foods prepared in the same ways that the Aboriginals were accustomed to use them. Far more often than not, they substituted local foods in their own recipes because they couldn't get the ingredients that they usually ate. They cooked parrots instead of pigeons into soups, and prepared kangaroo meat as if it was beef or mutton.  Mrs. Lance Rawson's Antipodean Cookbook from 1895 gave recipes for flying fox (tastes like pork), bandicoots, and iguanas (tastes like chicken),  preparing them all using English techniques and seasonings.

                  Flying fox, Sydney Centennial Parklands, 2/10/2018 [TWC]

The indigenous peoples also adapted. They continued to prepare their traditional foods, often using English ingredients -- flour, sugar, the new meats such as mutton, beef, and pork -- to make their traditional dishes. More often, they substituted English foods for their own. The English foods tasted better to them, were far easier to get, and were recommended (or at times, required) by the English who ruled over them. Some English paid indigenous people who were working for them in English foods, including flour.

That's one part of the story.  In addition, it's also true that the English brought domesticated animals such as sheep and cattle and sent them out to graze  on the Aboriginal lands. Some of the grazed areas had been fields of murnong (yam-daisy tubers) that the Aboriginals managed by judicious use of fire to keep down pests and fertilize the soil. The English took over the grain fields and grass lands that the Aboriginals cultivated and used them for their own crops. Because many of the Aboriginal populations were decimated by Old World diseases, or by deliberate killings, they didn't have the ability to resist, or to continue to cultivate their own foods. English foods were all that were available in many places.

Damper

                   Classic damper, cooked in campfire ashes (which would be brushed off   before eating) [From 2012, in Yandeyarra, Wendy Wood)]

One new shared food was the flatbread called damper. People have made flatbreads with ground seeds and tubers  and water for thousands of years. They have cooked them buried in ashes or over hot coals. The English brought hard tack, a basic form of dried flatbread, to Australia. Once there, they created damper from the same ingredients that they used in hardtack, but prepared  it differently. William Bond, a baker in Sydney's Pitt Street, gets credit for baking the bread in the oven's ashes, "damping" them around the dough.

A 1946 recipe emphasized the kneading process for damper, which is strikingly different from hardtack. "Take 1 lb of flour, water and a pinch of salt. Mix it into a stiff dough and knead for at least one hour, not continuously, but the longer it is kneaded the better the damper. Press with the hands into a flat cake and cook it in at least a foot of hot ashes" (Bill Beatty, in the Sydney Morning Herald). Hard tack or ship's biscuit is not kneaded, merely mixed until the dough holds together, then flattened very thin, and baked for a long time at a low temperature until it dries out completely.

The Aboriginals claimed damper as their own as well. Before the English arrived, they made flatbreads by grinding Spinifex seeds, miller, Kangaroo grass, Bunya nuts, cattail tubers, and other local plants. mixing them with water, and baking the dough in ashes of a campfire. Today, as is shown in the next post, ground seeds and nuts are often mixed with wheat flour to take advantage of the fact that it has gluten and thus will rise when leavened.  In a bit of reverse cultural appropriation, the English version of damper is sometimes credited to the Aboriginals, as in this snack characterized as "Damper and Dip: An Aboriginal Tradition."

Australian damper with kangaroo (buffalo can be used instead) curry dip, Maria Rodale

The next post describes wheat in Australia's present, from damper to ramen to Aussie pies. The first post in the series is Who Invented Bread? at this link.

Who invented bread? The Australian contribution

                             Bread from Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop, Anchorage [TWC]

"Aboriginals' foods , , ,  the land is our mother . . ."  my attention was wandering from the guide's  talk about how indigenous peoples used the native Australian plants. His lecture on respect for mother earth became a background drone as we walked through the lush palms and pines of Melbourne's Royal Botanical Gardens. Then he caught my attention: "This is the bunya nut, which we ground for bread in Queensland  . . ." Bread? I care about bread, even if the rest of the lecture was not so compelling.

                                Bunya cone ready to harvest (Queensland).

Before Aboriginals set foot in Australia, dinosaurs ate bunya nuts. For millions of years after that, other animals feasted on them.  When the Aboriginals arrived 50,000 or so years ago, they began to grind bunya nuts  into flour, mix the flour with water, and bake the  flattened dough in hot coals.

Aboriginal clans and tribes traveled hundreds of miles to harvest and share bunya nuts, sometimes from trees that belonged to a single family and were passed from father to son. The last of the traditional festivals happened in 1902 (some sources say 1887). Much of the history may come from a colonist's account published in 1904 of her father's acquaintance with Aboriginals in Queensland during the middle 1800s. Families revived the traditional feasts in 2007. Today, bunya flour appears in breads, gnocchi, and pancakes, among other dishes.

The Aboriginals had bread, and I wanted to know more. I thought of bread as a Middle Eastern invention. How could it have gotten to Australia before the arrival of Dutch explorers in the early 1600s, and the first English settlement in 1788?

Recent discoveries of grindstones suggest that the Australian Aboriginal peoples made bread 50,000 years ago, and not just from bunya nuts. Most of the Aboriginal breads were made from grains (i.e., grass seeds), and from smaller seeds  or roots and tubers of other plants.

         Aboriginal grindstone image, Australian Museum (Stuart Humphries)

Some Aboriginal groups say that the creator of the bread seeds was Ngurlu, the crested pigeon, who collected them and left them for people. The Aboriginals picked up the seeds, ground them between stones,  mixed the flour with water, flattened balls of dough into disks, and baked them in hot ashes. Ngurlu is associated specifically with spinifex seeds, but also more generally with other seeds used for bread. Based on this, and the fact that grindstones elsewhere date from only about 36,000 years ago, some argue that the Aboriginals invented bread.

                                                        Crested pigeon, Sydney, Australia [TWC]

Or was it people in Mozambique who invented bread 100,000 years ago?  Starch grains on stone tools found in caves there suggests that their inhabitants were grinding sorghum and other grass seeds around 105,000 years ago. Skeptics contend that the other technologies needed to harvest seeds and turn them into digestible food did not yet exist, so it is unlikely that people were eating the sorghum. Our present knowledge can't settle the question one way or the other.

Other gndstones with starch seeds (oats, and other grains) date from about 36,000 years ago. Stones  found in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic from 33,000 to 30,000 years ago also demonstrate that people were grinding seeds in many places, and that bread itself is much older than agriculture.

We may not have a definitive answer in our lifetimes, but we do know that grinding seeds, nuts, and roots releases much more nourishment than eating them whole. Mixing the dry flour or paste with water makes the seeds even more edible, and flattening the ball of dough to a thin disk allows it to bake all of the way through in the ashes, maximizing the usefulness and tastiness. People have done this for tens of thousands of years.

There might be connections among all of these stories. How did Ngurlu's people get to Australia?  At the present, it looks as if modern humans, Homo sapiens, began to migrate out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. This lends more credence to the possibility that the people who were grinding seeds in Mozambique 100,000 years ago took their technologies with them when they left home. Australian Aboriginals, who are more closely related to Africans than to Asians or  Europeans, probably migrated through Asia soon after leaving Africa -- perhaps discovering seeds and roots to grind for bread along the way.

The small group of people who arrived in northern Australia  moved south over the next thousand years, setting fires to burn the forests and make the land and plants more habitable for themselves. The change in landscape, and hunting by the new occupants drove giant mammals like huge wombats and marsupial lions, to extinction. The fires changed the landscape from forests that thrived in the low-water environment to desert throughout most of the interior. Some of  the remaining plants, including spinifex, millet, and kangaroo grass, provided seeds for making bread.

                               "Seed Dreaming," painting by Angela Nangala Parlinjirri

The Aboriginals were still baking  bush bread and seedcakes when Captain James Cook first set foot on their shores in 1777, and when the first prison ship dropped people off to create a colony at Botany Bay in 1788 (now part of Sydney). The story of the transition from bush bread to damper (the English name for unleavened bread baked in the ashes) is in the next post.