A valley of abundance
Araluen has always been a place of plentiful good food, except possibly during the last ice age. After the ice melt, in the last 5,000 years but also likely to be much further in the past, indigenous fruits were planted where the seedlings of those fruits would grow in turn. Seeds from various grasses were collected and ground into flour for flat breads that were baked on hot rocks. Sweet pollen from waterlilies or reeds and rushes was patted into cakes to be cooked on the rocks too; hot stones were plunged into rock pools to cook yabbies or freshwater mussels. Fish might be grilled, or wrapped in native ginger and other fragrant wet leaves and baked in the ashes.
There were at least seven kinds of edible fungi to pick; native peppermint and other leaves for flowers, or the sweet lerp insects on many species of eucalypt to soak in hot or cold water for drinks; the sweet gum from several trees to chew. Small birds that feasted on the figs were caught in nets, or trapped with stick sap and gum smeared on the branches. The birds might be roasted whole, feathers and all, in a ball of clay in the ashes. When the clay was cracked open the feathers came away with the clay, and the innards had shrunk, and the otherwise tough birds tender.
Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
Giant fish and enormous eels swam in the chain of lagoons along the valley, to be cooked over the fire, or wrapped in fragrant wet leaves and baked in the ashes, or in earth ovens. The stingless native bees provided honey; lerps (the scale like insects that suck the sap from gum trees) gave sweetness, as did the nectar from many blossoms. Add to that the meat from kangaroos, goannas, echidnas, snakes, possum, emus, wild ducks, (usually caught by women swimming underneath then pulling the ducks down by their paddling legs). There was the abundant food from the native white waterlily, every part of which can be eaten if you know the correct recipes, or nardoo, which also grew here but needed careful preparation. There was plenty for the feasts when the various Indigenous groups met in the valley for sport, fun and important rituals every few years. The Indigenous diet was far more varied than most modern eating patterns. The valley was a living larder, its foods harvested only when they were abundant, so that they’d continue to provide. An hour’s hunting by some of the women, with kids diving for mussels or clambering up trees to pull sleeping possums from their hollows, easily gave enough food for all.
Myrnong daisy roots were a staple food, baked in the ashes or wet leaves. Some myrnong survived till the late 1970s, but sheep grazing, and later goats, meant their eventual eradication. Immature kurrajong roots were also baked – old ones are stringy and too rough, as were the fat tubers of kangaroo berries. Bunya nut clusters were roasted, or ground to bake into cakes, mixed with animal fat. Travellers to the bogong moth hunt bought back bogong cakes to those too frail to make the trek, but bogongs used to visit the valley too, until the 1980s when numbers began to plummet, and were caught and eaten locally, as were several species of fat larvae that burrow into the trunks of trees or live under the bark. These might be eaten raw, or roasted on a hot rock, or mixed with one of the types of flour to bind them to make cakes.
Stingless native bees gave honey, fragrant and a pale green, and the wax was chewed for pleasure. Sweetness also came from the several species of native raspberries, native cherries, emu berries, native nightshade, kangaroo berries, at least two species of native fig among others. Bird eggs and goanna eggs were baked in the ashes.
Koalas weren’t eaten, though they were used for fur, nor were wallabies in this area because the meat tastes sour, or wombats, because wombat tastes like wombat, though a dead wombat’s fur might be twined into string. Food was so abundant here that even in a drought there was no need to eat badly. Many other foods were eaten, and with many ways of preparing them, both as meals for everyone to enjoy or just nibbled as people walked. Almost every step would give something edible.
| Note: I1Indigenous diet and native foods in the Araluen Valley. Compiled by Jackie French AO, September 2023. haven’t given the Latin or dhurga names for these, as I don’t want to encourage the devastation of remaining native species, not kill or poison those who eat them at the wrong time of year, don’t know how to cook them or misidentify them. Some nectar can be toxic; other flowers give nectar that can ferment easily; several of the native fruits, greens and fungi in this valley are easily confused with toxic ones, so no details or species are given in this account. I have also left out some of the foods that need extreme care and preparation, or that should be eaten only in small amounts. A written guide can’t give enough information – you need to learn it from an expert, and see the plants growing in situ, and other different soil and weather conditions, to know enough to harvest them safely or abundantly. |
| DO NOT TRY ANY OF THE ABOVE – ALL NATIVE ANIMALS ARE PROTECTED AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO PREPARE A SNAKE, GOANNA, GRASSHOPPER ABDOMEN OR WHAT FROGS ARE TOXIC, YOU MAY END UP DEAD AND SEVERELY ILL OR INJURED, OR FINED OR IN PRISON IF YOU SURVIVE. |
| For more information about native fruits and foods of the area (and more widely), we’d refer you to the work of A.B. and J.W. Cribb including Wild Food in Australia. Collins, 1974 as a starting point. |
The first white blokes brought sheep and cattle to the valley up from the coast, sometime before 1820 – the dates given vary. By the 1840s many families farmed here, often with enormous help from the local Yuin people, who showed them how to peel off stringybark to make walls or rooves, helped them erect their houses, and joined in the corn (maize) harvests for a share of the feasts of corn afterwards. Probably here, as in other colonial areas, it was the new settlers’ wives who brought the fruit trees and planted vegetable gardens and milked cows and made butter and cheese. Blokes tended to live on meat, damper and treacle, tea and sugar. Initially fruit trees, vegetables and a couple of milking cows would be just for home use, or to share with neighbours. There are many accounts of friendly food sharing and exchange between the early white settlers and the dhurga people pre-1850, as well as dhurga help showing how to make stringy bark huts or rooves or split wood for shingle rooves, and being given corn and other food not as a formal barter, but with friendship on both sides.
Households were fairly self-sufficient, using the year’s crop of corn, wheat, meat or wool to buy metal tools, boots, cotton cloth (many women were expert spinners, sewers and knitters), sack of flour, boxes of sugar, tins of treacle known as ‘cockie’s joy’ (a ‘cockie’ was a small farmer, as opposed to the wealthy squatters who’d ‘squatted’ illegally and used political influence and money to have laws passed to let them keep the land). Money was also needed for new plants for gardens or orchards and for firearms and black powder and lead to shoot wild ducks, emus or roos.
There are many recipes for pigeon or parrot pie. Half of them say ‘boil with a brick for a day then eat the brick’; others suggest mincing them for a pie. All seem to be ‘when there wasn’t much else to eat’ foods.
Food was carried in by packhorse up from the coast, or down one of the mountain tracks, also by packhorses. Sometime between 1840-1860 a shallow bottomed paddle steamer is said to have made the journey regularly back and forth to Moruya until dredging and possibly the early 1860s floods silted up the river.
Food in the Gold Rush: 1852-1870
In the 1850s, then came the gold rush – literally a ‘rush’ as tens of thousands of miners joined the hysteria to ‘rush’ from one promising new site to another. How were possibly 40,000 newcomers fed in a valley that had so generously supported hundreds – especially as the most productive areas were being dug up?
First, a lot simply starved. No records were kept, but possibly one miner in six died of starvation or water born disease – if you didn’t find enough gold you didn’t eat, and couldn’t buy the ale made from boiled water. Records from Bendigo indicate that maybe one in three on those goldfields made enough to eat and drink well, but we haven’t found records of mortality rates in Araluen.
Those that did eat had a reasonable choice. Barrels of flour, salt, butter, sugar and other foods were rolled down at least two major mud slides created for the purpose before the roads were built, and there were mule and bullock tracks up to Major’s Creek and Reidsdale. The shanty taverns that sprang up sold stew as well as ale, beer and gin, and even (genuine) brandy for those with the cash or the gold. But there were shanty grocers, general stores and butchers too – it was easier to bring sheep down on the hoof than carry the meat. Farmers who’d relied on selling wool or meat to whalers and sealers, now sold to miners.
Many indigenous people and local farmers turned to growing vegetables, with a heavy emphasis on potatoes, cabbages, and maize for humans, hens and horses. Maize could be dried on the cob, or eaten young as we eat the modern sweet corn varieties. The market gardens were often irrigated by diverting water from the races built to carry water for mining. Though the floor of the valley was ripped up for mining, the foothills had rich soil, with springs to water the crops by bucket or trench irrigation. By then, too, wheat had been planted in the Braidwood area.
The last indigenous market garden may have been run circa 1900-1920 by ‘Jack’ and ‘Nelly’ on land then registered to the Wisbey family, watered by the race that came down from almost as high as Major’s Creek.
Most men catered for themselves on small fires, boiling a billy (invented on Norfolk Island in the 1850s) and roasting one of the ducks and other birds that still flew across the valley if they were good shots, or making a damper from flour sour with weevils, which added protein as well as flavour.
Even in cities in the 1850s and ’60s fuel and access to a fireplace or stove was too expensive for home cooking for many of the poor, who survived on bread and cheap stews sold by the bowlful. The miners too bought stew at about a penny a bowl – the bowls and the spoons were often tethered on chains to stop the customers taking them away. The stews were thin, not just for the sake of cheapness, when potatoes cost far less than mutton, but because most of the adult population had poor teeth, not just from cavities, but lost to scurvy from lack of vitamin C. After a few years on the goldfields, a good set of teeth was rarer than nuggets. There is a reason while people in portraits or iconographs from the time kept their mouths shut instead of smiling.
Damper was a staple, as were sinkers. Both could be delicious, or heavy enough to bash an unwary snake.
Food in the late 19th and early 20th Century
Valley food really became gourmet tucker again after the gold rushes. By then a reasonably good farmer could afford an enclosed stove. This meant bread, cakes, biscuits and roast dinners, as well as stews long simmered on a fire which could be controlled by a good cook. Those who didn’t have an oven sometimes used termite and ant mounds to build an oven, a fire in the lower cavity and food in the top one.
These were the days of mutton: roasts slow cooked, so tough fibres softened and the fat seeped out to be kept as dripping, gravy made from pan scrapings and the remnants of vegetables cooked with the roast, potatoes, pumpkin, parsnips. The dripping was used to fry other foods, from flat breads to fish, or used instead of butter in cakes and puddings and pastry. Dripping makes a soft, rich pastry, quite as good as pastry made from butter, and often lighter.
With no fridges, food was kept cold in stone dairies, often splashed with water mid-morning so the evaporation helped keep them cool, or wrapped in oil cloth or poured into corked bottles and lowered into cold streams or wells. Butter, milk and meat could keep fresh for a week or more this way.
From about 1870-1930 food was comfort, celebration and hospitality. A well-spoken traveller would be asked to stay for dinner; a more disreputable one would be given a shoulder of mutton and flour to make his own damper in exchange for chopping wood. Households went through many tonnes of wood a year, and men and boys spent weeks each year cutting it and splitting it or ringbarking trees to provide dry wood in two or three years’ time. A common task was to bring in an armload of wood for the fire every time you came back in from the dunny.
The drought from 1878-1903 was hard on those with stock, but Araluen seems to have had a series of thunderstorms that meant crops of corn could grow here, enough to feed the whole district’s horses (Source: Clyde Mundey) as well as to keep tomatoes, pumpkins and potatoes going. Whenever the creek flooded after a storm, pumpkin seeds were planted in the silt in the hope of a crop. A big hard-skinned pumpkin could also be used as a ‘drover’s oven.’
This was the era of pickles and chutneys, to keep the harvest for lean times.
The Depression and World War II
The depression, especially from1930 onwards brought more hardship, but rarely hunger, in the valley. You might have to live on cabbage and rabbit, but there was no shortage of either. Those in the ‘susso camp’ called Poverty Gully grew tomatoes, and made and sold tomato jam, but it was also a time when neighbours helped each other with a cut of meat when they killed an animal, fruit in season, a hunk of pumpkin or a Christmas pudding. Turkeys were raised in the valley to sell at Christmas one year, but Ned Wisbey said ‘trying to drove a mob of turkeys was … (expletive deleted) as well as them perching on fences every night, and the industry was abandoned‘.
World War II meant fruit cakes packaged up so well you could throw them against the wall to be sent to those serving overseas. It also meant a rise in the price of wool, as did the Korean War after that. American servicemen popularised hamburgers in buns and milkshakes, though a patty of minced meat with lettuce, beetroot and tomato had been popular before. World War II brought rationing from 1942. The meat and egg ration was eked out locally by plentiful rabbits and backyard hens; many families kept a cow for butter, milk and cream, or shared a couple with neighbours. The real impact locally came from shortages of sugar and tea – no meal was complete without several cups of tea strong enough to melt a spoon, the pot often left on the side of the stove to stew all day, with water added every few hours.
War time recipes used various sweeteners and binders to replace sugar, such as dates, stewed plums, pumpkin, grated carrot or grated apple. Pancakes with sugar and lemon became ‘apple pancakes’. Pumpkin scones had been popular as ‘bring a plate’ foods since the 1890s, as they kept fresh longer than plain scones – i.e. about 24 hours, but now pumpkin was added to fruit cakes, puddings, and made in ‘pumpkin cheese’, an alternative to jam that isn’t as bad as it sounds. Another jam alternative was ‘apple and date’, the two stewed together, which is delicious, but mostly jams were made with less sugar, with the knowledge they wouldn’t keep as long.
After World War II
By the 1950s the valley still produced high quality butter, cheese that won prizes in Paris, fat lambs and fattened vealers; the male calves not wanted by the dairy farms. Young men – and older ones – shot rabbits for the pot and to sell the skins for fur coats, Akubra hats and for the bounty on their hind paws. Rabbit was a poverty food, eaten roasted, one bunny per person, or stewed or made into pies to take for lunch when working in the paddocks – the flies found it harder to get into pies than into sandwiches in those days before plastic containers, or later, in the 1970-80s, marinated in honey, garlic and soy sauce and barbequed or stir fried.
But mutton was still king, or hogget, two tooth young sheep, which is almost impossible to buy now. Mutton was cheap, and gave flavour as well as fat to be soaked up by the potato in stews. Hogget had flavour for roasts but was still tender. Only ‘new Australians’ from various parts of Europe ate what many thought was tasteless lamb. Corned mutton or beef with white sauce, to be used for sandwiches on Monday night, grilled chops Tuesday, sausages Wednesday, stuffed rib roast Thursday, fish if you were Catholic on Friday or sausages in gravy if you weren’t (few butchers specified back then what meat went into their sausages), roast sheep on Saturday, served cold with salad Sunday, unless there was a roast for Sunday dinner, then eaten cold that night, in sandwiches during the week, or reheated in gravy.
But the valley was no longer as isolated food wise. Cars became common again after post war shortages and petrol rationing ended. Flour was bought by the packet, not the sackful. Sliced bread began to replace the high top white or home-made bread.
The sixties drought brought a slow grinding halt to the growing prosperity. The dairy industry was ‘rationalised’ so that only certain areas could have dairy farms. This destroyed the district’s prosperous dairy industry, as did the subsidised irrigation of the Murray Valley Irrigation area, that meant vegetables from other areas like Araluen found it hard to compete. Government intervention, combined with increased cold storage of food and ethylene ripening of fruit picked young, meant the end of most Australians only being able eat food produced locally.
By the 1970s, farms could no longer support two or more generations. Cattle often replaced sheep as they needed less care, and the valley tradition of buying dairy calves from down the coast to fatten was mostly abandoned.
Younger people looked for jobs and more modern comforts in the cities. Abandoned and marginal farms were bought by hippies, or semi hippies, part of the ‘back to the land’ or ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement, who dreamed of being self-sufficient, or at least self-sufficient in part. These were usually middle-class young people with no farming experience, who built houses and irrigation systems with a book in one hand and a bit of pipe in the other. Many were vegetarian, though mostly not for long once they’d been offered a few roast dinners and had worked a sixteen-hour day. Brown rice and lentils gave way to home grown lamb, pork, chicken, goose, duck or feral rabbit. Buckets of (illegal) milk were swapped for home cured ham (also illegal).
In 1982 members of the Araluen Bushfire Brigade laughed at one of their number whose wife had made multigrain sandwiches. ‘Is that muesli bread?’ By the end of the 1980s ‘muesli bread’ and wholemeal were as common as white bread.
By then Australian cooking generally had changed, not just by waves of immigration. Apart from the most dedicated self-sufficiency practitioners, Araluen food had become pretty much what any Australian of the time might eat, influenced by ads on TV or what was in Braidwood’s first supermarket, opened in the mid ’70s – though the meals in the valley at the time did tend to have a greater emphasis on peaches, apricots, home grown vegetables, especially beans and pumpkin, and, for a while, rabbit. (Kangaroo was mostly used as dog tucker, though a few old timers sometimes made kangaroo tail soup.)
Backyard food, or surplus swapped with neighbours was still common, but no longer a staple. Once cooks had used whatever ingredients were to hand. Now less experienced cooks – who had spent their childhoods mostly in school instead of at their parents’ or grandparents’ sides working with them – cooked from recipes, and bought the ingredients to make their food. Dishes were increasingly pre-prepared. Packaged cereal took over from scrambled eggs and bacon or bubble and squeak. Cheese came in slices.
Chicken, once a rare luxury, either from the backyard or ‘a bloke in the pub’ came frozen – and very, very cheap. They also came with their innards wrapped in plastic inside, but after many cooks had roasted the birds, plastic and all, the hens came ready to be stuffed – or even ready roasted. The cheapness of bought chicken meant that wild duck was no longer prized, and most of a generation grew up not knowing how to kill, pluck and cook an unwanted rooster.
Bottling the surplus fruit and veg in Fowler’s Vacola jars gave way to bunging it in the freezer. Wood stoves were changed for gas or electric, and the teapot no longer stood on top of the stove all day, freshened now and then with more water. The ubiquitous meat safes – a bit like a fly proof mosquito net hung from a high beam, where a freshly killed sheep or beast could be hung in a cool shady spot that got the breezes without getting fly blown – began to vanish, the meat going to fridge and freezer and later still, vacuum packs, where it no longer had the flavour of ‘long hung’ meat.
The plates brought to the many ‘bring a plate’ events were now more likely to contain something made from the Women’s Weekly cookbooks or the recipe on a packet of flour rather than cakes or savouries taught from grandmother to granddaughter while Mum was out feeding the poddies or pruning the orchard. Recipes might be based on Thai, Greek, Italian, Chinese, French, Singapore, Vietnamese, Philippine, Austrian, Hungarian, or Middle Eastern foods.
Araluen food continued to change with Australian eating habits. Though Braidwood’s supermarket and garages might sell Araluen’s fruit and veg, and Conrad and Carol Kindrachuck sold their market garden veg, and several orchardists sold peaches and vegetables on the road side or from packing sheds, most food eaten in the valley was shop bought.
From about 2000 onwards, however, ‘fresh is luxury’ foods began to be grown and sold on small farms, like the ‘black garlic’ from Jembaicumbene and truffles from Reidsdale. Both Harrisons’ orchards still sell peaches and fresh vegetables from their farm store as well as fresh food markets, and many small producers sell fruits and vegetables at the Braidwood and Canberra markets. Araluen has its first legal and now award winning distillery.
Most ingredients still come from far away, apart from a few households that cling to the ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement of the 1970s and eat mostly what the land gives them, or families that eat what they also sell commercially. Araluen doesn’t any longer have a shop, though various shops have opened and then closed after a few years since 1945. The Araluen Hotel serves meals, and keeps some staples like milk and bread. The Courthouse restaurant operated in the 1970s and ’80s, and was famous for its Black Forest cake afternoon tea as well as dinners; Wisbey’s Café provided breakfast for fruit pickers and delicious meals for those who wanted a day out in the early years of the millennium, and for a few years local Araluen pizza was available one night a week too.
Keeping up the reputation of good cooks in the valley, local women still cater superb food for events, made by excellent cooks in what is now a commercial kitchen at the Araluen Federal Hall, as well as jams, chutneys and cordial for sale locally and in Braidwood to make money for the Hall upkeep. As always, there is tasty food at the pub when it’s open, and a sausage sizzle to accompany almost every community event, though the thin steaks that used accompany these vanished in about 1980, and shredded lettuce, canned beetroot slices and sliced tomato are no longer routinely offered as accompaniments.
The Araluen population has grown again, and those who come to live here have often chosen the valley partly for its food growing potential. Interest in fresh, local and delicious is growing. As I2Jackie French AO, personal recollections of food in the Araluen Valley over the decades, September 2023. write this in late 2023, it seems as if a new stage of ‘food in the valley’ is beginning.