Introduction

Twenty-two years ago my partner Ian and I had an epiphany: we discovered Australian indigenous foods. Like many of our contemporaries in the food industry, in those days we cooked with familiar ingredients that originated in Europe or Asia, blissfully unaware that our big Australian continent was also home to a vast store of exciting, tantalising native food plants.

I remember with great clarity how we came to find indigenous foods. Ian and I had a small catering company in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, which also had a specialty retail food outlet attached. We both came from a restaurant background and found running our own business exhilarating and liberating as we were not tied down to a particular cuisine or discipline. We experimented with Thai and Japanese food, Ian indulged in his love of charcuterie (preserving meats) and I lost myself in the world of French cakes and pastries. As you can imagine, our offerings were quite eclectic!

One night we were working late making jams when, metaphorically at least, lightning struck. I was busily stirring a 20-litre pot of raspberry jam, an occupation that always seems to lull me into a Zen-like reflective state, and it suddenly occurred to me that every single ingredient we used in our professional kitchen originally came from another country. I couldn't think of one native Australian fruit or vegetable in any of our recipes.

I posed the question to Ian and of course, he couldn't identify anything either. A friend who was working with us that evening suddenly said, 'I think you can eat lilli pillis; in fact, I'm sure I read somewhere that early settlers ate them.' As a child I was told that lilli pillis were poisonous, so as far as I was concerned the only thing they were good for was for stomping on or throwing at other kids. Regrettably, I therefore discounted this lead.

However, the question remained an intriguing one. For centuries before us, Indigenous Australians must have needed fruit and vegetables in their diet – so why was it that we, as Australian cooks, didn't know about them? I spent some time in libraries and eventually came across a reference to Dr Bethgott, a bio-ethnologist at Monash University. I eventually went to meet Beth, and outside her office was a beautiful little native food garden. She offered me a lilli pilli (what we now call a riberry) and after tasting this little gem of a fruit, I felt the scales fall from my eyes – and my palate!

That day in Beth's garden, I tried lilli pillis, muntrie berries, lemon myrtle and wattleseed, and I rushed back to Ian in a state of great excitement. Once he'd tried the small handful of berries, leaves and seeds that Beth had given me, he became as transfixed as I was, and we knew we had to find out more about these incredible foods. That 'eureka moment' was the harbinger to the life and business journey that we still travel today.

I remember that some of our colleagues in the restaurant and catering industry thought we'd gone slightly mad, but Ian and I were so enamoured of this thrilling new culinary world that we didn't really care what anyone else thought. We just went from one native food to the next, building our knowledge and expertise. It seemed so logical to us to develop a cuisine based on the food that comes naturally from the land that we kept looking over our shoulders thinking, surely we can't be the only ones to have discovered these things?

And of course, we were far from it – Indigenous Australians have been nourished by the flora and fauna of this land for thousands of years. These ingredients are the 'slow foods' of Australia, each with local tradition and culture imbedded in their use. When we became aware of the cornucopia that is Australian indigenous food, we felt really quite humbled by our lack of knowledge.

In the early days I was determined to track down a desert fruit that I knew by the name of 'bush tomato'. I had no idea what I was doing, nor indeed what the indigenous name for this fruit might be. I just got on the phone and rang places like the Hermansberg mission and tried to describe it from the small sample that I'd been given. Eventually some kind person took pity on me and suggested I call a particular community in the Tanami desert. In an incredible display of generosity, Janet Chisholm from Napperby station and Rita Nungala of the Laramba community offered to send me a selection of bush foods in the hope that what I wanted would be there.

About 2 weeks later, 20 large boxes of all sorts of native foods arrived. Ian and I were like kids at Christmas, and eventually we found the much sought-after bush tomato in box number 5, labelled 'katyerr' in the Anmatyerr language. I immediately rang Janet and Rita to thank them and to see if some of these marvellous fruits could be harvested for us. After some discussion it was decided that yes this could be done, and how much did we want? Send as much as Rita and her friends could harvest – after all, we said to ourselves, how much could anyone gather out in the desert? It couldn't be more than 20 kilograms, right?

After about 2 weeks, Janet phoned to see if 2 tonnes would be enough for us, or did we want more . . . ? Shortly afterwards we took our first delivery of 2 tonnes of bush tomatoes, and then had to decide what to do with them! We had no market and nobody knew what bush tomatoes were. Ian's mother used to make a delicious tomato relish so we borrowed the recipe, Ian modified it for bush tomatoes, and Bush tomato chutney was launched. To this day, it is still our most popular product and the women from Laramba and other desert communities are valued partners, suppliers and friends in this developing agronomy. These people and the fruit they harvest have become so important to us that I have made the central desert my second home. The development of an arid land agriculture (wild harvest and cultivated) based on bush tomatoes is an important mission that we are all passionately involved with.

Looking back, I think we may have come across as very boring crusaders for a while there – up on our soap box, trying to convert all and sundry to Australian indigenous foods. But we've settled down over the last 20 years, devoting our energies to making our products and books the best they can be. This gentler approach does actually seem to be converting many people, which is something I'm very proud to be a part of.

Further investigation of these plants has taught us that indigenous foods have significant nutritional profiles and some are true 'superfoods'. On page 7 we have included some exciting information from Dr Garry Lee and Dr Izabela Konczak of the CSIRO that illustrates how important these foods can be in our diet. Again, we are just discovering what Indigenous Australians have always known – that these incredible foods are delicious to eat and very good for us.

This book is yet another step towards our goal of increasing national and international awareness of Australian indigenous foods. I hope that you will fall in love with these magnificent flavours, and enjoy making the recipes that show them off. We'd love you to join us on this exciting 'wild food' journey.

Juleigh Robins