The Ark of Taste

Shell middens along the coast mark thousands of years of Blacklip Abalone eaten in the shell over campfires. The Indigenous communities who harvested them left marked shells on the midden pile so the next family knew to move on. Australian law now bars those communities from doing this, while overfishing, disease, and warming water push the species toward collapse.

Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, and garlic-steeped wine. When a Bull Boar sausage goes into the pot, it smells like a meaty hot cross bun. The recipe arrived in the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s with Swiss and Italian settlers and has stayed there ever since. Roughly equal parts beef and pork, it was named Bull Boar for the two animals it combined. A handful of local butchers still make it, and Hepburn Springs holds a festival for it each year.

Eighteenth-century breeders had a phrase for it: those “for the hook” and those “for the pail.” The Dairy Shorthorn was the pail animal. It originated in County Durham in the sixteenth century and is the world’s oldest pedigree-registered cattle breed. A New South Wales Herd Book from 1873 lists more than a thousand pedigree animals in the colony. Around 200 registered pure-bred breeding females remain today, in herds across Victoria, Tasmania, and the ACT.

Prized by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years and sought out by European settlers for its white flesh and delicate flavour. Populations collapsed from the 1980s onward. It is now Endangered in New South Wales and Threatened under Victoria’s Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act. In parts of the southern Murray-Darling, it is already gone.

Many Murray River peoples believed the wide bends of the river were carved by a giant cod swimming toward the sea. The fish earned that mythology. The Murray Cod is the largest exclusively freshwater fish in Australia, capable of growing past 1.8 metres and living for 70 years. Peoples along the Murray-Darling relied on it for more than 40,000 years. Wild stocks, reduced by overfishing, dams, and pollution, are now supplemented by fingerlings raised in aquaculture and released into the river.

For thousands of years it was a prized food for Indigenous peoples, caught by hand in shallow water, then cooked in hot coals. It takes six years to reach reproductive age. That slowness makes it unsuitable for aquaculture and vulnerable to overfishing. Its abundance has since declined, squeezed by altered water flows, pesticide runoff, and introduced crayfish species.

Cutting out the heart of a Native Cabbage-Tree Palm gives you something to eat. It also kills the tree. Coastal Indigenous communities built protocols: take a certain size, keep it for emergency or ceremony. The palm grows to 25 metres in moist forests across Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland, and reproduces only from seed. Settlers have cleared most of it since colonisation.

Black-coated with a white band across the shoulders, the Wessex Saddleback foraged the New Forest in southern England for over ten centuries before intensive farming had no use for it. Breeders crossed it with the Essex to make the British Saddleback, and the Wessex went extinct there. Pedigreed animals reached Australia in the early twentieth century. At least nine registered herds remain here, all free-range.

Early European explorers described fields full of Yam Daisy. A generation after sheep arrived, those fields had gone. The Wathaurong and Yuin peoples had cultivated it across southeastern Australia for millennia. The tubers grow just below the surface, are easy to harvest in quantity, and deliver more energy than potato when cooked in pit ovens. A small number of farmers and researchers are growing it again.