http://www.redochre.com.au

They are buying lemon myrtle, riberries, mountain pepperleaf and pepperberry and lemon aspen from Warren and Ewa Jones at verdun. They run a beautiful little herb farm gorwing only native herbs called Tumbeela.

Renaissance herbs are starting to carry some Australian native herbs like Mentha australis and and bush basil.

here is the website for ANPI (Australian Native Produce Industries), these are the guys who market the Red Ochre brand of produce as well as bush food plants for both home gardeners and people producing on a commercial scale - theres some good info on their site. Their plant research and development operation and nursery are based at Paringa in the riverland of South Australia.

cheers, mudlark

Jamus, I have bought some of the native herbs from Renaissance, namely native basil and sea parsley (the sea parsley was one of the herbs being grown by Red Ochre, also). If you could, I would appreciate any further information you may be able to gather from the people at Red Ochre.

Once again, thank you for your replies.

Andy, my only contact with them was in the VERY early days. I visited their produce office at Dudley Park with someone who was interested in small-scale commercial growing. At that time they were very helpful, they gave us lots of samples of there value added products and were very enthusiastic about the interest in growing produce. Some time ago I visited a couple of growers who are working with ANPI to selectively grow larger fruits of some Bush Foods. My impression is that this industry is still in its infancy and that for some Bush Foods to be really viable may take considerably more Research, Development and Marketing .....not to mention a need to consult, support and in some case compensate Aboriginal peoples for their intellectual property rights, because so much of the info we do have on these plants has come about because of the generousity and openess of Aboriginal people. I understand that there is now a Bush Foods company that buys its produce directly and exclusively from collectives operated by Aboriginal people and if I had a choice I would buy prefer to buy their products over any of the other brands. I was talking to someone involved with this a couple of weeks ago so I'll try and find out about their availability if anyone is interested.

cheers, mudlark

PS: from what I understand there is no longer any conection between the Red Ochre restaurant run by Andrew Filke and the Red Ochre brand of plants and produce, but I'll try and find out for sure.

It concludes with this warning:

"The Kershes worry that Australian ambivalence will see a valuable resource slipping out of our grasp. "All this will be transferred overseas. We will not be able to call it our own any more," says Raymond. "It just needs ... a lot of people putting up their hands and saying, 'Let's have a go at it'."

cheers, mudlark

There are many books on the market about Bush Tucker and Bush Medicine that present information that is almost exclusively sourced from Aboriginal people without even acknowledgement, let alone compensation. Non-aboriginal people are profiting from Aboriginal knowledge and that to me is unethical....like wealthy art gallery owners exploiting Aboriginal artists...those people are getting rich off another persons 'story'.

Intellectual copyright laws exist to protect people, black or white, from profiting from, or taking credit for another persons knowledge, much like plagarism laws. What is ethically wrong about that?

I agree that you can't (and shouldn't be able to) own a plant (plant breeder rights really peeve me), but the information about the uses of that plant, or the whereabouts of particularly good examples of a species are another thing entirely and that is what I was talking about.

By the way I have heard that someone is in the process of trying to put a PBR on trees grown from a particular parent plant that was shown to them by Aboriginal people and the very people that shared their knowledge may potentially be asked to pay a fee in order to propagate their own plants.....is that ethically right??

respectfully, mudlark

I'm not convinced that in some instances, Aboriginal people haven't bred or propagated plants, it depends on your interpretation. They certainly 'improved' some species ability to adapt to fire.

Australian aboriginal people had absolutely no concept of conservation. For example I have it on good authority that the method they used to harvest muntries in southern australia was to uproot the entire bush and take it back to camp where they could sit comfortably and eat the berries. Another example is the cutting down of mangrove trees in the north of the country to extract a single worm from inside the trunk, and in the south east the cutting of 100s of years old treeferns to obtain the grapefruit sized starchy crown at the top. They burned, raped and decimated the entire country, not that we are any better, because we're not. The aboriginal philosophy was eat absolutely everything in an area, drop garbage all over the place, set fire to it and then move elsewhere. Charming.

First of all, how do you suggest that approx. 18,000 generations of Aborigines managed to survive over 40,000 odd years? If they had "burned, raped and decimated the entire country" I doubt that they would have survived one generation. There must have been some concept of conservation in their ability to live with the environment.

Over the years I have come to be sceptical of statements attributed to "good authorities" unless those authorities have names and qualifications. Have you just taken these statements at face value or have you bothered to do any research of your own. If you had looked further into the subject you would find that there is another explanation for one of your comments. The one to which I refer is about the "mangrove worm". The mangrove trees weren't cut down to extract a single worm but were harvested from plants which were unhealthy, probably affected by the presence of the "worm" in question. Why cut the trees just for one type of food when there would have been many other foods in the entire mangroves.

Aboriginals may not have used herbs and spices for cooking but they would have used them for other purposes, e.g. medicinally.

Your suggestion that they lose knowledge in a few short generations demeans their obvious ability to have survived for thousands of years. Any loss of knowledge would unfortunately have begun since the arrival of white settlement when tribes were dispersed and the elders knowledge was not passed down.

Regarding your last sentence, at least their waste would have been recyclable and not the toxic rubbish which we generate.

There is a wealth of literature available on the subject of bushfoods and the Aboriginal culture, much of which has been written by learned anthropologists, historians and scientists. Some information can be found in sites compiled by a Michael Michie and a Peter Lister. Also, www.anbg.gov.au/library/bushfood.html and www.teachers.ash.org.au.

I quote Tim Flannery,

"the Aborigines' arrival in Australia, some 40 to 60 thousand years ago, precipitated a wave of extinctions that was the catalyst for an environmental meltdown from which the Aborigines made a triumphant recovery."

Flannery believes their story is a parable for our times.

There is a wealth of evidence for this fact, unfortunately politically correct anthropologist are not known for non-biased reporting.

As for Aboriginal cultural knowledge it has always evolved, as with any spoken tradition. The "dreamtime" stories are exactly that. Every time they are told they are different, and that's the nature of the beast. As soon as Aboriginal people left the bush and stopped making a living off the land the knowledge slips away, appart from instances where interested people have made written records.

Of course a similar situation existed in northern africa and the environment there lost the battle. The result is the Sahara Desert.

HUH??!! Jamus I think need to get out more.

I have not replied to your comments about whether or not the first Aussies were 'conservationists' or not because it has no relevance to the point I've been trying to make...which could proabably best be summarised by saying if you had a tree growing on your land and only you knew it was there and only you knew that in some way it was special and you mentioned it to someone in good faith (perhaps during some process to determine your title rights to that property you were compelled by law to identify the tree in order to reveal your knowledge and 'connection' to the land), be it a quandong or an apple or anything, and they then came on to your property and took seeds or cuttings without your permission and started an enterprise that made lots of money, would you not feel you were entitled to some of the profits. The law says you are, whether you are black, white or brindle and whether you are a conservationist or not.

respectfully, mudlark