Framing Indigenous Foodways Prior to Colonization

Abstract

This Chapter of first section of this book, ‘Food and Food Knowledge’, frames the analysis of historical records relating to the foodways of Indigenous people. It focuses on what is known about food cultivation and dietary practices of people before newcomers explored and then settled on the lands and waterways of inhabitants, now known as Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A matter of importance is central to the analysis offered in this chapter. Explorers and early colonial diarists created a fiction that the inhabitants they encountered were in some indeterminate way less than human. Commonly described as natives, savages, and ‘les naturels’, the recorded observations of the newcomers were overloaded with interpretations that tried to fit inhabitants into an eighteenth and nineteenth century British or European worldview that was collapsing under the weight of the very colonial expansion they were causing. Old European worldviews were collapsing because of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples around the world. This chapter argues that at the time of first contact, sustainable equilibrium had been reached, as evidenced by the fact that communities exited, and are known to have existed continuously in Australia since the late Pleistocene era (between 2000 and 3000 generations of people). Using food security as the focus, the chapter then gives a detailed examination of the edible foods used by people across the various ecosystems that comprise the modern Australian landmass.