Provisions, Seed Collectors, and New Foods

Abstract

This chapter, the second chapter of section two ‘Food across the Colonial Frontier’ examines food practices during the expansion of the frontier in a number of locations that provide insight into the variety of factors influencing contemporary postcolonial Australian foodways. Examining the expansion out from Sydney through the letters and journals of early explorer parties, seed collectors, and early colonial settlers, a number of themes emerged. First, the newcomers had begun to secure food for themselves at the expense of inhabitants but they had also exhausted some local food supplies. Under the pressure to find more food and arable land, explorer parties were sent out from the first settlement. The first issue facing them was the need to secure reliable food provisions for their journeys, something that took them many years to develop. Second, these explorer parties had little knowledge or understanding of the local ecology and were often blind to the available food resources around them. Third, they brought new sources of food onto the traditional estates of inhabitants that began the ecological transformation of Australia that continues into the modern era. As the penal colony became more food secure, and its population of arriving administrators, convicts, and settlers swelled, newcomers looked to the horizons and of expansion of land for new settlements. A significant event that pushed the settler colonists inland was a severe drought in 1813 that caused significant depletion in food for people and animals. Oxley noted that recognition of the success of Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth in finding a route from Sydney across Dharug country towards a western mountain range that seemed impenetrable was attributed to the fact that they made it possible for settlers to be able to expand the agricultural lands and pastures for their growing stocks and herds. The approach taken by the colonial administrators and settlers to overland exploration in some cases relied on supplementing government food supplies with endogenous food, included trying to fathom the knowledge about edible local foods and the methods of procuring them from Indigenous Australian people who travelled with them or inhabitants they met. As one example, Hovell and Hume used a mix of carried provisions and locally sourced foods procured by a guide who travelled with them, Tommy; he used a short stick to kill small wallabies that were then fed to the dogs. Some explorations avoided relying on endogenous foods, preferring rather to carry and consume more familiar, exogenous forms of food.