What Do Aborigines Eat?

The Food of the Bush

What do Aborigines Eat?

Just the same food as all the other Australians eat.

But the answer would not be the same if the questions were:

what did they eat?
how did they survive in a harsh environment?

Australian Aboriginals learnt to take advantage of everything the environment was offering in terms of food: fruit, plants, animals, insects, fish.

What do Aborigines Eat - The Animal Food

They hunted kangaroos and emus. You can find kangaroo meat in the supermarket these days. It is very good and also very healthy.

But other native foods are not quite to today's tastes: wichetty grubs, snakes, moths.

what do aborigines eat - the wichetty bush is a shelter for the grub Wichetty bush

In the past the wichetty grubs formed an important part in the diet of Aboriginal Australians living in the desert. The grubs were cooked on coals or eaten raw.

The grub looks like a white large worm. It is a larvae of a moth. The adult lays eggs near the wichetty bush, which is a type of wattle tree. When they come out of the eggs, the grubs get into the roots of the tree and feed on them.

There is plenty of food in areas along the coasts. Seafood and fish formed part of the diet of the groups living there.

But, for those living in remote areas inland, finding food was a hard daily task.

What do Aborigines Eat - The Plant Food

Aboriginal Australians ate roots, seeds and berries, yams, honey. Just food that is easily available in the bush.

They did not raise cattle and did not cultivate the land. But they had a strong knowledge of the environment and how to benefit from it.

They developed the knowledge to survive and passed it down from one generation to the other.

They knew how to find water. They knew which plants and what parts of them were edible. They knew what was the right time to harvest them and how to prepare them.

Not all plants are good to eat and some of them are toxic. And among those poisonous some can still be eaten if you know when to pick them and how to prepare them, how to keep the good and remove the bad.

Here are some more interesting pages about Indigenous Australians: