R M Williams Outback Magazine Article

WILD HARVEST

An Indigenous catering initiative does much more than serve food - Story by Kerry Sharp

I t was a case of sink or swim when Alice Springs food lovers Rayleen Brown and Gina Smith first decided to try their inexperienced hands at catering 20 years ago. Word went out via the bush telegraph and the first order came in – for three cooked meals a day for a week for 100 Warlpiri women at a forum in remote Central Australia. “We were shell-shocked,” says Rayleen, a Ngangiwumirr and Eastern Arrernte woman. “But we took it on and somehow managed to fill that huge order out of a domestic kitchen. After the meeting, the old women thanked us and suggested we start a commercial cooking business.” The glowing endorsement convinced the mates to launch Kungkas Can Cook in 2001. “Our first formal job was to feed 1000 Indigenous dancers for four days during the Alice Springs Yeperenye Festival,” Rayleen says. “Many catering jobs followed for major events, morning teas and everything in between.” Kungkas (Pitjantjatjara for ‘women’) uses wild plant products harvested by traditional women from their desert homelands. “By sourcing our products in this way, we are supporting livelihoods and helping sustain their important connection to country and the stories within it,” says Rayleen, who became the venture’s sole owner-operator after co-founder Gina reluctantly bowed out for family reasons. A typical wild harvest involves family groups working on country that has fed their people for millennia. They target the high-demand species – vitamin-rich bush tomato, wattle seed, quandong, saltbush and other traditional food sources. The harvests are seasonal. Bush tomatoes, for example, fruit around August, but if good rains have nourished the desert landscape the harvest can stretch over a couple of months. Back in the communities, the produce is cleaned and stored in big hessian bags ready for delivery, first to Alice Springs and then on to Sydney for processing, packaging and distribution to worldwide clients. The products are used in gourmet lines such as spice mixes, chutneys, bush biscuits, chocolates, deserts and even gin. Rayleen’s five offspring and 10 grandkids all pitch in as kitchen hands when the pressure is on – and grandma often takes the young ones on bush picnics to teach them about their country and heritage. “I’m keen to help them become more familiar with the bush than with their smartphones or computer screens,” she says. “I want them to connect with the bush and to love going out camping, fishing and hunting.” Rayleen says her own happy bush childhood inspired her cooking career. “Mum and Dad met in Alice and travelled all over the Territory in the ’70s with Dad fencing on cattle stations while Mum looked after us six kids,” she says. “We were like nomads shifting from place to place – from Pine Creek to Kalkarindji to Dunmarra and Adelaide River.” Her favourite home was a little hut her dad built on the Adelaide River. “We were real bush kids, running around barefoot and gathering food for Mum to cook, with no power or running water. We hunted, fished and braved water snakes and freshies to collect mussels from the river. It was an incredible lifestyle and learning place. “When we moved back to Alice Springs, I spent a lot of time with my Arrernte nannas, going on bush harvests and learning about the meaning of food for Indigenous people. This all had an enormous impact on what I do now.” Rayleen works with prominent NT hospitality training specialist Karen Sheldon, mentoring young Indigenous people in Karen’s Future Stars initiative to help them on the road to employment. “We have had great success stories of where young people are now standing tall, feeling confident and earning their own money. They are so proud that it makes me cry.” She has shared recipes for her bush tomato damper and quandong-topped Christmas cake in the Great Australian Cookbook (now a Foxtel TV program), has appeared on a host of high-profile television programs and recently featured on the BBC’s Great Rail Journeys of the World, in a segment filmed on The Ghan. During Central Australia’s Parrtjima Festival of Light in April she worked side-by-side with Australia’s celebrated Indigenous chef Mark Olive. When not rustling up orders in her Alice Springs kitchen, she’ll be found presenting her regular talk for trekkers on the Larrapinta Trail, conducting bush food workshops or accompanying her desert harvesters on a trip. She’s also involved in regional research into the growth potential and development of Australia’s bush foods industry and chairs the First Nations Bush Foods and Botanical Alliance, which is lobbying for protocols to support Indigenous providores.