Great Dividing Age (for Zephyr on his 15th birthday)

Life is changing fast in your time. This can be measured in big stories as much as those not needing celebrities. Like the man we met who now voluntarily eats just one meal a day, or the four of us walking this poem line, the Great Dividing Trail between Daylesford and Castlemaine, for your birthday.

We eat the fruits of the earth early on our first day. All the long processes — the morning’s dew, storm’s temper, intentions of the bees, the fungi, worms and not-by-naked-eye critters of the soil — have lived before these gifts. We eat in this love of the earth, together. Your reluctance is for your own understanding. You see this fruit-love as mine, but she belongs to everyone who holds dear the earth. Her fruit is your adult mother and lover, sister and aunty too. 

We follow goat track and hard dry wallaby lines, trailed in blackened fox scats. Your fox has also eaten blackberry and the seeds are impregnated from pointy carnivorous tip to pointy fruitarian end. We are never just one thing.

After half a day’s walk from town, home table and cellar, the shrivelled, dried-on-the-cane berries are appealing, even preferred. Our walking unsettlement is already changing us, quickening our senses, exposing our prejudices.

We pass by the campsite where we once endured the hail and sleet and a first winter camp challenge. You boys got so wet and it seemed to take an eternity to get the fire going the next morning. We were miserable until then, but that’s how fire makes home as we discovered together. That Promethean comfort, that myth in our face, warming our frozen fingers. This story was not the beginning of your initiation at nine years old, just another story of your and my making, with friend Gabe.

We walk into the blowhole where we rest and throw rocks at imaginary beasts, 

into the prickly pear (Opuntia) patch,

shaving away the splintering hairs of the skin of her fruit. Then on to the first-date-dumpling-lunch-story where we had taken Meg and boiled the billy and I ask her into our hearts. Where she took us on seeing our fatherness and sonness, our light playfulness at Breakneck Gorge.

After lunch we dig the burdock (Arctium) roots from the path and keep their leaves. Remember this plant young fox. It only grows in cool to cold temperate climates, but it's carbohydrate may save you one day.

The seeds hitchhike around our ankles distributing their future nourishment along the track where it’s wet enough for their renewal, and we haul our heavying packs into the afternoon when my note-taking drops off and a quietness intrudes upon us. Our fatigues, with Jeremy and Connor, our bodies instead — a compaction of atoms and more-than-human microbes in numbers outnumbering us a billion to one — write this poem. Our toes crushed into steel caps siren out in the cries of white-winged choughs who follow us trailing the scats of the unseeable fox, your totem.

We finally make camp, your accruing survival skills relaxing into you.

We bring out the burdock and wrap the roots in the leaves to cook 

on the fire's coals to accompany our brought along food. 

Sleep will trouble itself with each of us on this night, not just because of our chosen sleepwear. 

Lactic acid has built its restlessness in our turmoiling, quivering muscles, and no amount of stretching will completely becalm them.

Our second morning is spent in near fruitless forest, as though the gums have consumed every last drop of every last thing but for the edible devil guts (Cassytha), not yet ripe.

Wild food? A possum, a cockatoo, a skink camouflaged before a black wallaby thumps across our animal track song and disappears. Our brought along rations begin to run out. 

No fatty Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) or lean rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) to snare and spit on a small bush fire. Instead inedible cramps form in our grieving legs before we reach Vaughn Springs and recharge with rock-given carbonated water and swim in the old Dja Dja Wurrung story of the Loddon River — Yolelerwil-meerin, Yarrayn, Woppoon, Byerr, Pullergil-yaluk, Gunbungwerro, Minne-minne, Mudyin gadjin.

Following your lead we all end up napping after lunch,

wake and break from our intended forest path and head to the little banjo town where you volunteered your fourteen year old skills and helped bump in the festival. The town held a place for you then, and will again, or somewhere else, if you continue to offer yourself to the call of others.

On our second night, well fed on the general store’s local bread and eggs, 

we camp by what’s left of the river. Mosquitoes predate through the night. Shooting stars rocket across our animal eyes, soft but no longer hunting. You three young bucks slept fairly rough, while your old man's light flynet and mattress enabled a little more rest.

On our third day of walking, I become that guy who over speaks in your direction. You groan like a trillion sons before you. 

There are no poisoned gifts to wake up to, just this waking, walking poem, and a little breakfast. 

Our last leg trek along the railway from Guildford offers up a multiplicity of feral fruit — peaches, plums, blackberries, figs, grapes, apples. Our opshop marbles are slung rapidly, illegally at rabbits. Discreteness, Zeph! Care. You have the choice to be a gift giver-receiver of the flowering earth, or a parasite, a mistletoe of grave and selfish destruction. Anywhere between this binary is still the latter. Not much in life is this clear. Nothing else is as defined between two distinct modes of being.

I’m not sure how much more I can teach you. Your fox-like pride wants to teach yourself or learn from others. I get this. Your fox smells freedom. I want more than anything to let you go on your wanderlusting. I want to blow gently onto your free-seeking sails, away from the sad story of school and now home. 

Yesterday’s mineral water – calcium, sodium and magnesium et al – today quells our long haul aches, our last 12ks to Castlemaine. Remember this free medicine from the underworld. Remember this communitarian walk, before you solo out in search of your own people. We'll always be here with open doors and wide open tracks to walk with you, but not always open to just anything thrown at us. 

On our walk we gathered up the cowboy's arse paper (Mullein) along the post-industrialising track. You may want to note such soft and useful gifts.

We ate sweet March flies (Tabanidae), raw and toasted on coals skewered on sharpened stick — fly kebabs! They tasted good, did not make us sick, it would be prudent again to note this animal protein easily hunted, little energy expended.

And we noted the flowering fruits that would be consumed by others later on.

Greeted by farmer’s and ancestral shade trees at the market in the park, just this coming together at the end of our walk, could go unappreciated where your ideological father spoke about the urgency of non-monetary economies with agrarian friends and finished off the first draft of this walked-for poem, scribed on paper.

You’re right, I’m not listening to you, much. But I do see you and will come to listen more closely as your voice grows and you become comfortable in your own unique and unusual skin, like the young men you have been walking with. 

I see and feel the yearning in your fox burrowed skin, it pops out in over excited pimples. Trust your resilience and the skills you possess that no industrial school has imparted. Your many schools of life will be your health. More and more you will start living your story and joy will fill you up as you grow into her and respect the lores of her and your own tellings. This may be a long road for you, especially if you continue to worship mass society's false gods who only quicken mass death. The teen-age is merely a product of such unrelenting consumption. Go that path and tragedy will be your story. Abandon the ad-men, con-artists and poisoned gifts that are killing the flowering earth and your beautiful spirit will be unleashed with the great force of love you possess. 

Happy birthday Zeph! Much love, Dad.

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Gariwerd bush foods

Zeph and I joined the Victorian home educators camp at Halls Gap in the Grampians this week. We came with a community friend Gabe and the two boys joined over 100 kids from all over the state (and further afield). For five days we experienced unpredictable weather, night games, wrestling, abseiling, rock climbing, new friend making, swimming, tiredness, ball games, bike-riding, sunburn, boomerang throwing, cuts and bruises and some autonomous food.

Blow fly grass (Briza maxima) also known as quaking grass

It is true spring, one of the six seasons in Gariwerd, and there is an abundance of edible flowering plants covering the ground. These are the traditional bush plants used by the original people and the newly naturalised plants that have come since 1788. Many are edible and/or medicinal. One favourite newly naturalised plant at this time of year is wild onion, otherwise known as three-cornered garlic or angled onion because of the triangulate stem shape. We found swathes of them along the path that runs into town and on to the Brambuk Cultural Centre. Great food for being on the go.

Three-cornered garlic (Allium triquetrum)

The garlic was growing near pockets of Milkmaids, a perennial herb native to woodland forests of southern Australia. The tuberous roots are edible cooked as potato and like yam daisies they are crisp and starchy eaten raw.

Milkmaids (Burchardia umbellate)

Everywhere throughout Gariwerd relationships between traditional bush food species and newly naturalised tucker are apparent. Common resources are shared between species who get along without ideological register or monetary warring.

Deer (Cervidae family) and Kangaroo (Macropod, meaning 'large foot')

We visited Brambuk and spoke with the knowledgeable and generous Blake, the chef at the centre's Bushtucker Cafe. Blake and I shared notes. He introducing me to some of his preferred herbs and spices from nearby and other regions of Australia,

Round-leaf Mint (Prostanthera rotundifolia),  Strawberry Gum (Eucalyptus olida), Wattleseed (Acacia sp) Lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora)

and I demonstrated how to find desirable starch at the base of mat-rush (lomandra) leaves just outside the cafe. Lomandra is also known as basket grass and was used for traditional basket making. The seeds can be ground into a flour meal for cakes. The plant is a good source of vitamin C, iron and fibre.

Mat-rush (Lomandra longifolia) a common source of starchy food

At Brambuk we also learned about uses for honey-myrtles. The local people called these plants Gutyamul. The scientific name is Melaleuca. The nectar was added to water to make a sweet drink. There are thirteen species of Melaleuca in Victoria and like all the Banksia species the flower spikes can be used to make a sweet cordial or a fermented beverage.

Honey myrtle (Melaleuca sp.)

We also learned about the traditional uses for grass trees and how the seeds were ground as flour and the stem was used as a fire-stick for the ingenious fire-stick farming that was common to all Aboriginal peoples. The resin was used to bond materials together such as stone spearheads to wooden shafts.

Grass tree (Xanthorrhoea sp.)

The walk to Brambuk and back to our camp was around ten kilometres. The sun beat down in the afternoon and we were talking up the need for a swim when we came across what I thought was an enormous bolete mushroom, but my mycologist friend Alison Pouliot (who knows the area well) believes it is Phlebopus marginatus. We placed a dollar coin on the cap of this big pore mushroom to give a sense of the size.

Phlebopus marginatus

While at Brambuk we also undertook a boomerang throwing workshop. A second Gariwerd post will follow on making and throwing a boomerang.

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More courses available...

I've extended my foraging classes indefinitely through the Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre. But I will also travel to take them in your neck of the woods.

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Symbol-free feeding (on the coast again)

We haven't been able to stay away from the Victorian coast this summer and so we've had to find out a little more about the edibles down there as we camped again and had at least one main meal a day of fish and greens that we foraged and hunted (with hand spear) for. We left home in Jaara country and moved around through Wathaurong and on into Bunurong country, crossing the bay at Queenscliff by ferry.

These are some of the things we found:

Tetragonia implexicoma, Bower Spinach similar to New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) by its 4 perianth segments (instead of 5), its yellow flowers and succulent fruit. Used as a leaf vegetable by Indigenous Australians and early Europeans as a source of vitamin C to ward off scurvy. The berries were used as a red dye; they are edible but not highly desirable. 

Tetragonia implexicoma (Bower Spinach)

Rhagodia candolleana, Seaberry salt-bush is a rigorous plant good for stabalising eroded sites. Birds seed this species as they like to feed on the red staining berries. Confined to the Southern coastline of Australia. The cooked leaves of young plants are delicious, the fruit is very bitter but edible, very dark red when ripe, would make a great dye.

Rhagodia candolleana (Seaberry salt-bush)

Carpobrotus glaucescens – all parts of Pigface are edible. The raw purple flowers are delicious, sweet and salty they taste like figs; fresh or dried fruit; triangular leaves cooked; high in protein. 

Carpobrotus glaucescens (Pigface)

Lycium ferocissimum the African boxthorn, according to Tim Low (1988) has orange or red berries, grows on coasts and on the plains in southern Australia, and the bitter berries are edible. We can also attest they are edible, although would be better cooked and added to honey or dried to extract the bitterness and bring out the natural sugars. They look similar to the native boxthorn (L. australe), which have smaller, fleshier leaves and are found inland in southern Australia.

Lycium ferocissimum (African boxthorn)

Meuschenia freycineti, Sixspine Leatherjacket colouration can change with growth. The species is endemic to Australia. The meat is delicious, cook with skin and peel off when ready or skin first.

Meuschenia freycineti (Sixspine Leatherjacket)

There were a number of things we tried but didn't know the names of, such as these two fish. 

Unidentified fish from Port Phillip Bay 

Alyxia buxifolia, Sea box is confined to coastal habitats along the southern coastline of Australia. Often grows in exposed situations where they are pruned by wind. The fruit is eaten by birds. We nibbled a tiny piece of berry and later found out they are supposedly toxic to humans. However, we can attest, they are not poisonous (fatal or otherwise) in a small dose. They are very astringent and not palatable at least eaten raw.

Alyxia buxifolia (Sea box)

Solanum carolinense, Tropical Soda Apple or Horse Nettle. This crazy looking thorny plant is a nightshade that hails from the USA. They start out with a mottle green fruit before turning yellow. Edibility is doubtful, we didn't try this plant and I couldn't find any information on this plant reported in Victoria, so looks like it has just landed and doing its thing. Other states have it on their radar as an introduced pest.

Solanum carolinense (Tropical Soda Apple)

Note: Although inlanders, Jaara people supposedly made routine trips down to the coast to feed on the abundance and variation of food found there. They made corroboree with other Kulin nation clans, traded goods and arranged marriages. It makes sense for us too to load up our backpacks and leave for the coast to look for some symbol-free food.

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A forest camp

Two friends of mine and I have been working on establishing an ecological business, A Forest Camp, for adults, family groups, businesses and organisations. 

Campers will be asked to come by public transport to Daylesford and walk into the bush with their forest guides (that's us!). Over a weekend (or longer, depending on the group) they will eat a non-packaged, locavore vegetarian diet of locally sourced organic food (and some foraged foods, depending on the season). Campers have the option of building their own shelter or sleeping in a tent. They will be able to learn how to make fire and many other bush skills, if they desire. But mostly this camp is to provide the space for people to be students of a forest and rejuvenate their senses.

The image above shows my fingers about to pick and eat an unripe native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis). Still edible when yellow, though when they turn red they're delicious.

Please check out the site and spread the word. 

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Jaara Jaara foods (and a peg from the big smog)

Yesterday I gave a bush foods walk with a group of home schoolers. Today I went to Melbourne.

Little creatures.

Milk maids.

Yam daisies.

Yabbies.

Clever Melbourne.

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