The Hungry Desert by Robin Hanbury-Tenison
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The exploration of the arid interior of Australia is a story of intense suffering, thirst and hunger. The early pioneers referred constantly to their supplies or, more often, the lack of them. To survive, it was necessary to eat absolutely every scrap and waste nothing. Peter Warburton, who crossed the Great Sandy Desert in 1873, writes:
"To eat a bird meant with the explorer to pluck him and eat him right through and to eat a camel meant exactly the same thing. No shred was passed over; head, feet, hide, tail, all went into the boiling pot; even the very bones were stewed down for soup first, and then broken for the sake of the marrow they contained. The flesh was cut into thin, flat strips and hung upon the bushes to dry in the sun, three days being requisite to effect the process properly. The tough thick hide was cut up and parboiled, the coarse hair was then scraped off with a knife, and the leather-like substance replaced in the pot and stewed until it became like the inside of a carpenter's glue-pot, both to the taste and to the smell. Nourishment there was little or none; but it served to fill up space, and as such was valuable to starving men, who could afford to discard nothing. The head was steadily attacked and soon reduced to a polished skull, tongue, brains, and cheeks all having disappeared; the foot was much esteemed as a delicacy, though a great deal of time was requisite to cook it to perfection."
It seems almost to have escaped the notice of many of the first explorers that the land was already quite well populated with a race which had learned how to thrive on the resources which do exist there. Perhaps it was all part of the appalling human rights history of the British colonisation of that continent that the aboriginal people were regarded as so inferior that little or no attention was paid to what they ate. An exception was Edward Eyre, who made the first crossing from east to west in 1841, although he drew the line at the more nutritious forms of food. "There were many grass-trees ...full of white grubs of which the natives are so fond. From these Wylie [his aboriginal companion] enjoyed a plentiful and, to him, luxurious supper. I could not bring myself to try them, preferring the root of the broad flag-reed ... which is an excellent and nutritious article of food. This root, being dug up and roasted in hot ashes, yields a great quantity of a mealy, farinaceous powder interspersed among the fibres; it is of an agreeable flavour, wholesome, and satisfying to the appetite."
The classic example was the case of Burke and Wills who, after surviving the first crossing from Melbourne to the north, perished slowly on the return journey, after finding that their supply depot had been abandoned on the morning of the very day they reached it. Only when it was already too late did they begin to wonder if the despised food of the natives might save them. Wills, who wrote the only surviving journal, describes in tragic detail the initial generosity of the aboriginals and then the Europeans' pitiful inability to imitate their diet.
"The rations are rapidly diminishing... I suppose this will end in our having to live like the blacks for a few months.
"...We came on some blacks fishing. They gave us ...a lot of fish and bread, which they call nardoo. They also gave us some stuff they call bedgery, or pedgery. It has a highly intoxicating effect, when chewed even in small quantities.”
Eventually, in his final entry, he writes "I am weaker than ever although I have a good appetite, and relish the nardoo much, but it seems to give no nutriment, and the birds here are so shy as not to be got at. Even if we got a good supply of fish, I doubt whether we could do much work on them and the nardoo alone... but starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move oneself, for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction."
The aboriginal attitude to food would, I suspect, always involve a certain understanding of and respect for the environment. There are ancestors and spirits to be placated and communicated with, so that the fragile links between life and death are not broken. There are practical environmental controls to be observed for exactly the same sound reasons, and the dividing line between the two is one modern people find hard to recognise.
Yet, when the chips are down and death is near, the struggle for survival chucks all niceties to the winds. Ernest Giles, after sending his young companion, Gibson, ahead to fetch help on their last horse, struggles on on foot. Gibson, after whom that desert was subsequently named, was never heard of again. Giles, several days after finishing his last scraps of horsemeat, rapidly becomes weaker, even though he eventually finds plentiful water. Hunger has driven him to abandon all social pretence and he describes his own animal behaviour.
"I crawled away over the stones down from the water. I was very footsore and could only go at a snail's pace. Just as I got clear of the bank of the creek, I heard a faint squeak, and looking about I saw, and immediately caught, a small dying wallaby, whose marsupial mother had evidently thrown it from her pouch. It only weighed about two ounces, and was scarcely furnished yet with fur. The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying - fur, skin, bones, skull, and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget. I only wished I had its mother and father to serve in the same way."