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The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes
‘This is a book about Australian food, the unique flora and fauna that nourished the Aboriginal peoples of this land for over 50 000 years. It is because European Australians have hardly ever touched these foods for over 200 years that I am writing this book.’ We celebrate cultural and culinary diversity, yet shun the foods that grew here before white settlers arrived. We love superfoods from remote, exotic locations, yet reject those that grow in our own land. In this, the most important of his books, John Newton boils down these paradoxes by arguing that if we are what you eat, we need to eat different foods, foods that will attune us to the this land.
304 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2016
20 people are currently reading
266 people want to read
About the author
John Newton
16 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: John Newton
Dr. John Newton is an Australian author, journalist, novelist and lecturer. As a journalist he has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Art of Eating, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Weekend Australian Magazine and Slow. His first two novels, published in the '90s, were Whoring and The Man Who Painted Women. He writes about food and his three Spanish books are A Little Taste of Spain, Cooking Spanish and The Food of Spain. His last book for Murdoch was The Roots of Civilisation: a history of plants that changed the world. Grazing: the ramblings and recipes of a man who gets paid to eat was published in 2010. The Oldest Foods on Earth: a history of Australian native foods, with recipes was the 2016 National winner of the The Gourmand Awards, Best Culinary History Book category.
Two of his latest books are Stefano Manfredi's Italy & The Getting of Garlic, Australian Food from Bland to Brilliant. He occasionally uses his full name John Sefton Newton.
Please see: John Newton
Dr. John Newton is an Australian author, journalist, novelist and lecturer. As a journalist he has written for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Art of Eating, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Weekend Australian Magazine and Slow. His first two novels, published in the '90s, were Whoring and The Man Who Painted Women. He writes about food and his three Spanish books are A Little Taste of Spain, Cooking Spanish and The Food of Spain. His last book for Murdoch was The Roots of Civilisation: a history of plants that changed the world. Grazing: the ramblings and recipes of a man who gets paid to eat was published in 2010. The Oldest Foods on Earth: a history of Australian native foods, with recipes was the 2016 National winner of the The Gourmand Awards, Best Culinary History Book category.
Two of his latest books are Stefano Manfredi's Italy & The Getting of Garlic, Australian Food from Bland to Brilliant. He occasionally uses his full name John Sefton Newton.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 23, 2017
I have a strong interest in Australian native plants and already knew a fair bit about native foods before this book.
This is a very breezy and easy to read, conversational style book about an important topic. 5 stars for raising it, but 3 stars for what it says. The discussion about why we don't use native foods more, and also the debate about whether they are "Aboriginal" foods or just food from Australian plants was thought provoking.
The future is less clear. Of course we should be using more of our native ingredients, but a commercial level of production to feed the whole of Australia is another scale altogether, with its own set of issues. When Aboriginal people lived in traditional ways, the total population of Australia was much much smaller than today. I did like the idea of sharing indigenous and Australian food in a new Australia Day.
The recipes are an odd collection. The "rolled wattleseed pavlova" recipe seems to be missing a few final steps like actually spreading the cream and rolling up the pavlova. The pasta and pesto recipe which requires 30 finger limes would take the entire annual production from one mature plant in your garden or send you broke if you bought that many.
A good complement is anything by historian Henry Reynolds on why Australians don't know more about the early "interactions" (=conflict and war) between Aboriginal people and Europeans.
This is a very breezy and easy to read, conversational style book about an important topic. 5 stars for raising it, but 3 stars for what it says. The discussion about why we don't use native foods more, and also the debate about whether they are "Aboriginal" foods or just food from Australian plants was thought provoking.
The future is less clear. Of course we should be using more of our native ingredients, but a commercial level of production to feed the whole of Australia is another scale altogether, with its own set of issues. When Aboriginal people lived in traditional ways, the total population of Australia was much much smaller than today. I did like the idea of sharing indigenous and Australian food in a new Australia Day.
The recipes are an odd collection. The "rolled wattleseed pavlova" recipe seems to be missing a few final steps like actually spreading the cream and rolling up the pavlova. The pasta and pesto recipe which requires 30 finger limes would take the entire annual production from one mature plant in your garden or send you broke if you bought that many.
A good complement is anything by historian Henry Reynolds on why Australians don't know more about the early "interactions" (=conflict and war) between Aboriginal people and Europeans.
July 12, 2025
This book was poorly argued, badly edited, meandering, and repetitive. It did, however, make me curious about its thesis question: why doesn't the Australian public love its native foods?
Author John Newton tried to answer this question by suggesting that Australia doesn't like its native foods for three reasons: first, 'food racism'; second, neophobia, or fear of the new; and third, a mix of sheer laziness and cultural cringe.
I consider this book poorly argued for the simple reason that the author's proofs consist only of anecdotes, and only a few anecdotes at that, mainly about the experiences of European settlers and contemporary farmers and chefs, which are rarefied groups that do not represent the wider Australian public. This book, after all, is about the contemporary Australian public, about everyday Australians, not about long dead ones nor about those from two unique industries.
This aside, the author’s claims about food racism were sometimes self-defeating. Historical attitudes towards Indigenous peoples were racist, of course, given that our forebears committed genocide, but the settlers were often happy to eat the native food, especially native game, and seemed to approve of it is as often as they dismissed it. So, racism is not the best explanation of historical attitudes towards native foods. Then, as now, there was a mix of racism and a sincere acceptance of the other (food) culture.
Contemporary attitudes, though, seem much worse. One particularly bad example of blatant racism towards native foods came from Les Hiddins, a 1980s TV personality known as The Bush Tucker Man. Even though his job revolved around exploring Australia and presenting its unique and little-known foods to audiences, in private, Hiddins loathed bush tucker and thought it was good only for Aborigines. The insinuation was that it was food for n*ggers.
Gross.
An even more recent example of food racism happened when diners left a famous Sydney restaurant in droves when the owners revealed that many of the ingredients in their award-winning recipes were bush tucker. Again, the insinuation made by fleeing patrons was that bush tucker was n*gger-food, fit only for Indigenous people, not for whites or anybody else.
Both anecdotes shocked me; both proved that food racism, the very idea of which I found preposterous when I started reading this book, is real and pervasive. I suspect this is less an indictment of Australians in particular than it is of human nature in general, but nonetheless it is eye-opening. Racism is clearly one reason why native foods are not popular yet. Lots of everyday people don't want to be seen eating foods that Indigenous people eat.
How disappointing.
Author John Newton's second point, about neophobia, was mentioned a few times in passing but was never dwelt on or considered in depth. The idea was floated and then passed over. To me, this is bad form. Don't raise hypotheses which you don't mean to explore. It was one reason why the book sometimes felt half-assed.
Another reason why the book felt half-assed, and which led me to write my opening sentence about the book being meandering and repetitive, was the lack of narrative thrust. This book doesn't take you on a journey, as all the best examples of investigative journalism do. The book doesn’t open, for example, with the event that sparked the author’s love for native foods, and it doesn’t weave its way through a series of explorations of that love. There is no beginning, middle, or end, and there are no detailed character profiles of people important to the native food scene. This book is more of a rambling personal essay, but its scholarship is not erudite (it leans heavily on Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe, and contemporary anecdotes), its prose is not beautiful (there were so many instances of incorrect grammar and punctuation that I wondered how the author makes a living as a freelancer; surely, his clients would see his misuse of grammar and punctuation and wonder the same thing), and its arguments are not convincing, due to them relying on anecdote, limited scholarship, and a total inability to craft arguments with clear theses and explanations.
This book's chapters also don't have a clearly defined purpose. They are not themed. From start to finish, the author moves willy-nilly from one idea to another, one farmer to another, one observation to another, without reason or purpose. Chapters do not doggedly pursue one idea, or a few ideas, to their conclusion. The use of chapters seems arbitrary, and this lack of structure made the book read like a ramble, well-meant but never clear enough to be very engaging. This lack of structure meant the author returned to the same themes and personalities over and over again, giving it the aforementioned feel of a poorly written personal essay.
I have often thought that some books are published, not because they deserve to be, but because their middle-aged and older authors think that books are the only meaningful publishing medium. This might be true—for them. I mean that, if this book was published as a series of blog posts, it would attract zero attention. This is because all of the criticisms above would make it dull reading unlikely to inspire even a small, devoted readership. Its scholarship is thin, its writing sloppy, its arguments almost non-existent. Its lack of merit would make it fall stillborn form the digital press. You could not, for example, chop this book up into chapters, publish those chapters online, and expect a glowing response. Its chapters are as bad as the sum of their parts.
And what is the conclusion that this book leads to? A recommendation that, next Australia day, we cook and eat native foods with Indigenous Australians. I actually like that idea! It seems a bit forced to shack up with Indigenous strangers, though. I wouldn’t do it. They’re strangers, after all. But making the eating of native foods a new tradition? That sounds nice. However, this conclusion came out of nowhere. Not one part of the book talked about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, aside from laudable attempts by farmers to include Indigenous communities in the cultivation of wild foods. Otherwise, the book was strictly about native foods, non-Indigenous peoples’ mismanagement of the land, and attempts to make native foods mainstream. The disconnect between the book’s conclusion and, well, the whole of the actual book is further proof that this book project was poorly planned and executed.
Nevertheless, this book made me curious about the panoply of native Australian foods there is to eat. I was shocked and intrigued to read that some Indigenous people eat, or ate, whole budgerigars, heads and all, which were caught and cooked by the dozens in earth ovens. Other mobs would cook turtles in their shells and drink the resulting stew from the shells themselves. Kangaroo tails were boiled and turned into soup, which even settlers found delicious. The notorious bush turkey, which I always thought were pests, are supposedly delicious game birds. The famed Kakadu plum has the highest concentration of vitamin-C of any fruit on earth. There are hundreds of kinds of native Australian grains that are yet to be identified and tested for eating.
This beautiful country, the largest continent on earth, which is home to the oldest continuous culture on earth, with its tens of thousands of years of culinary knowledge, is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. One consequence of empowering Indigenous communities could be the rediscovery, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike, of the vast bounty of interesting foods this great country has to offer. I dearly hope that something like this happens. In the meantime, I’m going to follow one of this book’s recipes. Next week, I’ll be cooking wallaby shanks!
Author John Newton tried to answer this question by suggesting that Australia doesn't like its native foods for three reasons: first, 'food racism'; second, neophobia, or fear of the new; and third, a mix of sheer laziness and cultural cringe.
I consider this book poorly argued for the simple reason that the author's proofs consist only of anecdotes, and only a few anecdotes at that, mainly about the experiences of European settlers and contemporary farmers and chefs, which are rarefied groups that do not represent the wider Australian public. This book, after all, is about the contemporary Australian public, about everyday Australians, not about long dead ones nor about those from two unique industries.
This aside, the author’s claims about food racism were sometimes self-defeating. Historical attitudes towards Indigenous peoples were racist, of course, given that our forebears committed genocide, but the settlers were often happy to eat the native food, especially native game, and seemed to approve of it is as often as they dismissed it. So, racism is not the best explanation of historical attitudes towards native foods. Then, as now, there was a mix of racism and a sincere acceptance of the other (food) culture.
Contemporary attitudes, though, seem much worse. One particularly bad example of blatant racism towards native foods came from Les Hiddins, a 1980s TV personality known as The Bush Tucker Man. Even though his job revolved around exploring Australia and presenting its unique and little-known foods to audiences, in private, Hiddins loathed bush tucker and thought it was good only for Aborigines. The insinuation was that it was food for n*ggers.
Gross.
An even more recent example of food racism happened when diners left a famous Sydney restaurant in droves when the owners revealed that many of the ingredients in their award-winning recipes were bush tucker. Again, the insinuation made by fleeing patrons was that bush tucker was n*gger-food, fit only for Indigenous people, not for whites or anybody else.
Both anecdotes shocked me; both proved that food racism, the very idea of which I found preposterous when I started reading this book, is real and pervasive. I suspect this is less an indictment of Australians in particular than it is of human nature in general, but nonetheless it is eye-opening. Racism is clearly one reason why native foods are not popular yet. Lots of everyday people don't want to be seen eating foods that Indigenous people eat.
How disappointing.
Author John Newton's second point, about neophobia, was mentioned a few times in passing but was never dwelt on or considered in depth. The idea was floated and then passed over. To me, this is bad form. Don't raise hypotheses which you don't mean to explore. It was one reason why the book sometimes felt half-assed.
Another reason why the book felt half-assed, and which led me to write my opening sentence about the book being meandering and repetitive, was the lack of narrative thrust. This book doesn't take you on a journey, as all the best examples of investigative journalism do. The book doesn’t open, for example, with the event that sparked the author’s love for native foods, and it doesn’t weave its way through a series of explorations of that love. There is no beginning, middle, or end, and there are no detailed character profiles of people important to the native food scene. This book is more of a rambling personal essay, but its scholarship is not erudite (it leans heavily on Bill Gammage, Bruce Pascoe, and contemporary anecdotes), its prose is not beautiful (there were so many instances of incorrect grammar and punctuation that I wondered how the author makes a living as a freelancer; surely, his clients would see his misuse of grammar and punctuation and wonder the same thing), and its arguments are not convincing, due to them relying on anecdote, limited scholarship, and a total inability to craft arguments with clear theses and explanations.
This book's chapters also don't have a clearly defined purpose. They are not themed. From start to finish, the author moves willy-nilly from one idea to another, one farmer to another, one observation to another, without reason or purpose. Chapters do not doggedly pursue one idea, or a few ideas, to their conclusion. The use of chapters seems arbitrary, and this lack of structure made the book read like a ramble, well-meant but never clear enough to be very engaging. This lack of structure meant the author returned to the same themes and personalities over and over again, giving it the aforementioned feel of a poorly written personal essay.
I have often thought that some books are published, not because they deserve to be, but because their middle-aged and older authors think that books are the only meaningful publishing medium. This might be true—for them. I mean that, if this book was published as a series of blog posts, it would attract zero attention. This is because all of the criticisms above would make it dull reading unlikely to inspire even a small, devoted readership. Its scholarship is thin, its writing sloppy, its arguments almost non-existent. Its lack of merit would make it fall stillborn form the digital press. You could not, for example, chop this book up into chapters, publish those chapters online, and expect a glowing response. Its chapters are as bad as the sum of their parts.
And what is the conclusion that this book leads to? A recommendation that, next Australia day, we cook and eat native foods with Indigenous Australians. I actually like that idea! It seems a bit forced to shack up with Indigenous strangers, though. I wouldn’t do it. They’re strangers, after all. But making the eating of native foods a new tradition? That sounds nice. However, this conclusion came out of nowhere. Not one part of the book talked about reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, aside from laudable attempts by farmers to include Indigenous communities in the cultivation of wild foods. Otherwise, the book was strictly about native foods, non-Indigenous peoples’ mismanagement of the land, and attempts to make native foods mainstream. The disconnect between the book’s conclusion and, well, the whole of the actual book is further proof that this book project was poorly planned and executed.
Nevertheless, this book made me curious about the panoply of native Australian foods there is to eat. I was shocked and intrigued to read that some Indigenous people eat, or ate, whole budgerigars, heads and all, which were caught and cooked by the dozens in earth ovens. Other mobs would cook turtles in their shells and drink the resulting stew from the shells themselves. Kangaroo tails were boiled and turned into soup, which even settlers found delicious. The notorious bush turkey, which I always thought were pests, are supposedly delicious game birds. The famed Kakadu plum has the highest concentration of vitamin-C of any fruit on earth. There are hundreds of kinds of native Australian grains that are yet to be identified and tested for eating.
This beautiful country, the largest continent on earth, which is home to the oldest continuous culture on earth, with its tens of thousands of years of culinary knowledge, is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. One consequence of empowering Indigenous communities could be the rediscovery, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike, of the vast bounty of interesting foods this great country has to offer. I dearly hope that something like this happens. In the meantime, I’m going to follow one of this book’s recipes. Next week, I’ll be cooking wallaby shanks!
February 27, 2016
Interesting perspective on why we've been so slow to take up native Australian foods - possibly food racism as Newton claims, certainly cultural cringe. The popularity of macadamias only after we imported them from Hawaii (although once we acquired a taste for them we accepted homegrown) is a good case in point.
Kuranga Native Nursery in outer Melbourne seems to be quite successful - selling native plants and serving native-inspired food in its Paperbark Cafe. We've bought native food plants from there but have found that they're actually, very very hard to grow!! Our Illawarra Plum is struggling as is our macadamia. We're having a bit more luck with our lilly pilly and warrigal greens. Could the difficulty growing them partially explain the lack of popularity?
By the end of the book I did find it became a bit repetitive, which lost it a star. Each chapter includes recipes and there is a good index, bibliography and list of useful contacts.
Kuranga Native Nursery in outer Melbourne seems to be quite successful - selling native plants and serving native-inspired food in its Paperbark Cafe. We've bought native food plants from there but have found that they're actually, very very hard to grow!! Our Illawarra Plum is struggling as is our macadamia. We're having a bit more luck with our lilly pilly and warrigal greens. Could the difficulty growing them partially explain the lack of popularity?
By the end of the book I did find it became a bit repetitive, which lost it a star. Each chapter includes recipes and there is a good index, bibliography and list of useful contacts.
June 18, 2016
Although a little repetitive, this is a great book and an easy read for those keen on expanding their knowledge and use of native ingredients.
There is much discussion as to why Australian foods have taken so long to get on to our plates and into our kitchen gardens - much of it put down to racism and cultural cringe. It is certainly something of a conundrum, given the longstanding popularity of drought-resistant native plants in our gardens..
Newton takes a good look at some of the history of native ingredient use, those who have been championing the cause and each chapter cleverly closes with a couple of quite accessible recipes. There is a list of the most commonly used ingredients at the back of the book, plus a section on useful contacts for purchases or more information.
These foods are clearly a bit of a no-brainer and extraordinarily high in nutrients so anything that helps get the word out is a winner as far as I'm concerned.
There is much discussion as to why Australian foods have taken so long to get on to our plates and into our kitchen gardens - much of it put down to racism and cultural cringe. It is certainly something of a conundrum, given the longstanding popularity of drought-resistant native plants in our gardens..
Newton takes a good look at some of the history of native ingredient use, those who have been championing the cause and each chapter cleverly closes with a couple of quite accessible recipes. There is a list of the most commonly used ingredients at the back of the book, plus a section on useful contacts for purchases or more information.
These foods are clearly a bit of a no-brainer and extraordinarily high in nutrients so anything that helps get the word out is a winner as far as I'm concerned.
Read
October 17, 2018"Non-indigenous Australians must accept that the original inhabitants have carefully stewarded this land for the entire time they have lived here, and have the oldest unbroken culture in the world, before that racism - culinary and otherwise - will disappear" says John Newton. This book is an exploration of racism, with recipes. It doesn't pull its punches but does offer hope for the future. I loved it.
August 6, 2016
A useful text for anyone who has access to and an interest in utilising native foods of Australia.
Just one big tip: Don't miss out on sampling finger limes if you get the chance. They're an awesome citrus burst!
Just one big tip: Don't miss out on sampling finger limes if you get the chance. They're an awesome citrus burst!
February 24, 2025
This book has its positives and its negatives.
I appreciate a lot of the info presented in
this book about the extremely under
appriciated value of Australian native foods.
The incorporation of how these foods and
food culture has been affected by colonisation, which was also interesting. The book displayed a variety of views, which I can appreciate.
As for the recipes in this book's I think
they were a good addition to the book as
they show examples of how the foods
being talked about can be used. This book
doesn't claim to be a cookbook, so I can't
criticize it too harshly, but I genuinely cannot
see myself being able to follow these
recipes without further research.
I also felt the book became quite
repetitive in the second half, I felt I was
reading the same points over again.
I appreciate a lot of the info presented in
this book about the extremely under
appriciated value of Australian native foods.
The incorporation of how these foods and
food culture has been affected by colonisation, which was also interesting. The book displayed a variety of views, which I can appreciate.
As for the recipes in this book's I think
they were a good addition to the book as
they show examples of how the foods
being talked about can be used. This book
doesn't claim to be a cookbook, so I can't
criticize it too harshly, but I genuinely cannot
see myself being able to follow these
recipes without further research.
I also felt the book became quite
repetitive in the second half, I felt I was
reading the same points over again.
February 6, 2020
A great introduction for someone who didn't know anything about foods that are native to Australia. Definitely written by a journalist, some of the referencing and sources didn't have me convinced in parts, but it was certainly educational. There is a great appendix at the end of 'high-yield' foods - or ones that you might actually be able to procure and start using.
February 10, 2025
Australian food revival - yes please, with recipes to try - although most I will leave to the experts to source the product - like rump of kangaroo. I have been fortunate to have tried most of these foods over the years and yes agree some are an acquired taste - but the nutrient value is 10-fold - so go forth and indulge.
February 28, 2018
Fascinating and compelling
I rarely read non-fiction but I'm becoming increasingly aware of horrifying gaps or outright historical falsehoods in my own knowledge of Australia. This book was fast-paced, lingering only on some delicious recipes which I'm dying to try out.
I rarely read non-fiction but I'm becoming increasingly aware of horrifying gaps or outright historical falsehoods in my own knowledge of Australia. This book was fast-paced, lingering only on some delicious recipes which I'm dying to try out.
June 25, 2019
Brilliant book with great insights. Very thought provoking
Read
May 15, 2021No, no, no....hated it
August 21, 2025
Amazing book. Not only about food, but most of all about native Australian peoples and their relation to the natural world.
May 21, 2016
Essential reading for anyone interested in bush tucker foods of Australia.
Read
August 16, 2018This book is not so much a history of foods local/indigenous to Australia as about attitudes towards eating them. It includes some recipes from well known chefs.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews