Native grass harvest fosters healing on Country

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Bruce Pascoe, Founder of Black Duck Foods:

[Bruce has white hair and a white beard. He is wearing brown shirt with a black zip up vest.]

On the property we’re farming Australian Aboriginal grains and tubers. So we’re selling the food that we make here but there’s also a political element to it in that we’re we’re proving our sovereignty over these foods.

The 2019–20 bushfires went right through this property, right through the whole district. We had a crop that we were about to harvest and we lost that crop but, once the fires were over, and that took 8 weeks, it rained and within 4 weeks we had a great crop of microlaena. We learned to harvest it and we’re still harvesting it today.

Chris Harris, Farm Manager Black Duck Foods:

[Chris is a bearded man wearing a black cap and a brown shirt. He sits on red ride-on vehicle.]

So we collect the grass and then there’s quite a process after that we have to dry the seed as quick as we can, so we don’t get any mould then it’s another process through a threshing machine and then 2 other machines. We get it to a really clean seed and grind it up and package it and turn it into flour.

It’s basically knocking the seed out through a manual operation.

[Chris demonstrates the use of the threshing machine, showing the grain that is produced.]

So this is what it comes out of the harvester and after our processes that’s what it looks like. Obviously this stuff here needs to be ground, milled into flour.

And this is some of our product that we’ve got ready to go. So this is the Mitchell and Button that we’ve been working on. Amazing.

It’s on Country, it doesn’t need to be fertilised, it doesn’t need to be cropped, it just grows by itself. It’s just natural and that’s why it’s so good.

Bruce Pascoe, Founder of Black Duck Foods:

The Fire for Food program enabled us to bring Aboriginal people onto the farm because of a grant of money from Emergency Recovery Victoria to pay for their travel, their accommodation, their food.

But it was more important just to have people together. We’ve had people from the Kimberly, had them from Geelong, had them from Sydney, all over the country really. And when we come here we can talk about food production. We can talk about Cultural Fire.

But we can also talk about community and how we heal, how we heal as a people on Country, out of the towns away from all the trouble, and just talking about working on Country and making a living on Country, and getting our kids to stay at school and maybe get involved in botany and learn about the plants out here.

Because this is our heritage and if we can get our young people to understand that these grasses and these tubers are theirs and that they can make a living off the old people’s knowledge then that would be fantastic for us.

Chris Harris, Farm Manager Black Duck Foods:

Coming here really reconnected me to culture and really made me feel this is what I need to do.

This is me. So yeah, I love my job. I love what I do.

[End Transcript]

Updated 16 January 2025

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Native grass harvest fosters healing on Country

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