Lemon Myrtle

~ By Julie ~

What would I do if grocery stores and farmers disappeared?

The thing is I live in a city so I would use the abundance of salt as a preservative along with smoking lots of foods just as we did in the 1940's and 50's since there are no forests coming up to the house which is what I observed when I visited the States. They had forests right next to their houses and I couldn't believe it! So I think that people who live in the cities would die unless they moved out to the wild, like our Australian Outback.

But if you moved there you would need to have an intimate knowledge of what was poisonous and what was not poisonous, in fact most people who travel through the Outback come to grief because they are not prepared and don't know the area as did the Aborigines.

Australian aborigines picked food which was available and ate it for nutritional purposes. There were no refrigerators or storage containers. Local knowledge of which plants were edible, palatable, or delicious, as well as the best time for harvest and preparation methods, was passed down by word of mouth to the next generation.

Aborigines generally did not boil water, so their cooking methods were different from those used by the early settlers and modern users. They did not have pots or pans. They did not make tea or coffee, or similar drinks. They did not make jams, jellies, or chutneys, and made little use of flavorings. Apart from Bunya nuts they only used food from their tribal area and did not trade.

Below is one example of an edible plant the Aborigines lived on and there are others like Blechnum_indicum, a tuberous root used to make flour; Black Bean, Moreton Bay Chestnut whose seeds, although poisonous, were pounded into cakes for roasting after being prepared with different methods and Native Ginger (Alpinia caerulea) whose pith and young root tips were edible while the leaves were used to lay under meat cooked in earth ovens.

Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) in bloom

Lemon Myrtle is a bushy Queensland rainforest tree that grows to about 8m, having dark green lemon-scented leaves about 100 mm long. It flowers with large bunches of small white flowers on the ends of the branches. It is a common garden plant in Brisbane, and about a million have been planted commercially for their lemon oil content. The essential ingredient is Citral, which accounts for over 90% of the plants essential oil, compared to about 3% in lemon oil. The oil is extracted by steam distillation.

Aborigines have long used lemon myrtle, both in cuisine and as a healing plant. The leaves are used fresh, dried or ground and have a lemon/lime oil flavor. They can be used with baked fish, to make a lemon tea, breads and cheesecakes etc., chicken and rice dishes and sauces.

There are more native edible plants the Aborigines used than what I have listed but this gives you a general idea of how they survived in the bush.

         

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