We were privileged at this year's Fungimap Conference to have so many informative and fascinating speakers. Among them was Dr Gary Presland, an authority on Aboriginal history and natural history in
Melbourne, Australia and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. Dr Presland has kindly permitted us to republish his talk here. [Eds.]
The place of fungi in Aboriginal economic
practices
by Dr Gary Presland
Talk given at Fungimap 7 Conference
Rawson, 24 May 2013.
Aboriginal economic practices were regular and
considered, they were, in fact, an integral part of the human role of
maintaining the world as it was given. The movements of Aboriginal people within
their estates were time-honoured and measured to take advantage of seasonal
occurrence and abundance. But Aborigines were pragmatic and would opportunistically
exploit food resources wherever and whenever they were encountered.
It is within these contexts in mind that we should
look at the place of fungi in Aboriginal life and economy.
I should say at the beginning, that in Victoria and
Tasmania—indeed, in most parts of Australia—there is a dearth of evidence
regarding use of fungi by Aboriginal people; looking at Victoria in particular,
there are a number of reasons for this:
(1) the
rate and extent of disruption to Aboriginal society in Victoria was such that there was no
opportunity to carry out detailed studies on the day-to-day practices of
Aboriginal groups in this part of Australia . There were no anthropologists or the like,
that is observers who were trained make sense of a lifestyle that appeared to
lack everything that held European society together.
(2) while
there was much written during the 19th century about what Aborigines
were eating, there is little detail about exactly how it was gathered, when,
and where. And there is even less information, of course, relating to species. Moreover,
the recorded observations were of a much-changed situation; one in which
Indigenous people were fighting to maintain something of their traditional ways
and at the same time find a place for themselves in a vastly changed world.
(3)
This situation is often exacerbated in the case of Aboriginal use of fungi, and
a number of other resources, because the process of gathering the food or
material was mostly women’s work. I say,
that not to diminish the economic role of women (which in fact, one can easily
show to be paramount), but rather as a comment about the observers. Even those
white people who took an interest in Aboriginal matters, paid far less
attention to what women were doing and
more to the activities of men. This was partly because all the observers were
themselves men and partly because what the men were doing was more obvious – for
eg. hunting, fishing, or cutting bark from trees.
We
have, thus, only a partial picture of what Aboriginal people were doing.
What can be said, however, is that within Aboriginal
economic practices there were a couple of elements of relevance to any study of
Aboriginal use of fungi (Presland 2010). Firstly, seasonal movement was a central
feature of the yearly round. Thus bands of perhaps 12 to 20 individuals would
work their estates in a way that took them to particular locations at specific
times of the year. In Autumn—the time when most fungi were collected—people
were moving upwards along river valley, heading toward the higher parts of their
territories, where they could shelter from the winter wind and rain.
The second relevant feature of Aboriginal society
was that, as hunters and collectors, they applied a sexual division of labour. A
part of each day’s economic activity was spent in women gathering plant foods
and men hunting game, generally in separate locations. Contrary to popular
thought, it was the women who provided the bulk of the day’s foodstuffs, as a
result of their gathering. However, almost all the food obtained by either
group was brought back to camp for communal consumption.
Considering the size of groups and amount of fungi
available suggests that fungi were eaten mostly where and when they were found;
we might think of it as something in the way of a snack food. Fruiting bodies
may have been taken back to the camp (perhaps if they were abundant) but more
likely, they were consumed in the field.
It is probable that there were a number of species—perhaps
even a large number—of fungi that were eaten by Aboriginal people. I say eaten
because in this part of Australia that’s what observers saw them doing; people
weren’t seen using fungi as a source of colour, or as a medication, as recorded
in other areas.
 |
| Cyttaria gunnii. Photo by Paul George, CC-BY-SA. |
The most documented fungus exploited by Aborigines
was, of course, Laccocephalum
mylittae,often referred to in the past as Blackfella’s bread, or
native bread. There are many references
in historical sources to this species in both Tasmania and Victoria. The most
interesting references from Tasmania are to be found in the journal of George
Augustus Robinson.
On 30 May 1829,
in commenting on the acuteness of the Aborigines’ sight, Robinson wrote:
I
observed them knock off the fungus from the gum tree, which they eat. It has
the appearance of wood and
has a sweet flavour not unlike mushroom.
There is another sort of fungus belonging to the same tree but which they do not eat. There is also another sort of fungus which
belongs to the she-oak, resembling
sponge, of which they also eat.
Referring to
native bread which some of his Aboriginal companions had brought him, Robinson
wrote on 2 July 1831:
The natives procure this fungus from under dead or
fallen timber, to which it adheres, and growing
in the ground. In size it is as large as a big turnip and in taste it resembles
boiled rice.’ He also mentions ‘another fungus from the peppermint tree …;
also a white fungus, quite transparent
and resembling jelly.
Three months
later, Robinson recorded in his diary (on 25 Oct 1831):
… the natives showed me a dead tree where there was
native bread growing: I saw no signs myself;
they smelt the wood and said the plant was a long way in the ground.
In Victoria, similarly there are a number
of references to Aboriginal fungi use in 19th century publications. Brough
Smyth (1878) wrote that ‘the native truffle (Mylitta Australis)
a subterranean fungus, was much sought after by the natives’. In a passage about the feeding of children, he wrote:
And while very small—but yet able to move about only on hands and knees—it [a child] has a little stick put into it s hands and, following the example of elder children, it digs for roots, for the larvae of ants … and sometimes for the native bread (Mylitta Australis) where it is plentiful, and when the elder children are willing to help the little one.
And while very small—but yet able to move about only on hands and knees—it [a child] has a little stick put into it s hands and, following the example of elder children, it digs for roots, for the larvae of ants … and sometimes for the native bread (Mylitta Australis) where it is plentiful, and when the elder children are willing to help the little one.
James Dawson
(1881) a western district squatter wrote:
Mushrooms,
and several kinds of fungi, are eaten raw; and a large underground fungus,
about the size of an
ordinary turnip, called native bread by white people, is eaten uncooked and is
very good.
One
of the tree fungus species which Dawson says was eaten by Aborigines has been
identified by Beth Gott (1985) as probably a yellow jelly-fungus species, such
as Tremella mesenterica.
 |
| Tremella mesenterica. Photo by Paul George, CC-BY-SA. |
are very common in Gippsland,
but they are difficult to be obtained, as they only grow underground, and leave, as far as I know, no
distinguishing mark to show their whereabouts. I say as far as I know, but as Mr. Howitt assures me that they are
eaten in large quantities by Aboriginals,
they may have some way of finding them.
Well, it can be taken as read that they did.
No doubt, in addition to other strategies, Aborigines would have noticed the
relationship between fire and the fruiting of this fungus, and made a point of
looking out for it.
The fact that this fungus fruits after fire
has led (or more correctly mis-led) some people to suggest that Aboriginal
firing was aimed at this result. For example, one contributor to the website Australian bushfoods and native medicine
forum saw the connection as ‘yet another reason/symbiotic dynamic involved
in Aboriginal burning of country.’
On a page of the website Tall trees and mushrooms we can read the
statement ‘One can easily imagine that the Aboriginal people would have swept
through areas they had burned a couple of days earlier to harvest the
scelorotia, which can be quite numerous.’
It is outside of the scope of this paper to
explain how wrong these suggestions are. Suffice to say that the burning
practices of Aboriginal people at maximizing the yield of a particular range of
herbaceous species. If people saw the
occurrence of Native Bread as a result there should be no doubt that they would
take advantage of it, but that was not their main intent.
In conclusion, I cannot pass by an example
of a web of interconnections involving a number of species, including a fungus.
Gott (1982) notes that one particularly
important food orchid for Aboriginal people on the western plains was Gastrodia sesamoides R.Br., called 'native potato'. This
plant is completely saprophytic, depending on a fungus for its nutrition. Its
position is marked only by the early summer flowering stalk, but when not in
flower it was located by Victorian Aborigines by observing where bandicoots had
dug for it. Dawson (1881) noted this and was told by local Aborigines that the
plant was called 'puewan'.
References
Australian bushfoods
and native medicine forum http://www.bushfood.net/forum/
Dawson, J (1881) Australian
Aborigines (Melbourne: Walter May & Co.)
Gott B (1982) The ecology of root use by Aborigines of
southern Australia. Archaeology in
Oceania 17: 59-67
Gott B (1985) Plants mentioned in Dawson’s Australian Aborigines. The Artefact 10: 3-14
Kalatos, A C (1996) Aboriginal knowledge and use of fungi Fungi of Australia vol. 1B
Introduction — fungi in the environment (Canberra: Australian Bureau )
Presland, G (2010)
First people: the Eastern Kulin of
Melbourne, Port Phillip and central Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne Museum
Publishing)
Tall trees and
mushrooms http://morrie2.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/polyporus-mylittae-an-ancient-edible/
Tisdall, H T (1886) Fungi of north Gippsland. Part II.
The
Victorian Naturalist 3: 106–109
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