Native Harvest Kitchen Cookbook

The Native Harvest Kitchen cookbook helps demystify native ingredients and empowers Australia’s home cooks to grow and incorporate Indigenous food into everyday meals.

University of Melbourne researchers, project partners including Indigenous partners, and the William Angliss Institute, contributed recipes to the cookbook, which include information about the crops, twists on classic dishes such pigface stir-fry, mountain pepper chicken drumlets, a wattleseed pavlova, as well as native river mint tea and native dukkah.

Funded by the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund and led by the University of Melbourne, the ‘Whole-Systems Redesign of Broadacre Farming of Southeast Australia’ project was designed to evaluate and demonstrate proven farming practices to cope with and recover from climatic stresses such as drought and to develop an inclusive systems approach to diversified farming.

The project is led by Associate Professor Dorin Gupta from the Faculty of Science’s School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences and is partnered by Birchip Cropping Group, Riverine Plains Inc., Gap Flat Track Edible Natives, Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority and Black Duck Foods.

The development of an Indigenous-owned demonstration farm site at Gap Flat Track in Kergunyah in northeastern Victoria sought to evaluate the viability and benefits of diverse native crops as part of a drought-resistant farming system. The site complements the already-established native garden at the Dookie campus of the University of Melbourne.

For this project, a range of native crops and grasses were grown at the Dookie campus and at Gap Flat Track site. We have also drawn on previous experience from the project ‘Indigenous Plants – Journey from Paddock to Plate: A New Model for Sustainable Agriculture’, funded by the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust 2019-2021, and have included recipes developed through that project in this cookbook.