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Wild Foods of Australia Over 120 years ago, the English botanist (植物学家) J.D. Hooker, writing of Australia edible plants, suggested that many of them were ’’eatable but not worth eating’’. Nevertheless, the Australian flora (植物群), together with the fauna 动物群), supported the Aboriginal people before the arrival of Europeans. The Aborigines were not farmers and were wholly dependent for life on the wild products around them. They learned to eat, often after treatment, a wide variety of plants. The conquering Europeans displaced the Aborigines, killing many, driving others from their traditional tribal lands, and eventually settling many of the tribal remains on government reserves, where flour and beef replaced nardoo (大柄苹) and wallaby (小袋鼠) as main foods. And so, gradually, the vast store of knowledge, accumulated over thousands of years, fell into disuse. Much was lost. However, a few European men took an intelligent and even respectful interest in the people who were being displaced. Explorers, missionaries, botanists, naturalists and government officials observed, recorded and, fortunately in some cases, published. Today, we can draw on these publications to form the main basis of our knowledge of the edible, natural products of Australia. The picture is no doubt mostly incomplete. We can only guess the number of edible plant on which no observation was recorded. Not all our information on the subject comes from the aborigines. Times were hard in the early days of European settlement, and traditional foods were often in short supply or impossibly expensive for a pioneer trying to establish a farm in the bush. And so necessity led to experimentation, just as it must have done for the Aborigines, and experimentation led to some lucky results. So far as is know, the Aborigines made no use of Leptospermum or Dodonaea as food plants, yet the early settlers found that one could be used as a substitute for tea and the other for hops (啤酒花). These plants are not closely related to the species they replaced, so their use was not based on botanical observation. Probably some experiments have less happy endings; L. J. Webb has used the expression ’’eat, die and learn’’ in connection with the Aboriginal experimentation, but it was the successful attempts that became widely known. It is possible the edibility of some native plants used by the Aborigines was discovered independently by the European settlers or their descendants. Explorers making long expeditions found it impossible to carry sufficient food for the whole journey and were forced to rely, in part, on food that they could find on the way. Still another source of information comes from the practice in other countries. There are many species from northern Australia which occur also in southeast Asia, where they are used for food. In general, those Aborigines living in the dry inland areas were largely dependent for their vegetable foods on seed such as those of grasses, acacias (刺槐, 毛洋槐) and eucalypts (桉树). They ground these seeds between flat stones to make coarse flour. Tribes on the coast, and particularly those in the neighborhood of coastal rainforests, had a more varied vegetable diet with a higher proportion of fruits and tubers. Some of the coastal plants, even if they had grown inland, probably would have been unavailable as food since they required prolonged washing or soaking to render them non-poisonous; many of the inland tribes could not obtain water in the quantities necessary for such treatment. There was also considerable variation in the edible plants available to Aborigines in different latitudes. In general, the people who lived in the moist tropical areas enjoyed a much greater variety than those in the southern part of Australia. With all the hundreds of plants species used for food by the Australian Aborigines, it is perhaps surprising that only one, the Queensland nut, has entered into commercial cultivation as a food plant The reason for this probably does not lie with an intrinsic(本质的) lack of potential in Australian flora, but rather with the lack of exploitation of this potential. In Europeans came, the Aborigines practiced on agriculture and so there was no opportunity for such improvement, either deliberate or unconscious, in the quality of the edible plants. Since 1788, there has, of course, been opportunity for selection of Australian food plants which might have led to the production of varieties that were worth cultivating. But Australian plants have probably ’’missed the bus’’. Food plants from other regions were already so far in advance after a long tradition of cultivation that it seemed hardly worth starting working on Australian species. Undoubtedly, the native raspberry, for example, could, with suitable selection and breeding programs, be made to yield a high-class fruit; but Australians already enjoy good raspberries (树莓) from other areas of the world and unless some dedicated amateur plant breeder takes up the task, the Australian raspberries are likely to remain unimproved. And so, today, as the choice of which food plants to cultivate in Australia has been largely decided, and as there is little chance of being lost long periods in the bush, our interest in the subject of Australian food plants tends to relate to natural history rather than to practical necessity. Some species of coastal food plants were also found inland.