Section B There is one passage in this section with
five unfinished statements. Read the passage carefully, and then complete each
statement in a maximum of 10 words. Remember to write the answers on the answer
sheet. Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following
passage. The conquering Europeans displaced the
Aborigines, killing many, driving others from their traditional tribal ]ands,
and eventually settling many of the tribal remnants on government reserves,
where flour and beef replaced nardoo and wallaby as staple 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 speculate on the number of edible plants 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 clone for the Aborigines, and
experimentation led to some lucky results. So far as is known, 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.
These plants are not closely related to the species they replaced, so their use
was not based on botanical observation. Probably some experiments had 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 that 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 and eucalypts. They ground these seeds between flat stones to
make coarse flour. Tribes on the coast, and particularly those in the vicinity
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. The edible plants available to Aborigines vary according to ______.