LITMIR.BIZ

      The myth started to dissolve for me in the autumn of 2013, when I visited a small cider orchard in southern Tasmania planted on a hill sloping down to the cold, choppy waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Orchardist and cider maker Clive Crossley showed me dozens of heritage English and French trees he had planted there – cultivars with evocative names such as Yarlington Mill and Kingston Black and Frequin Rouge, originally grown in the cider-producing regions of Somerset and Herefordshire and Normandy. The apples grown on these trees are more bitter and mouth-puckering than eating apples such as Pink Lady or Granny Smith. We strolled from tree to tree in the orchard, crunching into the red and green and yellow fruit, experiencing their kaleidoscope of different flavours.

      As we walked, Clive mentioned he’d also planted a few different species of eucalypts around the property, including one he referred to as a ‘cider gum’. The two words hung in the air. I’d never heard of it. Cider gum? It was obvious why he’d wanted to plant this particular tree. But how did it get that name?

      ‘I’d noticed a mention of the Aboriginal use of the cider gum in an old book,’ he said. ‘It sounds as though the sap can be drawn and fermented. It may be a myth, but I thought we’d give it a go. Haven’t seen any sap yet, though.’

      Cider gum. Fermented sap. Having seen the tree, I couldn’t shake the image. And I began to imagine what its fermented sap would taste like. I started researching the history of the tree, looking for references to fermentation, and found the work of Dr Maggie Brady, a social anthropologist at the Australian National University.

      Brady has worked for many years with Aboriginal communities across Australia, and has extensively researched the social history of alcohol and other drugs. In The Grog Book (1998) and First Taste (2008), she lists a number of examples of Aboriginal fermentation, including way-a-linah. Reading about them opened my eyes. The landscape came to life. Plants turned into flavours. As well as the cider gums and way-a-linah in Tasmania, I learned about kambuda, made from the pounded nuts of the spiral pandanus in the Northern Territory; mangaitch, made from steeping banksia flowers in water in Western Australia; and tuba, made from the fermented juice of palm-tree buds in the Torres Strait.

      Then I read Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe’s groundbreaking book about Aboriginal agriculture as revealed through the journals of early white explorers and settlers: firsthand early-19th-century written accounts of Indigenous people sowing and harvesting and preserving food – a history that none of us were taught at school. I learned about the cultivation of staples such as murnong (yam daisies). I learned about the development of extensive aquaculture such as the eel traps at Budj Bim in western Victoria. I learned about the production of bread and cake from kangaroo grass and native millet.

      And I realised that I had come across a few fleeting references to Aboriginal fermentation in a couple of books before standing under Clive Crossley’s cider gum in that Tasmanian apple orchard in 2013. But I had overlooked them, not registered their importance, just not made the connections. I was, back then, still seeing through the dust of the ‘dry continent’ myth. Reading and talking to Maggie and Bruce changed that. Their work fundamentally shifted the way I think about, look at, listen to – and, importantly, smell and taste – the country where I live.