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One of our most important food festivals is just ahead: Taste of Kakadu

Richard Cornish
Richard Cornish

Cooking yams at Ubirr.
Cooking yams at Ubirr.Richard Cornish

It's early morning in Kakadu. We're in a small gorge, a rock escarpment wrapping around us. The air is cool but shafts of sunlight penetrate the canopy of leaves and feel hot on bare skin. "This is where we'd come in the wet season," says Jacqueline Cahill. She's a local Indigenous park ranger and artist.

We are at Nourlangie, a rock art site. The protected faces of stone are covered in hundreds of drawings of barramundi, goanna, long-necked turtle, painted in ground ochre in a cross-hatch fashion. "People would come and make tools, make string bags and eat yams and sugar bag," she says, explaining that sugar bag is the super sweet honey collected from the hives of native bees.

We're on a morning tour, a prelude to the Taste of Kakadu Festival 2019, a 10-day-long exploration of the food culture of Indigenous locals who call Kakadu National Park home. Run by Parks Australia together with the traditional owners, it's held in May each year and is one of the most important food festivals in the nation.

Ubirr, Kakadu.
Ubirr, Kakadu.Richard Cornish
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Cahill walks along the path and brushes past a climbing palm. Parts of the palm will be stripped off, she explains, to be dried, dyed and woven into fish traps. She passes a green plum, the pointed olive-like fruit still clinging to the branches. "You eat it when the fruit falls from the tree. Then it is ripe," she says. From a wattle-like tree hang what looks like grapes. It's a milky plum and has a taste quite similar to mango. She comes to what she calls "stringy bark", a tall eucalypt with rough, fibrous bark. She peels off a long rope-like cord of bark and rolls it into a fine cord in her hands. "My brother," she says, "when he does the kangaroo in the ground oven, he uses the bark to tie up the limbs so they don't flop about." She gives a laugh as she mimes hog-tying a kangaroo.

"Our food culture is really important to us," she says. "When I visit family who live on the coast I take freshwater tucker to them – magpie goose, water lily, fish. In recent years, our kids who were not so interested in culture are learning through food."

Later that day we bus out to Patonga Homestead, home to the Murdudjurl Community and Kakadu Kitchen. Under the shade of a sprawling mango tree is a table laden with tropical fruit, wild passionfruit and a salad made with bush plums. There is a glass pitcher filled with a green liquid. Cold and slightly viscous, it is delicious and refreshing. "It is made from water lily stem," says Indigenous chef Ben Tyler. He uses bush foods to create modern dishes.

Ben Tyker from Kakadu Kitchen with his mussels.
Ben Tyker from Kakadu Kitchen with his mussels.Richard Cornish

After our drink he takes us down towards Jim Jim Creek, which runs behind the homestead. We pass a phone booth, a giant satellite dish and solar panels sitting on top connecting the community to the outside world. From a low steel cage comes a metallic clang. Dogs circle the large cage, their heads lowered and their hackles raised. In the cage is a two-and-a-half-metre-long crocodile. A sprinkler above it keeps it wet. "We caught it in the creek the other night," says Ben. "I don't like crocs. Except the tail."

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There will be a community feast in a few days. Ben rolls up his trouser cuffs and wades into the water. "Our elders said we had to teach people the importance of the food we get from the water such as water lilies," he says, pushing his hands into the sand. "We have to protect our waterways because they give us food and water." He pulls his hands out to reveal fistfuls of fat, plump freshwater mussels.

We wander to the waterhole. It is about the size of the MCG. On the far side a jabiru hunts in the shallows. Dinner is served. Fresh tropical fruit, deep-fried catfish tails, damper fresh from the coals and stockman's stew. We sit by the fire watching the bee eaters dart about the waterhole as the last light of the day turns the waterhole golden.

The Taste of Kakadu festival is carefully co-ordinated with special exemptions made to allow some exceptional events requiring fires for cooking within the park. We find this at Ubirr, an important rock art site in the escarpment above lush wetlands. The site includes paintings of many food species as well as a clearly defined image of a thylacine, an animal that became extinct on the mainland 3000 years ago.

Elder Connie Nayyingul tells us the story of the paintings, how some animals can only be eaten by certain members of the community, how animals are off limits to others. It is a complex menu that ensures sustainability of species.

We wander back down to a clear site in the shade where local women are tending a fire. With burning logs to one side they farm the coals and rake them over some yams that were harvested the day before in West Arnhem Land.

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"You can dig up the yams after the vines die," says one woman. "And then they last two to three weeks out of the ground so they are a good food to carry around with you," adds another.

The yams are broken up and passed around on paperbark plates. They are sweet, nutty and delicious.

Crocodiles grow big and numerous in the East Alligator River, the border between Kakadu and West Arnhem Land. They line the banks like washed-up logs. On the 36-kilometre Guluyambi River cruise up the East Alligator we see scores, the largest over five metres long. Here the river is still estuarine and hammerhead sharks share the water with the crocs, mullet, salmon and turtles.

Guide Terrence Nabegeyo describes the features as we go. English, he says, is not his first language. It's his sixth. He pulls the boat up on a sandy beach and we climb to a rocky outcrop. He pulls out a cane spear with a hardened wooden tip. With a woomera he launches the spear some 30 metres up into the air. It spins and forms a broad arc before it lands in the river some 100 metres away. "Twenty men go hunting. All painted. All with spears. Throw them, into magpie geese," Terrence says. "Many geese dead. Very tasty."

The Taste of Kakadu 2019, from May 10 to 19, will include the Bush Tucker Walk with ranger Jacqueline Cahill through Kakadu's wetlands and woodlands. There is also an evening of stories from Indigenous astrology at the Cooinda airstrip. The trip into West Arnhem Land also includes a tour and sunset refreshment at the recently opened Mawurndaddja rock art site. There are also cooking demonstrations with celebrity chef Mark Olive and traditional cook-up with yam, fish and water lilies with the Njanjma Rangers.

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Details: parksaustralia.gov.au/kakadu/taste/

Richard Cornish travelled to Kakadu as a guest of Parks Australia

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Richard CornishRichard Cornish writes about food, drinks and producers for Good Food.

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