[CHILDREN TALKING]
AUNTY JULIE MCHALE: Look at those!
[CHILDREN TALKING]
AUNTY JULIE MCHALE: The trick with-- Dja Dja Wurrung country or Jaara country is that most of the food that become the staple diet grows underneath the ground. When I say ""staple diet"" I mean something that you eat all year around to keep yourself healthy.
Murnong is a daisy. It's often called a yam daisy and it looks for all the world like the little daisies, the introduced daisies that grow everywhere. You can eat the leaves and that goes for a lot of our, I call it underground gastronomy. So there's the, you know, bulbine lilies, there's the chocolate lilies, basically all the indigenous daisies, lilies, and orchids, the root systems of them were eaten and that was the staple. That was the staple diet.
So the yam daisy or the murnong is the one that's often mentioned the most because it was prolific all around this area, all around central Victoria. And one of the reasons it was prolific was because the Aboriginal women actually farmed it. It's not something that happened accidentally. It kept the soil loose. So I grow these in my veggie patch because things have changed so much.
One is if I wanted to take you girls over to the bush to dig up some of these things we would be in big trouble. We would be fined for doing that. And because it is illegal to take native plants out of the bush.
CHILD: Oh, look!
ADULT: Shake it, baby.
AUNTY JULIE MCHALE: Wow!
That's huge!
CHILD: I thought you said it was small!
AUNTY JULIE MCHALE: Teaching the-- particularly the young girls the connection between the plants, the cooking, and culture, like we-- just going and cooking murnong is a cultural experience but it's more than just what you create in the end.
It's learning history but also it's the talking that goes on while it's happening, the confidence the girl's getting, the things that they're doing. The-- just the enjoyment of it, the surprise on their faces when, you know, we dug up the murnongs and there was no plants above the ground because it's the wrong time of year for them to be out.
So because the murnong is so healthy and so many of our indigenous foods and our native foods are like, blowing everybody's mind in how much more nutrition there is in each individual plant, it's stuff that's going to be used more and more and that's going to be relevant to these kids as they're growing up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
