Shoalhaven yams - an Indigenous harvest?

Contents

Introduction
Evidence?
Dreaming stories
Conclusions
Sovereign Union 2022
References

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1. Introduction

In recent years the evidence for yam harvesting as a traditional practice by Indigenous Australians has come to the fore, especially in northern Australia where climactic conditions are most suitable for planting and harvesting, though historically they extended south as far as Victoria. It has also been stated that the First Nations people of the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales, fostered crops of yams over the millenia as a staple of their diet. When the writer was made aware of this comment in January 2025 there was initial skepticism, as the perception was strong regarding those peoples as traditionally hunter-gatherers or foragers rather than what Europeans would refer to as farmers or agriculturalists. It was not clear whether the yam were simply taken from the ground seasonally without any prior intervention from the local people, apart from ensuring that all the yams were not taken in one go, of whether the environment in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven was amenable to the cultivation and harvesting of yams.

This subject drew the writer once again into the controversy surrounding Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (Pascoe 2014). Therein Pascoe posited a rethinking of the hunter-gatherer paradigm, and went further in citing evidence of .... pre-colonial agriculture, engineering and building construction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Wikipedia 2025). Was it possible the aforementioned Shoalhaven rumour regarding yam production derived from Dark Emu? This Graham Handcock of Australian Indigenous cultural heritage referred in his bestseller to the large scale growing of Yam Daisy during the colonial period in Victoria, and in the following video clip from one of his many public presentations following release of the book.

Bruce Pascoe, Growing yam daisies - Australia's earliest agriculture?, Farming Secrets, 21 December 2016, YouTube, duration: 1.31 minutes.

Eugene von Guerard, Kangatong, 1856, Ballarat Art Gallery. Yellow yam daisies on the left.

If the more southerly and colder environment of Victoria could sustain the yam, then it seemed logical that so could the Shoalhaven region to its north. An 1835 pencil sketch from Victoria supposedly showed two Aboriginal women using sticks supposedly to dig for yams, or something called tam bourn.

John Helder Wedge / Andrew Todd, Native women getting tam bourn [Yam Daisy?] roots, 27 August 1835, State Library of Victoria.

It is further read into this sketch that the two women are also turning the soil to ensure that any remaining tubers are left in place in order to be harvested the following year, or earlier. Whether the artist's tam bourn were yam or not remains unclear. Pascoe's argument that yams were introduced into Victoria from northern Australia by Dutch explorers was also questioned (Gerritsen n.d.).

There is no doubt that Australian Aboriginal people practiced seasonal food acquisition. But did this go so far as to label it agriculture? The concept of their tilling the soil in the European manner was basically unknown to the writer prior to the release of Dark Emu, and as a result over the decade following acceptance of the Pascoe proposition was tentative. No doubt facts presented therein were real. However, it was the conclusions presented that fell open to discussion and argument. Certain archaeologists and First Nations peoples continue to question the broad scope of the Pascoe claims, and individual sections, noting for example that: Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production (Westaway et al. 2023).

Pascoe's reference in the aforementioned video to the extensive evidence of the yellow Yam Daisy (Microseris lanceoloata) in Victoria during the 1830s points to not only its presence at that time, but also its ease of identification. Murnong is a Woiwurrung (Victorian) Aboriginal word generally associated with the plant as located in southeastern Australia, though numerous variants are listed here. They cover the region from South Australia and Victoria in the south to Sydney and Newcastle in the north. Variant species also exist in those warmer climates found in northern Australia.

Specific reference is made in the Dharawal and Dhurga languages of the South Coast to a Yam Tree or Bundaga, though the present writer does not know what this refers to (Eades 1976). Having carried out extensive research into the colonial records of the Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines during the first century of European settlement, and not having come across evidence which would suggest abandonment of the hunter-gatherer paradigm, by January 2025 the writer's opinion had not changed regarding the Pascoe controversy and the purported planting and harvesting of yam by the Indigenous populations of southeastern Australia (Organ 1990 & 1993). The story of yam harvesting in the Shoalhaven was therefore a challenge. Was it true or not, and what were the implications of uncovering an answer?

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2. Evidence?

A quick search of the colonial period archives available to the writer for mention of the yam in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven region did not find many references. Indexes to publications such Howitt (1904), Cousins (1947), Bayley (1975) and Turbet (1989) failed to mention the yam. Generally, the subject of traditional Indigenous foodstuffs was absent from these texts, with emphasis therein on social conditions, cultural norms, appearance, and encounters with colonists the most common elements described in detail and/or indexed. A search of the TROVE database was likewise fruitless. One intriguing reference to yam wars was found in What the Colonists never knew (Foley and Read 2020), however it appears to have merely referred to the battle between the local Indigenous people and the new settlers in the low lying Hawkesbury flood plains west of Sydney during the early 1800s.

The earliest significant references was by Charles Throsby (1777-1828) of Moss Vale in his journal of a journey from Sutton Forest to Jervis Bay in November - December 1821. On Tuesday, 2 December, he recorded the following near Bimbulong and Tallowa, on the western edge of the Shoalhaven River:

There appears a distinct difference in the mode of employ of the sexes in procuring the food for their subsistence. The men take the task of looking for opossums, hunting Kangaroo, and in fact procuring all the animal food they eat, the women procuring a sort of small yam, native Carrots, and picking berries that are very insipid to the taste. They are ripe at this time season of the year, of which they devour prodigious quantities, and are very fond of them.

The issue of the Shoalhaven yams raises the broader topic of traditional Indigenous diet. It is obvious that over the millenia the local peoples survived on seafood, meats and harvestable materials such as fruit, berries and roots including yams, also deriving juices from these resources. The variety of ways in which foods were gathered, prepared and eaten is almost limitless - the presence of the local tumeric plant may even suggest an Indigenous version of curry was made. Amongst the many archaeological reports prepared in Australia since the end of World War II there are numerous descriptions of materials found which record aspects of everyday life. However they are usually hard materials such as bone (human or animal) or rock / stone or artworks in protected cave sites. Most of the material evidence of the existence of First Nations people in Australia over the past more than 130,000 years had disappeared as it comprised largely organic materials such as food and cloth, wood, artworks and bodily flesh and bone. However, the fact that no evidence remains of an item, does not necessarily mean that it never existed. Therefore evidence for most of the food products utilised by local people no longer survives and can only be guested at in most cases. Yams would be a good example of this. The question therefore remains: did they exist in the Shoalhaven at any stage during recent history, or in the past? To answer the latter would require a detailed scientific study.

Another possible source of information is the Indigenous oral history tradition in the form of post-1788 interviews and Dreaming stories. The best we have of the former is a comment by writer and botanist Louisa Atkinson (1834-72), raised at Sutton Forest, located just to the west of the Shoalhaven region. She experienced frequent contact with the local Indigenous population, many of whom made frequent visited between the Sutton Forest and Bundanoon area and the Shoalhaven. In 1863 she published a newspaper item entitled Recollections of the Aborigines in which she made comments which were in direct conflict with Pascoe's claims of their utilisation of agricultural methods:

The habits of the race were wandering; they lived by the chase, having no idea of cultivating the soil; and it is a noteworthy fact that the Allwise has implanted no indigenous cereal, excepting grasses, in this wide region, which commands so vast a difference of climate and soil. Nor have we roots to take the place of the taro, sweet potato, and yam of the South Sea Islands. Thus, while the American Indian tills his maize, the African his rice, and the inhabitants of the Pacific these esculent tubers, the Australian tribes seemed destined for a race of hunters - hence wanderers. To the European was reserved the developing these sources of wealth and plenty.

Atkinson indicates that there was no evidence of yams or their cultivation in the wide region, which was supposedly inclusive of the Shoalhaven. Sutton Forest was located on the Southern Highlands west of the Shoalhaven and this may have meant that yams were not readily seen there, though the low lying, creek and river flood plain environment of the coastal area and the Shoalhaven River may have provided an appropriate environment for the growth of yams, unbeknownst to her. Yams are said to need a frost-free coastal climate, with summer rain and winter drought, and for this reason are seen in areas from Sydney north to Queensland. Whilst this could be said to include the sub-tropical rainforest and dry sclerophyll bush of the Illawarra and Shoalhaven, it does not align with the colder, inland climes of regional Victoria upon which Pascoe bases some of his arguments regarding the origins of Indigenous agriculture.

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3. Dreaming Stories

The Australian Aborigines have primarily made use of an oral tradition to communicate. There was no written language prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1788. After that, the English language was adopted where necessary, and in the face of restrictions on the use of Indigenous languages by the European invaders. One of its first tasks of the Cook expedition members (1770) and those on the First Fleet (1788) was to record the oral tradition and cultural heritage elements of the local populations (Organ 1994). One such story, noted by anthropologist R.H. Mathews from the Illawarra region, is obviously a remnant of a longer story. It tells of the formation of some prominent rocks in the hills between Kangaroo Valley and the sea, and is relevant to our present discussion (Organ 1989).

Two Women and A Dog

Two women were out in the bush gathering burrawang seeds and putting them into net bags, kurama. During the day they met a dog who was carrying a mullet, murra-murra. They asked him where he had caught it and as he answered, the women, their bags of burrawang seeds and their yamsticks (gaualang) were turned to stone.

The reference to yamsticks (gaualang) also known as digging sticks, is to a wood implement used to dig out roots and tubers from the ground. Whether this reference implies the presence of actual yams, rather than simply a digging tool, is unknown. Yamsticks were used in an 1888 Shoalhaven bunan ceremony (Mathews 1898). The yamstick was also a fighting implement and is referred to in the following Dreaming stories, alongside use of the native yam:

The Emu and the Native Companion

At one time these two large birds were great friends; but one day, when they met for their customary walk together, discord arose. Mrs Emu had forgotten her yamstick, and when it was her turn to cook her share of the yams for their meal, Mrs Native Companion would not lend her hers. Mrs Emu first used one foot and then the other as fire-sticks, but having scorched them black, she next used her wings. They were burnt off, so she used her bill, and that is why it is black also. Naturally, Mrs Emu was most upset and resolved to avenge herself on Mrs Native Companion. Next time the two erstwhile friends met, they had their children with them. The two families separated to gather edible roots. Mrs Emu hid all her children except two, and when she again met Mrs Native Companion she told her how free she felt with only two children. When Mrs Native Companion asked what had happened to the others, Mrs Emu said she had cooked and eaten them; and that they were much better than roots. Mrs Native Companion then cooked and ate all her children, with the exception of two. This is why the native companion lays only two eggs at a time.

The following story is from the area of Wagonga and Narooma, south of Moruya:

Wagonga (From an Aboriginal Tradition)

In remote days when the population of the coast was very great, the tribes had at times a difficulty in obtaining the food they required, not that there was an abundance of one kind or another, but like the white man they preferred a change of diet. They had their seasons for the various kinds of flesh both of fish and animals, also of different kinds of vegetable products. The little spade at the end of the wimmera was used by them to dig up the small native yam, and the well made but small meshed bag might at certain times be seen in the running stream filled with pounded nuts of the burrowang after having gone through some process to extract the poison much in the same way as we prepare arrowroot. Immense quantities of this article were consumed each season, the time being when the nut was in and fell out of its red jacket onto the ground.

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4. Conclusions

Whilst there are no specific historical evidence for the dedicated planting and harvesting of yams in the Shoalhaven, only mention of their presence, this does not mean that it did not take place either in the historic or recent past. The historic record is full of holes, and recording since the time of Cook in 1770 by non-Indigenous people regarding the eating habits of Australian Aborigines are sparse. Whilst Throsby mentions a sort of small yam, Atkinson denies their presence in the region. Consultation with local community members may reveal additional information around this topic, as it appears that such practices as yam planting and harvesting took place, and continue to take place, in other areas of Australia. For this reason it has been recognised as a traditional activity and will continue to be promoted as such both within communities and commercially. Some have gone so far as to refer to it as the earliest evidence of agricultural activity on the planet.

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5. Sovereign Union article 2022

An influential article regarding the early Indigenous history of use of the yam in Victoria was posted on the Sovereign Union website in January 2022, and continues to circulate on various social media sites. It read as follows:

THE STAPLE FOOD ALMOST LOST TO COLONIAL FARMING AND GRAZING

Yam Daisy, Aboriginal names Murnong and Nyamin (Microseris lanceolata)

For as long as anyone could remember, there were only a couple of places left where foragers were guaranteed to find murnong, a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut. One was a cemetery on Forge Creek Road in the town of Bairnsdale, Victoria, where the plant’s bright yellow flowers could be seen clustered around gravestones; the other was along a nearby railway track, where a line of tall fences protected the bullet-sized root and its shoots from grazing animals. Before Europeans arrived in the 18th century, the grasslands and rocky hillsides of Victoria had been covered in murnong; it grew so thick that from a distance it seemed to form a blanket of yellow. For the peoples who lived in south-eastern Australia over tens of thousands of years, including the Wurundjeri, the Wathaurong [wathaurong], Gunditjmara and Jaara ... [this and many other natives species were very important food sources]. But by the 1860s it was as good as extinct, making its retreat into cemeteries and sidings, places where either the dead were resting or the living kept away, and knowledge of the plant was lost to generations of Aboriginal people.

In 1985, a botanist in her sixties, Beth Gott, marked out a plot of land at Monash University in Melbourne. It was to be a garden dedicated to Aboriginal wild plants. Gott had become interested in indigenous foods and medicines during fieldwork in the Americas and Asia, and on her return to Australia she embarked on the most thorough study of Aboriginal plant knowledge ever conducted. From her base at Monash, she catalogued more than a thousand species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones picked from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks. After years of study, she concluded that one indigenous food in particular had been crucial to pre-colonial life in Australia. Some Aboriginal people called it the yam daisy, but most referred to it as murnong. Gott set out to find the plant in the wild, and grow it in her garden, but finding murnong wasn’t easy and uncovering its history was just as hard; so much knowledge had been lost, much of it through violence. Her source material, perhaps ironically, included the journals of the early colonists. As she uncovered documents, she built up a picture of murnong’s presence in the open spaces and woodlands of southern Australia, where it grew in the “millions”.

In 1841, George Augustus Robinson [the Chief Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip] wrote how murnong was picked by women “spread over the plain as far as I could see them… each had a load as much as she could carry”. Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the swollen tubers can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots. When broken, every part of the plant exudes a milky liquid that leaves fingers stained. Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape. Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts in which reed baskets filled with murnong, stacked three feet high, were cooked over fire. The only time of year when this didn’t happen was winter, when the tubers were less succulent and often tasted bitter. But across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never-ending. But in the first decades of European settlement,farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years. Awaiting the sheep were thousands of square miles of pristine grass and vegetation, and the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hoofs compacted the soil.

In 1839, just four years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tongeworong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. “Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],” Moonin said, “plenty eat it murnong, all gone the murnong.” The state-appointed Chief Protectors of the Aborigines, who were in a position to see how quickly things were changing in the Aboriginal territories, were aware of what was happening to murnong. One alerted his superiors to scenes of starvation. In the eyes of most of the Europeans, however, murnong was little more than a weed, and so the indigenous people were left looking on as more livestock arrived and swept through the landscape, eating up their supplies of food. Then, in 1859, rabbits were brought to Australia. If there had been any wild murnong left, the herbivores finished it off.

As Beth Gott was growing Aboriginal plants in her garden at Monash in the 1980s, an expert in public health based in Western Australia named Kerin O’Dea started taking indigenous people back to Country. Her hunch was that Western foods were contributing to obesity and Type 2 diabetes among the Aboriginal population. In a simple but radical experiment, she took ten middle-aged, overweight, diabetic and pre-diabetic Aboriginal people from cities to spend seven weeks in a remote part of the bush and live as hunters and gatherers, including digging up tubers. Even after this short period, all had lost weight and had seen the symptoms of their diabetes reversed. O’Dea concluded that it wasn’t necessary to revert to a traditional lifestyle to tackle diabetes, but incorporating features of that lifestyle, including dietary ones, could bring great benefits. By then, however, many indigenous ingredients, along with murnong, had become endangered.

Now, things are changing. Murnong is making a slow return to our consciousness and cooking. Aboriginal community gardens now have plots dedicated to the plant, and harvest celebrations featuring digging sticks and ceremonial dances are being revived after 200 years. One of Australia’s most celebrated chefs, Ben Shewry, sourced some seed and now grows murnong in his garden. “It’s the most important ingredient I serve,” he says, explaining that customers are blown away by how delicious the plant tastes and moved by its story. Some of the seeds used to grow murnong came from places where it had retreated to in the wild, including Bairnsdale’s railway sidings and cemetery; others were sourced from Beth Gott’s Aboriginal garden. Now, murnong’s future lies elsewhere: in the hands of growers and gardeners spread right across Victoria, and inside their kitchens as well.

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5. References

Atkinson, Louisa, A Voice from the Country: Recollections of the Aborigines, Sydney Mail, 12 September 1863.

Bayley, William A., Shoalhaven: A history of the Shire of Shoalhaven, 1975, Shoalhaven City Council, Nowra, 271p.

Cousins, Arthur, The Garden of New South Wales: A History of the Illawarra and Shoalhaven districts, 1770-1900, Sydney, 1948, [Reprinted 1994], 365p.

Eades, D.K., The Dharawal and Dhurga languages of the New South Wales South Coast, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1976.

Foley, Dennis and Peter Read, What the colonists new knew, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2020, 236p.

Gammage, Bill, Colonists upended Aboriginal farming, growing grain and running sheep on rich yamfields, and cattle on arid grainlands, The Conversation, 20 September 2023.

Gerritsen Rupert, They will offer all friendship: The evidence for cohabitation between indigenous Australians and marooned Dutch mariners and VOC passengers, in Did the Dutch teach Aborigines how to cultivate yams?, Dark Emu exposed, and the assault on Australian history, Justa Quiet Australian, n.d.

How Australian First Nations Peoples' Land and Food Management and Regenerative Agricultural Practices are Closely Aligned, Oxford Real Farming, 3 February 2021, YouTube, duration: 64.28 minutes.

Howitt, A.W., The Native Tribes of South-east Australia, Macmillan & Co., London 1904, 835p.

Mathews, R.H., The Bunan Ceremony of New South Wales, American Anthropologist, IX, October 1896, 327-344 & plate VI.

Minchin, Bryanna, Australia's hidden agricultural legacy, Integrate Sustainability, 7 August 2019.

O'Dea, Kerin, P.A. Jewell, A. Whiten, S.A. Altmann, S.S. Strickland and O.T. Oftedal, Traditional Diet and Food Preferences of Australian Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherers [and Discussion], Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 334(1270), 29 November 1991, 233-241.

Organ, Michael, A Documentary History of the Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines 1770-1850; including a Chronological Bibliography 1770-1990, Aboriginal Education Unit, Wollongong University, December 1990, 646p.

-----, A Documentary History of the Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines 1770-1900; including a Chronological Bibliography 1770-1990, Report for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, 1 December 1993, 364p.

-----, Australian Aboriginal Dreaming Stories: A Chronological Bibliography of Published Works 1789-1991, Aboriginal History, 18(2), December 1994, 123-44.

Pascoe, Bruce, Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Magdabala Books, 2014, 278p.

-----, Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Magdabala Books, 2018, 278p.

Tucker Bush, Murnong Yam Daisy [webpage], Tucker Bush - Edible Australian Tucker Bush, 2020.

Turbet, Peter, The Aborigines of the Sydney district before 1788, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1989, 170p.

Westaway, Michael, Alison Crowther, Nathan Wright, Robert Henry and Rodney Carter, Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple, The Conversation, 10 November 2023.

-----, Transdisciplinary approaches to understanding past Australian Aboriginal foodways, Archaeology of Food and Foodways, 2(1), 29 December 2023.

Wikipedia, Dark Emu, Wikipedia [webpage], accessed 12 January 2025.

-----, Digging sticks, Wikipedia [webpage], accessed 12 January 2025.

-----, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?, Wikipedia [webpage], accessed 12 January 2025.

-----, Microseris lanceoloata, Wikipedia [webpage], accessed 12 January 2025.

-----, Murnong, Wikipedia [webpage], accessed 12 January 2025.

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Last updated: 12 January 2025

Michael Organ, Australia

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