Meat is plentiful, cheap and excellent: steak forms the mainstay of the pub counter meal, and of the ubiquitous "barbie," or barbecue - as Australian an institution as you could hope to find. Even if no one invites you along to one, you can still enjoy a barbie: free or coin-operated electric barbecues can be found in car parks, campsites and beauty spots all over the country. As well as beef and lamb,

you may also find exotic meats, especially in more upmarket restaurants. Emu, buffalo, camel and witchetty grubs are all served, but the two most common are kangaroo (at least in states where the cattle lobby hasn't prevented its sale), a delicious, tender and virtually fat-free meat, and crocodile, which tastes like a mix of chicken and pork, and is at its best plain grilled. At the coast, and elsewhere at specialist restaurants, there's tremendous seafood too: prawns and oysters, mud crabs, Moreton Bay "bugs" and yabbies

Fruit is good too, from Tasmanian apples and pearsto tropical bananas, pawpaw(papaya) mangoes,avocados, citrus fruits, custard apples lychees, pineapples,passion fruit, star fruit and coconuts - few of them native, but delicious nonetheless.

Damper. Sounding positively wholesome in this company, "damper" is the swagman's staple - soda bread baked in a pot buried in the ashes of a fire. It's not hard to make after a few attempts - the secret is in the heat of the coals and a splash of beer.

Lamington A chocolate-coated sponge cake rolled in shredded coconut.

Pavlova or "pav." Named after the eminent Russian ballerina, a pavlova isa dessert concoction of meringue with layers of cream and fruit.

Pie floater. The apotheosis of the meat pie; found especially in Queensland and South Australia, a "pie floater" is an inverted meat pie swamped in mashed green peas and tomato sauce.

Witchetty (or witjuti) grubs. About the size of your little finger, witchetty grubs are dug from the roots of mulga trees and are a well-known Australian bush delicacy. Eating the plump, fawn-coloured caterpillars live (as is traditional) takes some nerve, so try giving them a brief roasting in embers. They're very tasty either way - reminiscent of peanut butter.

Vegemite. Regarded by the English as an inferior form of Marmite and by almost every other nationality with total bemusement, Vegemite is an Australian institution - a strong, dark, yeast spread for bread and toast

Esky. A brand name which has been adopted to describe all similar products, Eskies are insulated food containers varying from handy "six-pack" sizes to cavernous sixty-litre trunks capable of refrigerating a weekend's worth of food or beer. No barbie or camping trip is complete without a couple of eskies

The first European colonists decided that the country was not "owned" by the Aborigines because they didn't systematically farm the land. As many frustrated pastoralists later came to realize, this was a wise adaptation to Australia's erratic seasons, which don't lend themselves to European farming methods with any degree of long-term security. Instead, Aborigines followed a nomadic lifestyle within extensive tribal boundaries, following seasonal game and plants and promoting both by annually burning off grassland.

Along the coast people speared turtles and dugong from outrigger canoes, caught fish in stone traps, piled oyster shells into giant middens, and even co-operated with dolphins to herd fish into shallows. Other animals caught all over the country were possums, snakes (highly prized), goannas, emus and kangaroos. These animals were thrown straight onto a fire and cooked in their own juices with the skins, bones and fat sometimes used as clothing, tools and ointment respectively. More meagre pickings were provided by honey and green ants, water-holding frogs, moths and various grubs - the witchetty (or witjuti) being only the best known. Foot-long ooli worms were drawn out of rotten mangrove trunks and tiny native bees were tagged with strands of spider web and then followed to their hives for honey; another sweet treat was mulga resin, picked off the tree trunk.

Plants, usually gathered by women, were used extensively and formed the bulk of the diet. The cabbage palm, sea almond, mangrove seeds, pandanus and dozens of fruits, including tropical coconuts, plums and figs, all grew along the coast. Inland were samphire bush, wild tomatoes and "citrus," grasstree hearts, cycad nuts (very toxic until washed, but high in starch), native millet, wattle seeds, waterlily tubers, nardoo seeds (a water fern), fungi, macadamia nuts, cashews and bunya pine nuts - the last had great social importance in southern Queensland, where they were eaten at huge feasts. In Queensland's far north you'll find one of the few surviving traditional styles of cooking, the Torres Strait Islander kup maori - meat and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in an underground oven.

It's tempting to taste some bush foods and a few outlets are now experimenting with them as ingredients; otherwise you'll need expert guidance as many plants are poisonous. A few tours and safaris (particularly in the Northern Territory) give an introduction to living off the land;

this page was constructed on 12 April 1998

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