AY Honors/Aboriginal Lore/Answer Key
The term bush tucker is a combination of the Australian slang word "bush", meaning wilderness, and "tucker", meaning food. Thus the word tends to refer to any Australian native food, although it sometimes is used with the specific connotation of "food found in the Outback while living on the land". It is also called bushtucker and less colloquially, bush food.
Bushtucker includes both plant and animal foods. Examples of Australian native animal foods (meat) include kangaroo, emu and crocodile. These meats are not uncommon in Australian restaurants. Other animals, for example the Goanna and the witchetty grub, were eaten by Aboriginal Australians and thus qualify as bush tucker in every sense of the word.
Examples of Australian native plant foods include the Quandong (Santalum acuminatum), Bush Raisin or Bush Tomato (Solanum centrale), Warrigal Greens (Tetragonia tetragonioides, or New Zealand Spinach), and Mountain Pepper (Tasmannia lanceolata, the Mountain Pepperbush, is one example). The most identifiable (and probably only) "bush tucker" plant harvested and sold in commercial quantities is the macadamia nut (Macadamia integrifolia).
Major Les Hiddins, a retired Australian Army soldier, presented a hit TV series called Bush Tucker Man on the ABC TV network in the late 1980s. In the series, Hiddins demonstrated his training and research in combat survival by locating native foodstuffs in the northern Australian Outback.
