Protecting Australia’s native bushfood industry
Soaking up some glorious winter sun at Native Oz Bushfoods with Doug and Tracey Goebel, I asked, “Doug, what brought you to this property?” he laughed, “we wanted a nice house with access to water, and we bought a shoebox with no water!”
“I think I’m here to protect the place,” Doug—a proud Bundjalung man—then reflected, pointing to several culturally significant sites that surround his family’s 40-acre property in Ropeley, on Yuggera Country, in the Lockyer Valley.
It’s Indigenous owned and operated businesses like Native Oz Bushfoods that embody the 2024 NAIDOC theme, ‘Keep the fire burning! Blak, Loud and Proud’.
From a “tax cheque and a $5,000 microloan” in 2019, to a self-sustaining value-add product range and a growing ecotourism business, Tracey and Doug still find time to liaise with community and government to advocate for the protection of Australian native foods and the vital role they play in Indigenous culture.
From their commercial kitchen, Tracey and Doug produce a wide variety of jams, syrups, sauces, vinaigrettes, relishes, teas, soft drinks, salt rubs and spice blends. They sell these at local markets, festivals, and events, as well as online.
In 2022, the couple started welcoming school groups and tourists on tours of their educational garden where visitors touch and taste the plants and their fruit—including Lilly Pilly, Old Man Saltbush, Ruby Saltbush, and Wombat Berry—while learning about the flavour profiles, cooking and medicinal uses of the bushfoods they are sampling.
Behind the scenes, however, the Goebels are fighting to protect the future of not only their property, but the cultural integrity of native bushfoods as they become increasingly commercialised.
On the home front, Doug and Tracey faced difficulties in recovering from the 2022 floods as native bushfoods are not considered agricultural products, but ‘novel or other’.
Such classification was a significant barrier to the couple accessing funding to replant damaged trees and repair fences. It also means they cannot grow their business through exports.
Looking further afield, Tracey and Doug are alarmed at the ease with which foreign entities have purchased farms that grow native bushfoods and take this intellectual property offshore.
“If we’re not careful, we’ll be importing back our native foods from overseas,” Doug said.
‘Black cladding,’ non-Indigenous entities capitalising on native foods and First Nations culture, with meagre or no benefits to community is also a worry.
“We need a bipartisan policy support at both state and federal levels to ensure that the native bushfoods industry grows in a way that is culturally safe and ensures Blak businesses can thrive,” Tracey said.
