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"Dr Patrick Jones, author of “Walking for food: Regaining permapoesis” (Doctoral thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2014)."

""MEES Indigenous Men’s Health Conference, Cairns, October 15-17, 2014!"""

The author acknowledges the Palm Island community, the Manbarra and Bwgcolman peoples, for their generous spirit in sharing their knowledges."""All eight photographs in this paper were taken by Dr Patrick Jones on Palm Island in August 2014. A description of each image can be found at the end of this document."""Please note. The contents of this paper falls under a Creative Commons, non-commercial and share-alike licence. It therefore can be shared and copied for all purposes other than commercial.

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"Abstract! !Does the food we eat and how we go about obtaining it shape the culture we make, shape the people we become? In this paper Jones examines this question and outlines his theory and practice of 'walked for food', based on remodelling traditional forms of food procurement. Jones recognises the inherent damages of the industrialised food system, both to the land and to peoples' health. By studying the traditional foods of Indigenous Australians and the newcomer species that have naturalised since 1788, Jones puts together a comprehensive inventory of what he calls ‘autonomous edibles’ and explains their health benefits in an era of chronic food-related illnesses. For the past 11 months Jones and his family have been slowly cycling up the east coast

of Australia from southern Victoria, camping and sampling numerous species, which will constitute a new book of freely obtained, edible and medicinal foods found in Australia. Jones argues that community gardening, foraging, fishing and hunting are profound ways to re-establish health-giving diets and are active modes of food procurement that cost little or nothing to achieve. He argues that traditional Indigenous lifeways concerning food and energy consumption are future models for healthy people, communities and environments, and a way for people to reconnect with the

land in spiritual, cultural and practical ways. Even if these autonomous edibles constitute just a small percentage of a community’s diet, the nutritional, medicinal and cultural values of freshly gathered food may be significant. These non-monetised foods, medicines and cultural lifeways currently have little status in Australia and this, Jones argues, needs to be challenged. He believes communities like Palm Island are at the frontier in reclaiming health and well-being as the people remain close to what he calls ecological foods."""Dr Patrick Jones"Palm Island, August 2014"""""""""""""

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"No, no, no sickness really, only clean one – because they lived on wild honey and meat"– they have been living on bush tucker – nothing – no tea, no sugar, no ice-cream or lollies, nothing – only been living on bush honey, bush tomatoes, bush raisins, edible seeds and grass seeds – any kind of seeds – they lived on yams – no sickness – nothing, all good – nothing, they were good living in them days – they only got sick from a cold – only catching a cold, that’s all – no more – no sickness, nothing – because they living on different food – yeah, different food bush tucker…  "1""

The Indigenous health model pre-1788 is unsurpassable. People ate a wide range of nutritious foods and were active in obtaining them. The type of food consumed and the way they were obtained helped develop cultures of ecological sophistication where men, women and children were extremely knowledgeable about the world around them. Samantha Martin, a young descendant of the Kija and Jaru from the east Kimberly region of Western Australia, writes how this knowledge was passed on generationally: “My mother would show me the shape of the different leaves and the barks of different plum trees and berry trees and she would tell me to memorise that plant for next time.”  Remnants of such handed-down knowledge continue today, but overall 2

the western diet and the western economic imperative that has produced it has seen to the proliferation of food-related disease and, contiguously, the erosion of ecological knowledges.""While the future of food may appear to many as what new convenience product is seductively screened on highway billboards or in TV ads, I argue in this paper that the future of food is actually

the past and, by default, the future of health.""Throughout Australia the statistics for chronic food-related illness appear to aggregate each year, especially among Indigenous communities. When I asked Grace, a Torres Straight Islander working at the Dreamtime Cultural Centre in Rockhampton, what was the greatest threat her people faced today she was unhesitant in identifying “western food”. Poor diet and chronic food-related disease is becoming a generational problem as the old food knowledges lose interest and status and are replaced by a lethal convenience. Food-related substance abuse, addiction and

dependancy is the result of unscrupulous admen, a profit-obsessed industry that employs them and weak governance. There is no quick fix to such a systemic predicament, particularly when ‘monoculture money’ has grown so large and ungovernable. Refined sugar cane, processed in a similar way to cocaine but arguably more addictive because it is ‘hidden’ in most processed foods, is made by a powerful and seemingly untouchable industry, and despite the direct link between diabetes, heart disease, obesity and mental illness, the industry goes on unchecked and remains freely ‘open for business’. "

� Joe, Ali Curung elder, NT, transcribed from Message Stick, series 12, episode 11: ‘The Artists of 1

Ali Curung’, ABC iview, April 2010.

� Martin, Samantha. Bush Tukka Guide, Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd. Richmond 2014.2

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According to Dr David Reuben, refined sugar is not a food, it is a pure chemical, a drug.  Professor 3

Graham MacGregor, from the UK campaign group Action on Sugar, says “sugar is an unnecessary source of calories and a major cause of obesity, therefore causing many deaths and diabetes.”  An 4

American researcher, Dr Robert Lustig, recently stated that “[t]his is a substance of abuse. So you need two things, you need personal intervention and you need societal intervention.”  We can well 5

imagine what would happen if government funding was pulled from the refined sugar industry, refined sugar was heavily taxed, and all monies raised were put into subsidising organic food, so as all Australians could afford it. And we can well imagine the savings to public and environmental health if this were to happen.""But sadly, as we know, government hands are tied tightly by the donating lobbyists of big industries and because of this communities cannot rely on governments to create effective responses to any predicament or crisis. The responses, therefore, have to come from within the household and community economies. In other words, the non-monetary economies that generally become foregrounded in times of crisis. According to a Queensland Health official I spoke with on Palm Island, government funding in health is largely given to producing synthetic pharmaceuticals, because that is where the money is. This concludes a perfect cycle of ill-health: create an impoverished food system by taking the medicine out of people’s food and what you then require is a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. While this is a win for business and capitalism, it is a great loss for people and their environments. The growing crisis of antibiotics is just one testament to this. An example of such government intransigence to health can be found in the main food store on Palm Island. It is owned by the Queensland State Government and it sells a disproportionate amount of highly-processed and innutritious foods such as sugary drinks, lollies, packaged chips,

frozen foods and even 4 litre tins of white processed sugar. The rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease on Palm Island are among the highest anywhere in Queensland.  "6"However, I do not wish to dwell on the negative news, which has been excessively documented in the media. There are many positive stories. What I encountered on Palm Island was that the community has retained enough knowledge to attend to its own health problems, and that it seems it’s more a case of increasing the status of this knowledge and disseminating it more broadly throughout the community.""Referring to his painting of two echidnas hunting

ants, reproduced as the cover art of the Palm Island Health Action Plan 2010-2015, Allan Palm Island, a traditional custodian and artist, writes: “This is one of the traditional foods and like all bush tucker has a strong connection to the health and wellbeing of people on Palm Island.”  "7

� Reuben, Dr David. Everything you always wanted to know about nutrition, Simon and Schuster,3

1978.

� Carpenter, Louise. Life without sugar: one family’s 30-day challenge, Carpenter interviews 4

Professor MacGregor, The Observer, 15 March 2014.

� Dr Robert Lustig speaking with Zoe Williams in her article, Robert Lustig: the man who believes 5

sugar is poison, The Guardian, Monday 25 August 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/24/robert-lustig-sugar-poison (accessed 30/8/2014).

� Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council: Palm Island Health Action Plan 2010-2015, Brisbane 2011.6

� ibid. p4. 7

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"My family and I recently spent a week on the island, witnessing and participating in non-monetised food procurement. What Allan Palm Island also says in the report about people still gathering traditional foods  we found to be true, and what was inspiring to see is just how many young 8

people are knowledgeable about such food. Each day we would walk or bike around the island documenting edible and useful species. We asked Bwgcolman children to help us identify certain plants and asked them the traditional uses. There was always at least one who had the knowledge.

Each afternoon we fished on the jetty with kids who, like us, were catching their dinner. Barracuda and trevally were the mainstay catches. It occurred to us that young people on Palm are more prepared for the challenges of this century than many we’d come across in our eleven month, slow transit north by bicycles up the east coast of Australia from cold southern Victoria. ""Often left to their own devices Palm kids are free-ranging joy seekers. Breaking open coconuts on the beach with large rocks, making tools such as spears to hunt crabs and mullet, riding bikes, swimming, walking, playing ball sports,

bareback riding horses (also free-ranging on the island), playing with the town dogs, fishing from the beach or jetty, listening to music, play-fighting, dancing, laughing, jumping off the jetty. Much of this life is unsupervised. The children are not ‘helicopter parented’ like in so many other parts of the country. For many of these kids learning takes place directly in their environment. Older kids pass on knowledge, as do parents, aunties, uncles and elders. At the jetty one afternoon we met Wayne, a young father who is twenty years old. His knowledge of traditional foods and medicines was exceptional and as we walked home with him, his partner Katrina and their newborn son, Wayne junior, we ran through a list of free foods, medicines and other useful species we had observed or consumed on the island. ""Our combined list that was later added to by Nick McBride, another knowledgeable local man, includes the following species: Mango, Chinee apple, banana, bush banana, African tulip tree, bush lemon, amaranth, coconut, barracuda, barramundi cod, sea turtle, bush passionfruit, snakeweed, snapper, trevally, brush turkey, echidna, beach calophyllum, possum, Burdekin plum, bush cucumber, cluster fig, autonomous goat, queenfish, clam, native mulberry, rock wallaby, mud mussel, spider shell, crab, pipi, cassava, sweet potato, naturalised squash (via horse droppings), mangrove snail, mud whelk, stingray, sea caper, beach cherry, autonomous pig, jackfruit, emu berry, Pacific rosewood, lady apple, fleabane, goats foot, dugong, grasshopper, naturalised tomato (again via horse droppings), green ant, guava, mullet, nardoo, native gooseberry, native rock fig, pandanus, paw paw, peanut (or monkey nut) tree, mackerel, purslane, oyster, emu berry and tropical almond. ""I believe that this cursory list of over 60 species could easily aggregate with more thorough research and further compiling of local knowledges. Child education on Palm, where schools struggle with student attendance, could be more about getting children out of classrooms and into culturally specific learning environments, collecting foods that nourish, nurture, empower and honour the past, the present and the future. Western schooling currently does not value or give

� ibid. p4.8

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status to ecological economics, which I would argue, is the traditionally culturally specific economics of Indigenous Australians. As one man at this conference commented yesterday, why would kids want to go to school when what they learn is culturally irrelevant?""We saw a number of these 60 plus free food species being consumed and we consumed a modest number ourselves. The availability of this walked-for, hunted and fished food was to us a gift economy of significant importance, but an economy that has temporarily lost its status. What would it look like to Wayne, the young father we met on Palm Island with the exceptional knowledge of traditional foods and medicines if, for example, his community role was to disperse these knowledges among young people? With his excellent taste in hip hop he certainly had the street cred among his peers and younger kids. There are kids like Wayne all over Australia who just need a leg up. If there is no funding to give these young men roles, then what are the economic alternatives? My current research is funded on a gift economy. My role as a community garden facilitator within my community is non-monetary. Most of the things I do in my life involves little or no money. My esteem and sense of well-being as a man is based on broad self-interest. I give and

people give back making me a ‘we’. This is what I’ve learnt from Aboriginal being. To recreate the ‘we’ in community; the sharing of resources and the creation of community roles. ""Community sovereignty over food, uncorrupted by money, is the future of food and health in Australia. This is the model of health that has been in operation in Australia for the majority of human existence. Ignorance of, or intransigence to, such an optimal health model has been wrapped up in various forms of racial discrimination over the past 200 years and more, and continues today. But if we undress all the prejudices, mis-truths and lies we find an exemplary food

model – local, free, organic, medicinal, diverse, nutritious and walked-for. Within such a community model the corruption of food by big business becomes more difficult. Money is instead traded for knowledge, and with greater knowledge less money is required.""Rich culture comes from healthy people and communities. If a culture is starving it doesn’t have the time or inclination to produce rich cultural forms. The same can be said if a culture is too affluent, which can lead to various forms of narrow self-interest. The rich cultural and artistic forms produced in Australia pre-1788 are testament to a diverse and abundant food supply. Traditional bush tucker was the mind and body fuel used to make such rich culture, cultures that were holistically sustainable and regenerative, not extractive and polluting. Indigenous art, food, science and economics were all contiguous and non-delineated, all part of producing numerous ecological cultures embedded in loved and understood country. ""So what forms and lifeways from the past can we include in a future food-health model that involves a bottom-up, community-led rebuild in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities?""Recreating a community food model is not just about free food and medicine. It is about understanding land, being involved in the processes enacted by our earth others and observing changes in our environments with infinite detail. Margaret Ah Sam, a descendant of the Mitakoodi and Waanyi people of northwest Queensland, writes that “[k]nowledge of the seasons and signs of food sources was learned when we were young. For instance when the white wood blossoms, we know the freshwater crocodile is laying her eggs. When the turpentine wattle is in bloom, the emu chicks are hatching and when the bloodwood and other eucalypts are in bloom it means it’s time

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for the sugar bag, ‘nature honey’.”  It has been a largely urban, sometimes religious, non-9

Indigenous agenda that has seen to the erosion or destruction of these essential knowledges. But these knowledges have not fully disappeared and in the case of Clarry Bowen a Guugu Yimithirr man from Hope Vale, are being experimented with again  . Clarry’s bark medicine is just one 10

example of an Indigenous man rebuilding his knowledge so as he can heal his family and community. There is no money here, just love and care as a grandfather, husband, father, brother, uncle and son.""Foraging, forest gardening, fishing and hunting enact lifeways that don’t extract and harm systemically, but rather are in relationship with other lifeways and forms. This food-medicine is community-based and non-privatised. The industrial food model is the opposite. It puts food production into the hands of a few and so knowledges about land, species, climate and sustainability are lost or privatised through specialisation. Under this model we have seen the depletion of vast species of plants and animals and witnessed widespread damage to the biosphere. If we keep handing over our pay cheques to such a system of abuse we will continue to path the way for societal and environmental ill health. ""On a walk through the streets of Palm Island we came across Ashley Walsh, a Bwgcolman man, who came out of his house brandishing a copy of the Townsville newspaper our family was reported in. He introduced himself by asking us to sign the article which discussed our research of free food in Australia. Ashley listed for us all the different meats on the island that did not come from the island’s store. Wild pig can be hunted, brush turkey, possum, echidna, wallaby, all manner of seafood including dugong and sea turtle and an endless supply of wild goat that live autonomously on Palm and a nearby island. He told me that two dogs and a knife is all that is needed to hunt pigs. Colonisation has tried to instruct Indigenous people all over the world to feel ashamed of their non-monetary economies, their lifeways and their cultures. Work to the coloniser is framed in terms of monetary exchange so as one can go to the shops to buy privatised food and medicine for the family.""The challenge for many Indigenous communities in Australia, as it is with many communities

worldwide, is the lack of access to their own land and water – the basis of an ecological economy. Native Title, which has attempted to redress this problem, has been increasingly manipulated to benefit mining companies and not Indigenous autonomy. This, in turn, has often split communities, not helped to strengthened them. By cutting access to land and water it has crippled Indigenous gift economies and forced people to join the exceedingly damaging, extractive and health-destroying global monetary economy.""The longer my family and I were on Palm we realised that it wasn't far off being a significant model for healthy food and living for other Australian communities. Yes, the impact of

corporatised western food is a significant problem, but unlike many communities in Australia, especially non-Indigenous communities, the remnant knowledges that create community sufficiency and the possibilities alive to recreate healthy food ecologies within walking distance to

� Ah Sam, Margaret. Mitakoodi Bush Tucker: Edible and medicinal plants of the northwest 9

highlands and gulf plains of Queensland. Black Ink Press with Mitakoodi Juhnjlar Corporation, Thuringowa and Mount Isa Queensland 2006.

� https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymqkV7sUeLc&feature=youtu.be10

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people's homes is extremely strong. It became clear to us that the Palm Island community is in many ways leading the way for a walked-for food economy, that is a return to non-monetised health-making food. The greatest challenge for this community and indeed all communities in Australia, is how to transition away from damaging monetised food and re-establish medicinal-ecological-community food networks. Population growth means that cultivated food ecologies need to be intensified and species that are autonomous, abundant and hardy put to good use.""When my family and I came to Palm we learned that there are about 3,000 people on the island, comprising both the traditional custodians, the Manbarra people, and the many tribes brought here punitively and brutally, who are now known as the Bwgcolman people. We also learnt that about 800 people are ‘unemployed’. That’s nearly 25% of Palm residents. But if we return to the many tribal economies in Australia prior to 1788, it is easy to argue that 100% of Indigenous Australians were unemployed according to the western idea of economy, poverty was non-existent, and people’s health, according to early records and scholars such as ethnobotanist Dr Beth Gott, was unsurpassable. The reason for such health is because people were eating a diverse range of walked-for foods. " "

Speaking about the traditional diets of tribes in Victoria and their main staples of various lily and murnong tubers (carbohydrates), Gott argues that fructans, which are polymers of fructose sugar, undergo digestion by bacteria in the colon, producing short-chain fatty acids and no rise in blood glucose. On the other hand starches (wheat, barely, etc.), she argues, are polymers of glucose sugars, digested higher up in the small intestine and cause a rise in blood glucose.  It is clear that 11

Aboriginal people were extremely sophisticated nutritionists unclouded by the imperatives of profit and fully focussed on

community health and well-being. This past model is the future of health.""The marriage of wheat flour and refined sugar has been a lethal weapon in destroying Indigenous health across Australia for over 200 years, as has the shepherding of people into ‘jobs’ rather than the continuation of community roles that foster ecological– food, energy, arts and preventable medicine sources. Diabetes, chronic heart disease and obesity were non-existent in pre-1788 Australia, acknowledgement of which must raise questions about unchecked civil prejudices and what is intelligent human life and what is not. ""It is my thesis here, being informed by Indigenous models, that health food is synonymous with free food. Once food is capitalised upon it is more than likely at risk of being impoverished and innutritious; corrupted by the will-to-profit. Walked-for, gardened, just-picked, foraged, harvested and hunted food not only produces fresh and nutritious food, but the body has participated actively in its procurement. Fast food outlets and supermarkets both brandish the word ‘fresh’ at every possible place to manipulate people into thinking that what they eat is really OK. More than likely the freshest food in these places has been in cold storage or frozen for weeks if not months. How

� Gott, Dr Beth. Aboriginal Medicinal Plants, unpublished powerpoint presentation, Monash 11

University 2012.

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many studies compare freshly foraged food eaten within a minute of picking with store bought or fast food produce? Do they exist? Why don’t they?""Because there is little or no money in funding such transitions back to ecological and community- derived healthy food, communities will need to instead work on promoting and even reinstating gift economies and community resilience around food and food knowledges. Small-scale, localised

gardening and culturally-specific farming, as well as opportunities for hunting, fishing and various traditional (or experimental) aquacultures all go together to create community food resilience and health. Palm Island is closer than many communities in re-establishing a model for culturally-specific healthy food and medicine. The major challenge for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is how to re-instate culturally-specific lifeways that honour the wisdom of ancestral knowledge and help heal the wounds from the pathologies of monetised and militarised colonisation. """""Dr Patrick Jones "Cairns, October 2014""""""""

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"""Notes on the images!"All of the photographs and artwork in this paper were taken/made by Dr Patrick Jones on Palm Island in August 2014. They include in order of appearance. Page 1. unripe native rock fig. Page 2. bush cucumber. Page 3. Palm Island store sugar tins. Page 4. Palm Island kids eating coconuts. Page 5. unripe fruit of the peanut tree. Page 6. autonomous goats. Page 7. Palm Island store soft drink isle. Page 8. tropical or beach almonds. Page 9. What the Queensland Government should really be advertising to its communities. Page 10. Barracuda and trevally; marine life provides a rich source of nourishment for the Palm Island community.""""Acknowledgement!"The author again acknowledges the Palm Island community, the Manbarra and Bwgcolman peoples, for their generous spirit in sharing their knowledges."