Indigenous cuisine on the menu as chef Mark Olive kicks off Multicultural Festival
Indigenous chef Mark Olive is promising to shine a light on Australia’s native cuisine as he kicks off the National Multicultural Festival.
“We've embraced every other culture in this country except our own,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “This is our national cuisine, not meat pies and beer.”
Olive says he loves introducing indigenous foods to a new generation, saying he still remembers the first native herb he ever tasted.
“It was around Casino and Wardell in the Northern Rivers region of NSW where lemon myrtle grows in abundance and made regular appearances in my auntie’s fantastic scones,” he said.
“It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that I started experimenting with flavours like wattleseed and warrigal greens, and things I’d pluck from neighbourhood trees. It was a time of experimentation.
“As a chef, I’d been trained in the traditional way and wasn’t exposed to native foods professionally, so it took a few years for it all to come together.”
Sheridan Randall, 15th February 2019
