Eat Australia

SBS: Costa's Garden Odyssey

BACKGROUND:Alexandria Park Community School, in inner Sydney, is a green oasis in the middle of the industrial sprawl. The school, with its large indigenous student base, asked Costa to help them build a bush tucker garden to be used as part of the school curriculum.  

via www.sbs.com.au

Bush tucker gardens are starting to gain popularity, along with kitchen gardens (all hail Stephanie Alexander).  They do require a bit of work to ensure the plants being used will actually grow in the area; there's still a prevalent feeling that native plants, like the indigenous human population, are consistent over Australia and that a lillypilly will grow in central Australia (hint: it's a rainforest plant and like neither frost nor drought).

I approve of Costa's list for this Sydney garden, however :)

Study Bush Tucker Plants correspondence course - ACS

Study Bush Tucker Plants correspondence course, at home by distance education

Well, now, this is very interesting. The course goes for 100 hours and covers the complete range of how to identify, grow, gather, and use bush tucker plants.

It covers a very extensive range of resources - nuts and berries, vegetables, fruits, flavourings/tea/essences. There's a few things in there of which I've not heard - Araucaria and Aleurites moluccana in the "nuts" section, for eg.

I'd give serious thought to doing the course myself if I had a spare $729 ...

What's really interesting is that I originally found this as BUSH TUCKER PLANTS BHT 328 Course - ACS Distance Education, costing £299.00 - as a British correspondence course.  I was all prepared to write a rant about how native produce was taken more seriously overseas than it is in Australia (which generally it is - our export industry is still more important than the domestic one) until I did some investigation into the institution until I did more research and found it to be the "Australian Horticultural Correspondence Schools", which now has students from all over the world.

Saved from embarrassment by research and never trusting the surface of a webpage ...