Bringing Exogenous Foods to Australia

Abstract

This chapter is the final chapter in the section ‘Food and Food Knowledge’. It examines what food seafarers brought with them on their journeys and what they found to be edible as they explored the coasts of this new land. It focuses, first, on the food exploits of early European explorers who mapped the landmass of Australia and probed its inhabitants, collecting knowledge about people and available resources for future exploitation by their European masters. It then moves to an analysis of food related matters during explorations that continued once Cook, under orders from the British, claimed the eastern part of the landmass of Terra Australis. The work of such people as the seafaring explorers of the coasts, seed collectors, and land surveyors supported the colonial administrators in their development and expansion the colony and the attitudes to food formed by such people were influential in the early days of colonization. Analysis of data suggests that post-Cook overland and coastal explorations were different from those conducted by earlier British and European explorations because after Cook claimed possession of the eastern coast of the landmass, the British were exploring with the intent to stay, to establish colonies, to stave off rival claims particularly of the French, and to optimize the use of available resources to support the expansion and consolidation of settlements. Scholars of archaeology, anthropology, and history have examined aspects of the encounters between sea explorers and inhabitants during this period but only passing attention had been made of the importance of food in these encounters. Undertaking a sociohistorical analysis, and similar to the previous chapter that analyzed what inhabitants were observed to be doing to procure and prepare endogenous edible flora and fauna at the time of these encounters, this chapter analyses what the seafaring explorers were eating and how they were procuring and preparing their food. Later chapters will examine food in the context of particular encounters in particular locations and the development of a new sort of food consciousness that arose from these encounters.