Bruce Pascoe and the first dancing grass harvest in 200 years
Writer’s farm in East Gippsland, Victoria, is producing native grains for flour
and bread using traditional Aboriginal techniques. On the hill above
Bruce Pascoe’s farm near Mallacoota in Victoria’s East Gippsland, there’s a sea
of mandadyan nalluk. Translated from Yuin, the language of the country, it
means “dancing grass”.
Bruce Pascoe with his dog Yambulla in the grass on the hill above his property
Pascoe and his small
team of Yuin coworkers have never done a harvest like this before. There’s so
much grass that both sheds are full, and Pascoe says they are “racing against
the clock to refine our methods so we can extract the seed and make the flour.
We have got to get this done in two or three weeks before the seed completely
drops.”
The team had a
ceremony for the the beginning of the harvest because they think it’s the first
time in 200 years that mandadyan nalluk has been harvested for food. “And some of these
people are descended from those who would have done the last harvest,” Pascoe
says. “That’s what this farm is all about – trying to make sure that Aboriginal
people are part of the resurgence in these grains, rather than being on the
periphery and being dispossessed again.”....
