Myth has it that the penal colony in New South Wales suffered from starvation particularly from 1789 through to 1894.  In her 2013 history of Australia “Let the land speak” (Harper Collins) Jackie French argues strongly that this did not occur, that there was only a fear of starvation, exacerbated by a lack of understanding of the land they were in, and amplified by the isolation the white colonists felt.   She argues that the land and harbour provided sufficient food for all there, and that the reports of starvation, or of imminent starvation were due entirely to the shortage of wheat flour.  As Tarquin O’Flaherty has shown in his series “Man as Machine” wheat flour bread was considered the staple food for those of the British Isles.  French argues there was ample protein, primarily from the seafood – fish and shellfish of Sydney harbour – carbohydrates from corn grown and available, and necessary vitamins from food grown.  There was also a good supply of imported rations.  She points to the absence of scurvy as solid evidence that adequate vitamin C was being supplied.  She points to many reasons for the myth of starvation but:

‘Mostly the myth has persisted, and grown because our society is increasingly dislocated from the growing or harvesting of the food we eat.  Few people today have wandered the Australian bush or seaside, gathering more than enough food to survive on as they walk.  Much of the bush accessible to city bushwalkers has been dramatically simplified, and its food potential reduced, due to overgrazing by European animals, stock like cattle, sheep and horses, or feral rabbit, deer and goats, as well as repeated bushfires – not the firestick farming of the Dharug (local indigenous people), but hot, out of control flames as well as repeated ‘control burning’ with little understanding of what, or how much, needs to be burnt.  The bush that most Australians see now is no longer a living larder.

Nor are we a peasant society anymore, used to growing our own food.  Many gardeners grow vegetables, but they assume they need to buy fertiliser and watering systems to do so. (You don’t.)  Foods like pasta, rice and chicken are so cheap that it is a rare gardening cook who feeds their family purely on homegrown produce.  Yet it’s anot only possible to do so, it was actually a common experience two hundred years ago, and there are those in Australia who still manage it.

Tumalong, or Darling Harbour, is indeed a place of food.  But the tumult of ice-cream parlours, sushi bars and pasta palaces blinds us to the abundance there once was, when women cooked their fish in their cohoes and with every step you took the land offered you food: fresh, health, but also social.  Plaiting fish traps with other women in the shade of a tree while the kids gathered freshwater mussels – the laughter as well as the indigenous food has vanished from that generous land below the concrete of Darling Harbour.

The first colonists failed to recognise the living larder around them.  Over the next two hundred years European settlers would destroy much of the bounty of the land, and think they were doing good as they extinguished it.’

from ‘Let the land speak’ by Jackie French (Harper Collins) 2013, p 169