Biting the Hand that Feeds: Australian Cuisine and Aboriginal Sovereignty in the Great Sandy Strait

Abstract

Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson (1851–1933) is lauded in both academic and popular circles as the author of the first uniquely Australian cookbooks, which she wrote between 1876 and 1895. Rawson was a prolific writer and stressed that she was the first white woman settler at Boonooroo in the colony of Queensland, where she was ‘beholden to the blacks’ to show her what to eat (Rawson, 1895, p. 54). Rawson's cookbooks famously codified how to use Australian non-human animals, including wallaby, parrot and goanna, as meat, and her published memories of this time detailed the context in which she implemented and refined these recipes. Rawson organised and policed racialised frontier space as a white woman, claiming British sovereignty over Butchulla country in order to profit from and teach other settlers to profit from the coastal land and waterways. This paper draws on ecofeminist and postcolonial theory and works to explore how Rawson organised food production to exercise violent colonial claims to sovereignty as a white woman, explicitly advising other settlers to do the same.

Avustralya Mutfak Kültürünün Tari̇hsel Geli̇şi̇mi̇ Ve Avustralya’nin Gastronomi̇ İmajina Yöneli̇k Çalişmalar

“…Yerel bitki ve hayvan popülasyonunun azalması sonucu ekolojik yapı, iklim değişiklikleri gibi etkilere karşı kırılgan hale gelmiştir. Bu nedenle kolonileşme öncesi dönemde kullanılan bitkisel ve hayvansal kaynakların araştırılarak tekrar tüketime sunulabilmesi ve üretim alanlarının genişletilmesi için çalışmalar son yıllarda önem kazanmıştır (Woodcock, 2016ve Rhea, 2017.…”