Wp/nys/Bardi

Witchetty-Made

Moort Wongi - family talking about Bardi)

Greg Garlett

"Our mob used to find kwop eating grubs in the blackboy, gum tree and wattle.We been eating bardi since the Dreamtime. The old people knew when to findthem. After the first rains. Better than beef they reckoned."

Wadjella Wongi - Non-Indigenous people talking about Bardi

Captain George Grey

"compares in a cross-cultural manner the settler’s revulsion to the eating of grubs with the indigenous people’s cultural abhorrence of the European consumption of raw oysters. He comments:‘Grubs are either eaten raw or roasted; they are best roasted tied up in a piece of bark, in the manner that I have before stated that they cook their fish. If the natives are taunted with eating such a disgusting species of food as these grubs appear to Europeans, they invariably retort by accusing us of eating raw oysters, which they regard with perfect horror."

Eating raw oysters can cause very severe and unpleasant food poisoning if the oysters are spoilt or contaminated. People who have suffered this often gain a life-long aversion to many types of sea food. Bardi are safer than oysters to eat raw.

George Grey learnt Noongar whilst in West Australia. As a Lieutenant, he led expeditions to the West coast of Australia. On his second expedition his party were the first Europeans to see the Gascoyne River (in the Gascoyne region of WA) in 1839. but after being shipwrecked they had to walk to Perth. They survived the journey through the efforts of Kaiber, a Whadjuk Noongar man, who organised food and what water could be found (they survived by drinking liquid mud). On his first expedition to West Australia his party had discovered the Glenelg River in the Kimberley in 1838 but had also been shipwrecked.

Eating

Yudarn dookoon or “tying-up cooking" was one method of preparing the bardi grub, where the bardi would be roasted tied up in a piece of bark, in the same way that they cooked fish