I recently had the pleasure of visiting Western Australia for the first time in my 40 years. It is another world to the eastern states! The sun burns hotter and brighter, the skies are clearer, and the bush is chock-a-block full with new and interesting plants and animals. South Western Australia has long been known as a botanical biodiversity hotspot, home to more than 25,000 different species of plants, many of those endemic, living in this region only.
Of course, European colonisation has done much to destroy the once-abundant native staple foods of the west. Native scrub has long been cleared for housing, industry, commerce, transport and most of all, agriculture, primarily wheat and stock. The alteration in the landscape has been greatly detrimental to many native food plants, so much so that the recent WA Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 has made it an offense to harvest any West-Australian native plant without a permit, making bush food foraging an onerous task. Nevertheless, ample opportunity for photography abounded. Here’s what I found!
Sword sedge (Lepidosperma gladiatum) is WA's lomandra look-alike. It can be used in the same way as lomandra: white leaf bases can be eaten and the seeds used to make flour.
For more information about any of the foods listed here, one of the best guides to Western Australian food plants is Vivienne Hansen and John Horsfall (2019), Noongar Bush Tucker: Bush Food Plants of the South-West of Western Australia (Crawley: UWA Publishing). More than 250 bush tucker items of this region are found in this book, but keep the admonitions of the Biodiversity Act 2016 in mind if you get the bug to go out and harvest!
Some of the plants listed or mentioned here already have their own articles* on Bush Food Forager:
