nekare

Australian food is really a fusion culture - we have so many immigrants and so many overlapping food cultures that you get, for example, Thai-Italian food, or Greek-Indian (curry souvlaki is awesome) but mostly our food culture is very, very fresh food with good quality ingredients, even at cheaper places. My tiny rural town has three cheesemakers, two wineries, an olive grove, two professional beekeeping families, an organic free-range pork farm, a berry farm, an eel farm, an organic garlic farm, a few vegetable farms plus a few hundred dairies. People from the city come out to do gourmet tours, and that's the case for most rural areas within about 4 hours of the capital cities.

Aboriginal traditional food (known as bush tucker) has been on the increase in the last decade - using native honey, bush tomatoes, wattle and other seeds, and some spices like lemon myrtle are pretty common now. But a lot of the smaller animals that Aboriginal people ate are endangered now due to habitat loss and invasive species, so non-Aboriginal people aren't allowed to eat, say, goanna, turtle, snake or bandicoot. Kangaroo, emu and crocodile are good, though. The local eel farm that I mentioned above is actually a remnant of 5000 years of local eel farming - local Aboriginal people built stone eel-runs to herd eels into ponds for breeding and later eating. Those eel-runs are still used today. Australian history has this big myth that Aboriginal people never built or settled anywhere or farmed, but this is very much not true.