Earth oven cookery and cuisines in Aboriginal Australia: Ethnographic and ethnohistoric insights from Western Cape York Peninsula and the Southern Murray Darling Basin

Abstract

Earth oven cookery involves cooking food in pits using hot heating elements, typically over extended periods of time. This technique has been reported in Holocene and Late Pleistocene contexts in Australia, and is of ongoing importance to many Indigenous peoples today. Despite considerable previous work on earth ovens and related sites, few have explored earth oven cookery as a distinctive cultural phenomenon. Here, we investigate the foodways associated with earth ovens drawing on ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources from the southern Murray-Darling Basin and central Western Cape York Peninsula, Australia. While there are many commonalities in earth oven cookery, it was also a highly adaptable practice in terms of the range of foods cooked, oven construction practices, and cooking techniques. People widely used herbs and wrappings to flavour foods, added water to aid the cooking process, and made extensive use of other plant materials to impart flavour, prevent food from burning, while also keeping food free of debris. We show that earth ovens are strongly associated with culturally distinctive cuisines and foodways and an investigation of these cookery practices can enhance our understanding of past social organisation, identity, commensality and the scale of food production.

Keywords:

• Foodways
• cuisines
• earth ovens
• ethnohistory
• ethnography
• Murray-Darling Basin
• Cape York Peninsula

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge and thank Aboriginal Custodians both in the Napranum and Weipa regions in north Queensland, and the Riverland region of South Australia. This research is approved and supported by our community partner organizations including the Western Cape Community Trust, The Napranum Aboriginal Shire Council, Chuulangan Aboriginal Corporation, and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation. We are also grateful to the AA Editors and three anonymous referees for comments and advice on the manuscript.

Ethical approval

The research was undertaken under ethics approvals granted by the Flinders University Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee (approvals 6618 and 8295) and the University of New England Human Research Ethics Committee (HE20-219).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by: The ‘Indigenous Foodways in Colonial Cape York Peninsula’ project at the University of New England, and co-funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects Scheme (LP170100050), the Western Cape Communities Trust (Central Sub-Regional Trust) and the Queensland Museums Network (Brisbane), and supported by the Napranum Aboriginal Shire Council, the Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation, Flinders University and Macquarie University. Second, the ‘Interrogating the Riverland's colonial frontier’ project at Flinders University funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects Scheme (LP170100479) and supported by the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation and the Australian Landscape Trust (Calperum Station).