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At Engonnia, a one horse, one pub town in far western New South Wales, the locals are learning to keep their heads down.
It's bush tomato season. Harvest begins in late autumn and continues throughout winter unless halted by a severe frost.
This is the first harvest in a new joint venture and the enthusiasm is evident.
Each day, a dedicated band of volunteers from the Clara Hart community kneels in the red desert sand, hovers over rows of carefully tended plants and delicately plucks the valuable fruit from the bush tomato's spiny branches.
The market garden is a mere half hectare, but it presents new and exciting possibilities for this remote, socially disadvantaged Indigenous community.
The driving force behind this community-backed initiative is Tannia Edwards, the chief executive of the Murrawarri Local Aboriginal Land Council.
Two years ago, while attending a Native Foods conference in Dubbo, she saw a presentation by Mike and Gayle Quarmby.
The couple are trailblazers of Australia's nascent native foods industry and the owners of Outback Pride, the nation's largest grower and supplier of bush foods.
"It lit that spark," recalled Ms Edwards, who immediately invited the Quarmbys to Engonnia, an hour's drive north of Bourke, to have them assess the viability of growing bush foods at Clara Hart.
The community gave the idea the thumbs up. A plot was selected, a memorandum of understanding between the parties was signed and work began.
The first step was building a high, vermin-proof perimeter fence to keep out pests such as feral goats.
"Roos and goats, emus. You get a few odd cattle here and there too," said Wayne Kelly, a grandson of Clara Hart, after whom the settlement was named.
It was her advocacy for Aboriginal rights that saw this small area of land granted to traditional owners in the 1950s.
Bush tomatoes occur naturally in the surrounding countryside, but like all desert plants only flourish periodically when conditions are ideal.
In this case, solanum centrale, known to the locals as kutjera, thrives after a mild bushfire, followed by a summer thunderstorm. So the market garden tries to emulate the natural conditions.
The plants get plenty of potash and the water (the plot has drip line irrigation) is turned off in autumn to promote fruit set.
The fruit has little resemblance to conventional tomatoes.
When it ripens in the cooler months to yellow it has a vanilla-like taste. When it's further dried it carries a distinctive smoky flavour.
Its unique qualities make it an increasingly sought ingredient for chefs and high gourmet food outlets.
Other traditional food plants have also been planted and are starting to flourish. There's munyeroo, a type of portulaca or pigweed, quandongs or native peach trees as well as marsdenia, often called bush bananas.
With Mr Quarmby's guidance a drying shed has just been completed. It will give the bush tomatoes a much longer shelf life.
The bush foods will provide the community with much needed nutrition.
Being a long way from town makes it hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables.
"We can have it right here in our backyard," Ms Edwards said.
"You know one of our kutjera is 10 times the vitamin C content of an orange," she said.
Because of their high nutritional value, bush foods are being embraced as "super foods".
It's one of the fastest growing sectors of the Australia's horticultural industry, albeit from a low base.
"There are thousands of Australian native food plants that Aboriginal people used on an everyday basis," said Mr Quarmby.
"We've only started to really utilise probably a hundred."
"Their nutrient levels are sky high in comparison with world standard," added Mr Quarmby.
"So Aboriginal people didn't need to eat very much to be very healthy, very fit and healthy."
For the Quarmbys, overseeing the work here requires a three-day drive from their base in South Australia.
But to them the venture is more than finding a good supplier of valuable bush foods.
It's about empowering the community to some degree of self-sufficiency.
"So we're very hopeful," Ms Quarmby said.
"We keep coming back here with faith in our hearts and just face whatever is happening and just do the job. Get down and get dirty and do the job."
"Plants have a wonderful ability of feelgood," Mr Quarmby added.
"You watch something grow and you can harvest a bit of it and eat it. It improves the psyche of a community.
"When we started this project that's what it was all about; jobs and training and quality of life."
Ms Edwards is determined to see the market garden succeed and expand in the future.
"They'd like to expand it and we'd go along with it, with the expansion of this," Mr Kelly said.
"This is way too great. We need it to grow."
"Now we've got this we can think bigger," Ms Edwards concluded.
"It's also us giving back to our elders and our next generation, to be able to pass that on. It's a game-changer."
Tim Lee's story screens at 12:30pm this Sunday on Landline.
Topics: bush-tucker, rural-women, agricultural-crops, women-in-agriculture, food-and-beverage, indigenous-culture, australia, nsw, bourke-2840
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