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Ken Macintyre and Barb Dobson 2017 Research Anthropologists Ken Macintyre and Barb Dobson 2017 Research anthropologists www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com The writings of colonial recorders have often misrepresented Aboriginal people as deriving most of their food from the hunting of large game (kangaroo, wallaby, emu) when in fact the bulk of their diet (around 80%) was based on vegetable foods and small game, for example, lizards, goannas, snakes, insect larvae, rodents and small marsupials many of which are now endangered or extinct. Grub eating was looked down upon as an aberrant, opportunistic and almost degenerate means of human survival. This practice, like other unfamiliar food traditions such as indigenous geophagy (earth-eating) that we have described in a separate paper (www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com) only reinforced the colonial idea that the Aborigines of southwestern Australia, like those in other parts of Australia, were subhuman, uncivilized and deserved to be colonized by the economically, culturally and technologically superior ‘civilized’ white people. Little did the colonial superiors realize that traditional Nyungar knowledge of environmental, botanical, biological, phenological, ecological and entomological phenomena was heavily steeped in science and mythology and that this could have become a valuable asset to the colonizers had they wished to avail themselves of this knowledge. Nyungar people used a range of environmental and astronomical indicators for predicting weather, seasonality, animal breeding patterns, movements and so on. They understood how humans, animals, plants and all of life were interconnected and this awareness was manifest in their complicated web of kinship and totemistic affiliations, rituals and mythology. Even anthropology graduates often have great difficulty comprehending the intricacies of these classificatory totemic kin relationships that bonded humans to their natural world. Indigenous mythologies most of which were not recorded by the white settlers owing to them being considered too incredulous (Grey 1841 acknowledges this) contained cultural metaphors, moral messages and deeply encoded ecological and animal, plant and bird phenological information. The traditional ecological and phenological knowledge held by Nyungar people at the time of European contact was a rich but, sadly, overlooked source of scientific wisdom that had evolved over many tens of thousands of years of empirical observation and experience. By not listening to these people and assuming them to have been technologically, culturally and socially inferior to the white colonisers, has meant the loss of an encyclopedic library of ecological knowledge that nowadays, with the rapid extinction of species in southwestern Australia, we shall never get back. We would like to thank Nyungar Elders from the Perth, Pinjarra and Busselton areas who over many years have contributed to our understanding of Nyungar culture, and have highlighted to us the significance of bardi as an indigenous food delicacy. We would particularly like to thank Albert Corunna for his insightful comments over the years. 2 www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com WHAT IS THE BARDI? ‘Our mob used to find good eating grubs in the blackboy, gum tree and wattle. We been eating bardi since the Dreamtime. The old people knew when to find them. After the first rains. Better than beef they reckoned.’ (Greg Garlett, Nyungar Elder 2000) Plate 1: Big fat juicy barde (cockchafers) from Xanthorrhoea (Photo by K. Macintyre, May 2008) As anthropologists we have often been confused by the use of the indigenous terms bardi and witchetty used to describe edible grubs in Australia. These terms are often used interchangeably to the point where bardi becomes defined as a witjuti grub and vice versa. How confusing is that? Both have become part of a lingua franca throughout Australia. When we tried to unravel the difference between a bardi and witjuti grub by asking some Nyungar Elders, they told us that a bardi is a type of witjuti grub. And maybe they are right. 3 www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com Plate 2: Cockchafer bardies in the trunk of decaying Xanthorrhoea (Photo by B. Dobson) Linguistic dictionaries and scholarly sources provide contradictory interpretations of the meaning of the term bardi (also rendered in ethno-historical sources as bardie, bardee, bardy, bader, bada, berda, paarde-paattt, barit, bert, and burrtt).1 Some say it is the larva of a longhorn beetle known as Bardistus cibarius belonging to the Cerambycidae family); others attribute it to the cockchafer larva of a scarab beetle (Scarabaeidae family); others to the larva of a buprestid jewel beetle from the Buprestidae family and others include as bardi the caterpillar larvae of moths, such as the hepialid rain moth Trictena atripalpis.2 The Buprestidae, Scarabaidae and Cerambycidae (all of which belong to the Order Coleoptera) represent three different Linnaean families of beetle, and some or all of these larvae found in southwestern Australia may be bardi. We need to stop and ask ourselves are these Western scientific categories of ‘species’ and ‘families’ culturally relevant to a non-Western indigenous grub taxonomy? Maybe some answers will come to light in this paper. Australian linguists Dixon et al (2006: 101-102) point out that the term bardi /badi/ is ‘chiefly used in Western Australia and South Australia’ and they acknowledge its Nyungar origins. They define bardi as: 4 www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com ‘The edible larva or pupa of the beetle Bardistus cibarius, or of any of several species of moth, especially Trictena atripalpis (formerly Trictena argentata). The beetle larva bores into the stems of grass-trees, eucalypts and acacias, and the moth larva is found underground, feeding on roots of eucalpts and acacias. The name is also applied to Abantiades marcidus. Also called bardi grub.’ While it would seem that bardi refers to a range of beetle and moth larvae, the ‘purists’ identify it to the immature form (larva) of the longhorn cerambycid beetle called Bardistus cibarius - this being the Linnaean species to which it was originally assigned in 1841 by the British taxonomist Edward Newman, based on an adult specimen provided to him by Captain George Grey from the Swan River Colony collected at King George Sound. 3 Yen (2010) a prominent scientist of invertebrates who has conducted extensive research on edible grubs in many parts of the world, including some Australian Aboriginal groups, categorically states that the term bardi should only be used to refer to beetle larvae and strictly to the larva of the buprestid beetle found in Xanthorrhoea. He states: ‘The name bardi grubs is based on a buprestid beetle from Xanthorrhoea in southwestern Western Australia, but has also been loosely applied to edible grubs across Australia.’ (Yen 2010:67) ‘…the guide for the official common names of Australian insects (Naumann 1993) lists three taxa of insects as bardi grubs: the hepialid moths Trictena atripalpis and Abantiades marcidus and cerambycid beetles; the term should only be applied to beetle larvae and strictly to the buprestid Bardistus cibarius (Yen 2005).’ (Yen 2010: 75-76) In a later work Yen (2014: 80) refers to the bardi grub as the larva of “the cerambycid beetle Bardistus cibarius.” We are not entomologists so the task of putting a Linnaean- classificatory label on the bardi is beyond our scope. It would seem that even the experts do not agree as to its exact Linnaean identity. We have searched high and low to find a photo of the Bardistus cibarius larva to help shed light on its enigmatic identity but we could not find a single named image of this particular beetle larva. There are photos of the adult beetle Bardistus cibarius (see Plate 5) but not its larvae because Linnaean taxonomy relies exclusively on adult specimens to identify the subtle differences between species. The remarkably similar overall appearance of many beetle larvae despite their different species, genera or families, makes it impossible for non-entomologists to determine which Linnaean species they belong to. To us, they all look the same. 5 www.anthropologyfromtheshed.com Even the entomologists Sreedevi and Verghese (2014:3-4) note that the larval forms of Buprestid and Cerambycid beetles look alike and confusing in the field. They state: ‘The larvae of the both groups are fleshy, white to greyish in colour, straight (not ‘C’ shaped), legless and taper gradually from anterior to posterior with dark, hardened and well developed mandibles. The Cerambycids are normally called as round headed borer and Buprestids are flat headed borer and as the name indicates, the larvae of the both can be differentiated by shape of the head primarily (Figs. 1-2). The colour of the Cerambycids will be fleshy white while Buprestids larvae ranges from dull white to greyish.’ Cerambycid larvae have also been described as ‘white to yellowish in colour with a soft body, small head and strong jaws, an enlarged thoracic segment and a body that tapers towards the tail with legs small or absent’ (Comstock and Comstock 1901; Hangay and Zborowski 2010 cited in Seaton 2012:12). In cool temperate zones the cerambycid life cycle may last from two to three years, most of that time spent in the larval stage inside the host plant. Yen (2014: 86) notes that longhorn beetle larvae are consumed in many cultures including New Zealand (known as “huhu”), Tonga, Fiji and Samoa. Another type of beetle larva consumed by Nyungar people is the cockchafer. This is found in abundance in the trunks of Xanthorrhoea at the proper season (see Plates 1-2). Nind (1831) records its name as paaluck which is also the name of its habitat provider - the decaying or dead Xanthorrhoea (called paaluc). Cockchafers are the larvae of scarab beetles. They are characteristically C-shaped when feeding or at rest and referred to as ‘white grubs’ or ‘curl grubs’ because they: ‘curl up into a ball when disturbed. They are creamy white in colour with a prominent head (which differs in colour with different species) and three pairs of well-developed thoracic legs.
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