Pickled Pigface

A recent Metafilter thread revealed that Bush Tucker Man is available complete and for free on YouTube. It was one of the great Aussie outback series, a successor to another I loved as a kid, In the Wild with Harry Butler. Seeing that the ABC have put Les Hiddens on YouTube, I hope they do Butler’s series next. The thread featured a recent video with a nod to Bush Tucker Man, The Food That Fed Australia for 60,000 Years, done in a YouTuber style which sat a bit oddly for me with its factual and interview segments, but if that’s what it takes to get the knowledge out there, good for him. It was good, too, to see references to Aboriginal agriculture, the theme of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu of a decade ago—so different from how people used to think about indigenous Australia. Terra nullius, my arse. I did enjoy his dig about macadamia royalties. My dad once scored a sack of macadamias in the shell from his sister in Queensland, who had a tree, and made a neat tool for getting into them, a…