Ryk Goddard
Kitana Mansell, you might have seen her on the paper this week talking about access to ingredients, Kitana, and the idea of kind of licensing native ingredients and people respecting if they're using them in their products, that there should be some form of recompense. How has that played out in other places?
Kitana Mansell
Well, I know that a guy called Sean Sherman over in America, he's Native American, has been able to successfully have all of his native ingredients be accessible for his community. And what I'm seeing in the business is just license after license and having to have many different meetings about how we can get ownership or even just half of the percentage of all these native ingredients that are being sold on our country. And yeah, I just think it's a bit crazy as a young person having to have all these meetings about why can't we just harvest the traditional foods of our old people and yeah, just really want to make this industry sustainable and make sure that the industry of Palawa food is owned and operated by Palawa people. And I think it's just really important to see that we rightfully should be able to just go out and harvest our traditional foods, whether it be on land that was returned back to us or land that hasn't been touched. So it's really about trying to promote to the wider community why that's so important to Aboriginal people. It's connection to country, it's connection to cultural practices, and it's a connection for Aboriginal people to start relearning all of this traditional knowledge around our foods and to promote it for the wider community to understand through education and food.
Ryk Goddard
And Kitana, I think a lot of people who have been using those ingredients, once you put that to them, would be like, oh, actually, solid point, well made. Have you had anyone, you know, going, oh, yeah, we should be giving you something from that pepperberry gin that we're making?
Kitana Mansell
Yeah, so we've had a lot of different schools over the years donate a lot of their pepperberries and river mint to help support us with making our ice cream or making a certain dish where we needed quite a lot that we didn't have on the property. So it was great to see how many schools have donated so many bush foods to us, as well as just locals with some of these native ingredients in their backyards. We're seeing a lot more people coming to speak with me about how we can collaborate and really give back to the Aboriginal community. So I think we've got a really good kind of pathway where we're going with that now. And we'd just like to see that build over time as well to just try and get as many locals to really support their Aboriginal local food business. We're actually fully booked until September this year, which is great. There's so much going on as well. We're just looking in the future now with building a native edible garden and really just getting all of our natural plants re-growing back at piyura kitina so that we can just really connect with those traditional foods. We do have a few already growing there naturally, but it would be great to see more of the 150 native edible plants that we don't have already on the property to be able to really get our young ones to reconnect to those cultural foods and add more to our tours and just be a more self-sufficient business where we just go outside, harvest the ingredients we need for the day, and then put that into our cooking. So that's kind of where we're going for next year, really just building that native garden up and just really connecting to those roots and being able to promote palawa kipli in many different shows that we have coming up as well in the next few months.