Aboriginal chef Mark Olive wants more people around the world to understand indigenous Australian cuisine and its unique flavours

Chef Mark Olive, who helped launch Hong Kong’s recent Festival of Australia, has been championing indigenous cuisine in Australia for the past 30 years

He talks about using European styles to cook wallaby and kangaroo, and how indigenous herbs like wattleseeds and lemon myrtle are gaining traction overseas

4-MIN READ4-MIN

Chef Mark Olive, who has a restaurant in the Sydney Opera House, often appears on Australian TV promoting local produce and indigenous food. Olive visited Hong Kong recently to help to launch the Festival of Australia.

Published: 12:15pm, 7 Oct 2023Updated: 2:55pm, 9 Oct 2023

Chef Mark Olive is widely considered to be the godfather of Aboriginal cuisine in Australia. The affable Bundjalung man from Wollongong, just outside Sydney, has been a culinary fixture Down Under for close to 30 years. In addition to running his restaurants, “Black Olive” (as he is nicknamed) has hosted various food-related TV programmes while promoting and introducing the food of indigenous peoples.

Visiting Hong Kong for the first time recently, Olive helped launch Festival of Australia, a month-long showcase of Aussie ingredients and produce organised by its chamber, trade commission and consulate.

Although the First Nations chef is something of a celebrity at home and abroad, his array of indigenous ingredients, herbs and spices remains mostly unknown outside the country.

“At the moment, it’s still very Australian-centric,” Olive explains. “You do have places overseas now starting to pick up on our indigenous herbs, especially things like the lemon myrtle and wattleseeds. But the variety in our whole selection of herbs is huge.

“I was the first Aboriginal person to come out with a cooking degree in the early ’80s. It was way before all of these herbs were even available, so I had to do a lot of research.”

Australian ingredients such as wattleseed (above) are becoming better known, thanks to chefs like Mark Olive, and TV shows such as “MasterChef Australia”.

Olive explains that a lot of Aboriginal history was lost over the years and that while there were some libraries that held some useful information, he spent much of his time going out into the community, or “into the bush country” as he calls it, to do research.