A stolen painting and solanum wars

On my first day back at work, I clean my section of the office, wiping two months of dirt from the computers, printers and desks, replacing maps and photos stained with gecko dung on the pin-up board, de-webbing the windows. Under a bench, I find the dot painting which has hung on the walls of this dusty rammed earth office since before I came here, ten years ago. It was a kind of storyboard for a video made here on local Aboriginal land management.

It’s been ripped off the strips of wood that framed it and rolled up. The woman running the new training business in the office explains: an older bloke from the nearby town camp pulled it down when no-one was around, and walked off with it.
He was found a little later sitting down pulling the canvas off the frame, no doubt hoping to sell it.

This man has come to the office regularly in the last year looking for lifts into town for himself and his lame wife. The training woman felt sorry for them. For a while she made special trips to drive them into town, then got busier and decided she couldn't take them anymore, but the bloke kept coming to ask for lifts. So that story has come to an end, not a good one.

I think maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad thing it that painting had had a new life on some tourist's wall. I wonder what story the man would've made up for it. I wonder if he needed the money for food or for grog.

When I've had enough of cleaning, I wander over to the nursery, just across a dirt yard from the office. This nursery has staggered on through periods of ATSIC (national Aboriginal body) and Community Development Employment Program (sort of work-for-the-dole) funding, and trying to make a go of it as a business. In two decades of this, the nursery has supplied most of the trees for remote communities right across central Australia, often free of charge til the federal government axed ATSIC a few years ago.

Last year the boss was going to close the nursery down, the nursery manager didn’t come to work for weeks because he felt unsupported and depressed; the trickle of down-and-out CDEP workers weren’t helping much. The stalwarts were a woman and man in their fifties, who pricked out and potted up thousands of seedling over the years they worked in the nursery, despite drinking themselves to oblivion several times a week.

The man got sick last year and stopped coming for a while. Then both of them lost their jobs when the federal government axed CDEP, as part of their intervention to reform communities in the Northern Territory.

While I’ve been away, CDEP has come back, so our organisation now has it and ‘work-for-the-dole’, the program set up by the government, I thought, to replace CDEP. My boss tells me people in communities join up with whichever one is best run, although theoretically, I think, they have to be on work-for-the-dole for a while before they can move on to CDEP.

This year the nursery has a new lease of life. The boss has seen the light with bush tomatoes: native solanums, more like pale yellow opaque sultanas with a sweet tangy taste. Aboriginal people love them, and they’re good for you, have always been eaten a lot.

About 10 years ago, a woman in Sydney decided that bush tomato chutney would be a great business idea. She only used one or two tomatoes in each jar, because the taste is too strong for whitefellas. She managed to get one of the big supermarkets to take it on, and the chutney sold, especially as it said on the jar that buying it supported Aboriginal communities.

Because the supply chain for wild-harvested tomatoes is erratic, because of unpredictable rain and fire – both of which the plant needs to grow well – and wholesalers struggling with an uncertain market, this woman has decided to push for people to cultivate bush tomatoes, preferably in Aboriginal communities, to keep the connection and market strong.

She’s not the only person to think of this. A bloke who runs a big nursery down south got onto the same thing some years ago and made his own bush tomato chutney – ‘outback pride’, as opposed to the woman’s ‘outback spirit’. Our Aboriginal organisation was the first he approached, and worked with him to set up his first horticulture plots on communities. I won’t go into all that, but it didn’t end on good terms. The profits for communities were minimal, maybe because they ate too many of the tomatoes themselves, but not just because of that.

This is only one battleground in what I think of now as the Solanum Wars. Aboriginal people don't have much say in them, they're run by whitefellas. The federal government-funded Desert Knowledge research centre, based in Alice Springs, is now bemusing everyone by spending millions on trial bush tomato horticulture plots, so the nurseries will know how to do it. (At least one nursery has already done it, many times.)

Anyway, the last year or two there have been virtually no bush tomatoes to harvest out bush, because there hasn't been much rain. The woman in Sydney got down to her last tomato and, according to my boss, has had to stop making the chutney. The bloke with the nursery down south is sitting on tons of them but his asking price is rumoured to be through the roof.

So the Sydney woman has got into the ear of my boss, maybe given him a bit of money, and he’s got the nursery growing thousands of bush tomatoes. The nursery manager has a proper, if part-time, offsider. Two giant plastic and shadecloth green houses have been ordered. A huge slab of concrete has been laid in the work area – rather bigger than was needed, but these things often happen without much discussion.

It’s not entirely clear yet what will happen to all the bush tomato plants, but it seems there’s a community farm business interested in some of them. And some will be planted in plots on town camps – although this didn’t make any money last time our organisation tried it.