Dreamtime breads

So who really did discover the art of making, then breaking, bread? 

Breads have been with us for thousands of years. We know, for instance, that the Babylonians and Mesopotamians were collecting and grinding wild grains as far back as the Neolithic period – or the final stages of the Stone Age (about 11,500-14,500 years ago).

It was only a (seemingly) short jump to cultivating these grains – and the earliest forms of wheat were among them.

The Egyptians caught on, and capitulated wheat and barley growing Big Time along the Nile to the point where bread became a dietary staple. The ancient Egyptians are also credited with knocking out the first leavened loaves . . . but more on this later.

Then came the Greeks, followed by the Romans – and both were already fighting over the virtues of white Vs brown types – and bread was on its way to becoming part-n-parcel of ongoing European life.

Although there are sample rolls and loaves in the British Museum said to date back more than 5000 years, I believe the earliest types of breads date way, way further back – into the Dreamtime.

Let’s assume the Australian Aborigines have inhabited the Great South Land for 40,000-60,000 years. If that’s the case – and with grinding stones having been dated older than 40,000 years – it’s a fair bet these guys were cranking out crude flat breads and seedcakes long before the Sumerians were a twinkle in the Middle East’s eye.

It seems quite possible that, independent of the accepted Euro-centric view of history, Australian Aborigines had perfected so-called ‘bush breads’ 30,000-45,000 years BEFORE those Fertile Crescent neoliths. And long before earlier Stone Agers even figured they could chew seeds for nutritional value.

Mind boggling, heh?

What’s more, it appears that little changed for the Aborigines until white settlement of Australia, and the introduction of pre-milled flour.

As the name implies, bush breads were produced using seasonal and regional wild seeds, roots, nuts and legumes – which were pounded to flour, mixed with water and shaped into flat ‘cakes’. These were then baked in hot coals.

High in protein and carbs, these bush breads and seedcakes would have formed an important part of Aboriginal diets for tribes scattered coast- to-coast and cape-to-cape across Terra Australis.

But it was tough, time-consuming work, relegated to women (the guys were engaged in the ‘hunter’ side of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ equation).

Native millet, spinifex seeds and wattle seed are known to have been used in these bush breads.

However, the advent of pre-milled flour made bread-making life so much easier for Aboriginal women that traditional bush varieties died out rapidly through most parts of Australia. Only some remote Central Australian Aborigines were still baking bush breads into the 1970s.

From bush breads, it was only a short jump to that other quintessentially Australian bread-like concoction, damper.

But I’ll cover that separately.