Just like Indigenous art, for a long time, those benefiting from the sale of bush foods were not always Indigenous people.
As more Australians seek out native foods, plant and products, their origins and the ability to verify their authenticity is becoming increasingly important.
Now, Indigenous communities are playing a leading role in developing the technology that will allow consumers to be confident in their purchases.
Director of the University of Queensland's Australian Research Council Training Centre for Uniquely Australian Foods, Yasmina Sultanbawa, said a new app using blockchain (database) technology would allow the history of a product from harvesting to the end user to be traced.
"Indigenous people know the nutritional value. They know the therapeutic value of these products," Professor Sultanbawa said.
"But because of the market demand and increase needed in the supply to meet that demand, there is a need for us to prove [the] premium quality of these products.
"You may use rapid technologies like sensor technologies to understand the quality of the product, and you will also use this bush tucker app to recall the information — when it was harvested, how it was harvested, how it's going to be stored, how it is going to be distributed," Professor Sultanbawa said.
Aus Tukka app benefits
Professor Sultanbawa was hopeful the technology behind the ausTukka mobile phone application would be used by other Indigenous nations to benefit both communities and consumers.
"It empowers the communities to actually be in the front seat when they negotiate prices, and it also gives the comfort to buyers because you have that transparent evidence to show the authenticity and the provenance of the product," she said.
"I can imagine the retailers like Woolworths and Coles being very comfortable in buying products from such a native food ledger because the evidence is there to say that it is coming from communities, and then the premium quality is retained."
Jagera, Yugambeh and Githabul woman and Indigenous Enterprise Group chair Madonna Thomson said it was not just limited to bush foods but all Australian botanical and food species across numerous industries.
The products range from wild-harvested fruits, like the Kakadu plum, through to cultivated saltbush or wattle and manufactured jams or cosmetics.
"I think this is also a real possibility being able to shape then what constitutes an Australian agricultural crop over time because a lot of our native food species are still considered novelty," she said.
"We need to, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, rather than wait to be invited, we need to be part of leading a change in this particular industry."
Maintained for generations
She said traceability was especially important because of the place-based nature of bush foods and plants.
"A lot of species uniquely come from particular areas of Australia and some of those species are found nowhere else on the continent," she said.
"It enables the user to see 'Oh OK, Kakadu plum. It only comes with comes from these areas. This is where it originates. These are the original horticulturalists and users of this product.'"
"These species play a very important part culturally to those communities. They have totems attached to these. They have a relationship of skin law or attached to the species."
Ms Thomson said those species had been maintained for more than 10 generations in many cases.
"If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't have the benefits we do now," she said.
"It's really important in Australia as the interest in this becomes greater that we preserve that, we enable those communities to maintain that for as long as possible.
"And whether those communities want to be able to put forward what they call that species as well in their own language."
Ms Sultanbawa said the storytelling behind the products was very important.
"If they want people to know about how they look after country and the cultural knowledge they have, even the burning practices, they can just upload it to the blockchain so that people who are not aware of those can really understand what those practices are," she said.