A bit of CLAY, and what it opens up

The story isn't about foraging. It's about the relationship to Land / Country. Who is allowed to belong to a place, and how is that belonging expressed through everyday contact with the land?

It started small. A dog walk, a patch of exposed (maybe clay?) bits by the track, and a simple curiosity: could this become pigment for my art, or something made by hand?

The knowledge search on Google came back like a smack in the face for my curiosity. First: some ochre deposits are culturally significant to Aboriginal Traditional Owners, tied to specific places and specific rights, not free for anyone to take. Second, removing natural materials — plants, clay, stone, and other natural materials — from council or public land is often restricted and can carry substantial fines. Two different systems of law both say NO.

Now I feel like a criminal just for recently picking a few twigs of saltbush near the beach for herbs, a nettle from an overgrown patch for my tea. I guess the pine mushrooms on the nature strip in Mt Eliza count the same way — council land, same rule.

What follows are three ways of relating to that same question — can I take a little of the land I live on — shaped by three very different histories. And since it's become common to talk about “decolonising” everything, or at least holding some awareness of how colonisation shaped our relationship to what we call “natural”.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: COUNTRY AS RELATIONSHIP.

Before land was surveyed into parcels, Aboriginal custodianship of this continent worked on a different logic, an older, deeply developed system of law than any council bylaw. Knowledge of when to pick, what to leave, and what belonged to whom was carried in songlines, seasonal calendars, and kinship — passed down as law.

The principles were practical and precise: take the outer growth, leave the root to keep producing. Take what the season is offering, not what it's saving for next year. Take enough, never more than enough. Ochre pits, yam fields, fishing grounds — each had custodians, each had protocol, each was tied to specific people with specific responsibilities. Sounds a bit like unregulated abundance, but it was a living relationship of obligation, refined over tens of thousands of years, where taking and tending were the same act.

Colonisation took the land. And it erased legal recognition of that older system, ignoring or criminalising the very knowledge-holders who could have kept it alive.

LATVIA: THE COMMONS AS RELATIONSHIP.

And this is where my own habit comes from — gathering bush medicine, berries, mushrooms, and small materials to play and create with along nature walks. Something that feels completely ordinary to me apparently reads here as unusual, even criminal.

Latvia kept something most of Europe lost. Under the Law on Forests, everyone has the legal right to gather wild berries, fruit, nuts, and mushrooms in state or municipal forests for personal use. As roughly half the country's forests are state-owned, this covers much of the land.

Flowers for wreaths, Midsummer celebrations, or simply a vase at home are gathered the same way — an assumed right woven into everyday culture, not something requiring paperwork. And once a year, before Christmas, Latvians are invited to walk into a state forest with their own axe and cut a single fir tree for free from designated areas.

Even in private forests, the default leans open: you may forage unless the owner has explicitly posted a sign forbidding it. None of this makes Latvia's forests unprotected; strict nature reserves exist, and the rules are enforced. But protection and personal access were never treated as opposites. The forest didn't need to be locked away from the people who loved it in order to survive them.

VICTORIA: LAND THROUGH PERMISSION OR OWNERSHIP.

In Victoria, picking a leaf for your own cup of tea is, in almost every practical sense, legal only on land you own — or with the owner's permission. State forests generally require a Forest Produce Licence to remove plant material; council reserves are often more restricted, and national parks allow almost nothing. Penalties can run into thousands of dollars.

So the land that's actually open to you narrows down to what you can afford to own — and for many people, that's not much. A small backyard. A strip of grass. Beyond the fence line belongs to the state, the council, or someone else.

The land itself hasn't changed. What changed is who gets to reach into it. The choice narrows to two paths: find someone with land who'll let you “gather”, or buy the product already picked and packaged from a shop.

I wonder whether this reflects Australia's colonial inheritance or whether capitalism is to blame. A society shaped by ownership, surveying, policing and permission inevitably develops a different relationship with land than one where common access remains part of everyday life.

But the feeling remains: land here is something to be managed from above before it can be touched.

At a recent workshop on listening to nature's sounds — birdsongs — a researcher explained that birds in dense urban environments sing differently to cut through the noise. Even birdsong adapts to enclosure. Maybe we did too.

*Creative expression by Agnes Kruze — reflection on Connection to Land.

These accounts draw on real law (Victoria's Forests Act 1958 and Forest Produce Licence Policy; Latvia's Meža likums) and documented Aboriginal land-management practice, but are written as reflective prose rather than a legal document — check current regulations before foraging anywhere