This paper investigates the alignment of environmentalist and nationalist narratives through an examination of discussions of kangaroo consumption in popular media such as newspapers and cookbooks. In her bible of contemporary home cooking, The Cook's Companion, Australian chef Stephanie Alexander remarks that using kangaroo meat must, as an indigenous product, ‘qualify a dish as Australian’. And, she adds, such usage makes environmental as well as iconic sense. As I discuss in this paper, Alexander's comments are indicative of the framing of native foods: indigenous ingredients are billed as the solution to both the search for an authentically Aussie cuisine and the plight of the continent's devastated ecologies. Using John and Jean Comaroff's work on the politics of ecological discussions, the paper examines the entanglement of territory and ecology — the slippage between the ‘native’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘nation’ — to reveal how the realm of ecology, conceived of as ‘natural’ and therefore exterior to politics, is used as a forum for very political questions of ‘belonging’. The paper demonstrates how the framing of environmental discussions in the public sphere cannot be separated from wider questions of the politics of settler (post-)colonies.
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