'This is a book about Australian food, not the foods that European Australians cooked from ingredients they brought with them, but the flora and fauna that nourished the Aboriginal peoples for over 50,000 years. It is because European Australians have hardly touched these foods for over 200 years that I am writing it.'
In this, the most important of his books, John Newton boils down these paradoxes by arguing that if you are what you eat, we need to eat different foods: foods that will help to reconcile us with the land and its first inhabitants.