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# Kangaroo grass, milled into flour
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/native-grain/
- Published: 2026-09-02T03:36:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T04:43:21.000Z
- Description: The same kangaroo grass that carpets a Sydney headland is being milled into flour on Country, and it is turning up on some of the best tables in the land.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Sustainable Living, All stories

Kangaroo grass grows quietly along the east coast, on roadsides and headlands and in the gaps we walk past without looking. It is also a grain, and it has been one for a very long time. At Yumburra farm in East Gippsland, the small social enterprise Black Duck Foods, started by Uncle Bruce Pascoe and Uncle Noel Butler, is harvesting and milling native grains into flour: kangaroo grass, dancing grass, Mitchell grass and wattle seed. The flour goes to bakers around the country and to restaurants including Ben Shewry's Attica in Melbourne, which means a grain that fed people here for thousands of years is back on the table, and back in the hands of the people whose grain it is.

The farming logic is the loveliest part. As Black Duck's general manager Dr Bram Mason puts it, these plants are deep rooted, perennial and self generating: they make their own seed, and that seed drops and replaces whatever has died. A paddock of them does not need replanting every year, or the fertiliser and herbicide that an imported annual crop asks for. It simply keeps going, the way it always did. There is something quietly satisfying in that, and something worth noticing next time you are standing on a headland with kangaroo grass around your ankles. It is not just a nice green carpet. It is a crop that was here first, and it is coming back.

Sources and links

Our short take: reporting drawn from ABC Rural's coverage of native grain flour, the Australian Community Media feature on native grass farming, and Greater Sydney Landcare's conversation with Bruce Pascoe. Photograph: John Robert McPherson, CC BY-SA 4.0.

- [Black Duck Foods](https://blackduckfoods.com.au)The farm and the flour, on Yuin Country.