Nakkiah Lui’s new series is a memoir, meets history lesson, meets therapy session — and it’s a feast for the ears.
Nakkiah Lui is a Gomeroi and Torres Strait Islander writer, playwright and actor — not to mention the woman behind Preppers, which happens to be my favourite show of all time. The 2021 comedy series, starring the late Uncle Jack Charles, saw Lui play cancelled TV presenter Charlie, who flees the city to her nan’s land claim, only to discover her nan leased it to a bunch of hapless doomsday preppers. Choosing to stay with the weird and wacky naysayers rather than face the music back home, Charlie (Lui) attempts to learn their ways of living off the land, surviving off-grid, and preparing for the end of the world. The gag is, of course, that they’re all pretty terrible at it.
But after listening to First Eat, Lui’s latest personal docu-series available on Audible, it’s hard not to see the threads that run through much of Lui’s work: questions of sovereignty, of self-determination, and of what a decoloninised autonomous Indigenous-led society might look like in the modern Australia. Where Prepper’s cleverly trojans these questions in hilarious hijinks involving an underground bunker that only locks from the outside, or getting Native plants mixed up to disastrous gastric effects — Lui tackles these questions head on in her new series.
You can’t get any more political, any more personal than food.
“[The series] really did take me to some really, really unexpected places that were challenging. But it’s about food. It nourishes us. It sustains us. I’m a big believer that the personal is political. You can’t get any more political, any more personal than food. So in a way, the hugeness of the journey of First Eat was incredibly, incredibly nourishing for the soul and mind.”
Food Is Family
Helped along by her family, her best friend and actor Miranda Tapsell, and a ton of staunch deadly First Nations women around the world, Lui explores what her plate of food might look like in a decolonised world. It’s a question that takes her everywhere; through the past of her own family history, the Napa Valley, Aotearoa New Zealand, and her mum’s kitchen. For Lui, the complex reality of colonialism is a heavy one that she carries on her person, as well as everywhere she went as she explored the complex web our food weaves.
“When you ask people what their first memory of food, people will so often they close their eyes and they move their tongue around, and it’s directly linked to family and home… so it was impossible to then do this podcast without talking about my own family’s story.”
In First Eat, Lui unravelled the lives of the people who came before her. “Colonisation is… a word, it’s a political word. It’s quite esoteric. Like what is it?” she asks. “It kind of seems really far removed and I think in this history and the telling of the narrative of Australia, we really do remove colonisation as a thing of the past. Seeing it so directly impact my family, even how my grandma and grandpa ended up in their housing commission home in St. Mary’s, it was because of a government policy in which they were moving Aboriginal people in regional areas to urban areas.”
Lui recalls discussing this family history with her mum over the course of the podcast. “We were making a childhood meal that I grew up on, which was rabbit stew. And we talk about… how it became one of our childhood meals, the family recipe. But what was really sad, I guess why I said it was a really full-on time for me and it was looking at I guess the history of our family and seeing the direct impact of colonisation.”
“I think so often when people think, when they hear about chronic diseases and our life expectancy being lower than that of a non-Aboriginal person, they think it’s lifestyle factors. And it’s not. It’s genes and it’s the impact of colonisation.”
Food is not just what our family cooks either. The impact of colonisation on diet is in our DNA. I shared with Lui that I had recently been diagnosed with insulin resistance and that the Doctor said my Indigeneity was a major factor in being susceptible.
“I think so often when people think, when they hear about chronic diseases and our life expectancy being lower than that of a non-Aboriginal person, they think it’s lifestyle factors. And it’s not. It’s genes and it’s the impact of colonisation.”
On Her Personal Relationship With Food
Our relationship with food is in everything, steeping into politics, history, religion, and family histories. But of course, it’s also very personal. As a Wonnarua person who has often related to Lui’s public struggles with her body and weight, I asked her if First Eat impacted her personal relationship with food.
“I had weight loss surgery between Seasons 1 and 2 of Black Comedy. I had some really chronic health problems that needed to be addressed,” recalls Lui. “Having that surgery was life-changing for me, not just because I lost weight and it helped with a lot of my health issues, but it really made me have to address some really full-on issues I had with food.”
Lui stresses that the surgery was a tool: it didn’t fix everything, but it was a way for her to restore some autonomy and control over her body. When she began working on First Eat, she realised she was still in the thick of the fight.
“It was really doing this podcast that I realised that I’ve been trying to fight for some type of control over my body my entire life. That’s been a fight that my family have had their history, whether that being, trying to find a home, trying to find a sense of place, trying to find a sense of worth. And I guess that’s what I mean when I say wanting to find a sense of control.”
Lui adds that her relationship to eating has even impacted her relationship to her baby, Lux. “I think for myself it was like ‘what do I view as food and how do I look at myself and what is that relationship?’ And what came out of it is that I wanted food and the things that nourished me and sustained me not to dictate how I see myself.”
“I didn’t really articulate that until coming out of this podcast and I realised I don’t want my daughter [to experience that]. Whether it be their size, the colour of your skin, your gender, any identifiable factors that might make you different or feel like you don’t have control over or feel like you’re not at home in your body.”
“I want you to think of food as nourishment, but also that your community be nourishment, and your values, and your laughter, and your rebellion to be what sustains you. And for you to create meals that are symbolic of the world that you want to live in and for you to share that with other people.”
First Nations Food Sovereignty, At Home and Beyond
“What does a decolonised plate of food looks like? I don’t know,” Lui says of the question she poses in First Eat. However, she adds that she had the privilege of making some incredible connections as she worked to find an answer.
Food is so intertwined with our value system and land.
“There are a lot of people around the world and around Australia who are answering that question or taking that question and changing it and doing life and community building differently. Who are creating space and a future differently with the use of food. Food is so intertwined with our value system and land.”
In First Eat, Lui’s search to define the relationship between food, land, community and First Nations sovereignty takes her far and wide. She travels to the West Coast of the USA and speaks to First Nations elders there on the movement to rematriate the land. A movement that sees prioritising the return of Indigenous lands to Indigenous women.
“We very much made a conscious decision to speak to women and in particular First Nations or women of colour because land and food go so hand in hand. But land is so [related to] who gets to be the expert or the knowledge holders. We so often think of it as men, and white men at that,” says Lui.
Across the ditch, Lui also found solidarity in sharing meals with Māori peoples. But there was also a certain grief she felt in sharing in the cultures of others.
I’d say the hard bit was going, ‘I don’t have that, I don’t know the language’. There were certain rituals around culture that were stolen from my family that I don’t have to pass down onto my daughter.”
“I had the incredible meal with these Māori artists called Lucy and Rudy, and we’d do a Māori ritual. You give thanks and acknowledgements before you eat… Hearing Māori language everywhere, going over to Northern California and seeing a restaurant like Wahpepah’s Kitchen and where Crystal Wahpepah makes these incredible, incredible meals sourced from First Nations suppliers in North America, and going, wow, I wish I had access to something like that.”
“Then talking to different First Nations groups in Australia who have different relationship to land and language, and I guess I’d say the hard bit was going, ‘I don’t have that, I don’t know the language’. There were certain rituals around culture that were stolen from my family that I don’t have to pass down onto my daughter.”
“So it was hard to acknowledge what [I] had lost, because in my family, and I guess for myself as a storyteller, I think culture evolves and I think we have a lot to share. And I still feel like a proud First Nations person. We have a lot of culture because we are not people who exist in the past. But acknowledging the trauma and even just where we came from and that we don’t have access to that land anymore, private land, that was really hard. But in saying that, the solidarity and resistance and generosity, inclusivity of people who have had a similar experience to you, that is incredibly validating and for me gives me hope for the future.”
Hope, for Lui, is a huge part of her work. For her, it’s a verb, not just a noun. It is something that you do.
“For me, it comes down to the power of story. There are over a billion First Nations people around the world. I think when you are pushed to the margins, if you’re a group that is told that you are a smaller group… you’re not at the centre of power, that you are in the minority… but it’s actually a very small group of people who are [powerful] and get to control the story. What I think is incredible and what gives me hope — and I think hope is a doing word, we create hope — is the way stories are penetrating culture right now. And so many different stories because I think it makes us feel like we’re not alone.”
First Nations peoples in Aotearoa and the US both have treaties with their First Nations peoples. While this does not mean they’re free from colonial violence — Lui’s grief at the loss of her own culture was compounded by seeing what other First Nations peoples in other places have rebuilt and maintained. The difference is clear, and for Lui, it’s marked by one part of our history in particular.
“We do have a pan-Aboriginal movement that was very, very instrumental in achieving civil rights. So you can look at the [1967 referendum]. I did a podcast called Debutante about First Nations debutante balls. The first First Nations debutante ball was in 1968 and that happened right after the referendum.”
“If we can come to a common truth about how this country was created and called Australia through the invasion and stolen land of Aboriginal people, then maybe we might be able to create a future in which all people have value.”
“We have a referendum coming up later this year. I’m not here to tell anyone how to vote. But part of that, the Uluru statement was a truth-telling process. And that is for all Australians to come together to decide on a common truth. That is our story. If we can come to a common truth about how this country was created and called Australia through the invasion and stolen land of Aboriginal people, then maybe we might be able to create a future in which all people have value.”
It’s all connected — food, referendums, land, sovereignty. After all, none of us can live without it. Food, the love of it, who makes it, who grows it, who owns the land it’s grown on — it all matters. Most importantly, it all matters at once, not in the moment of a single bite, or recipe, or policy. Decolonising our plates, Lui found, is decolonising everything and building something better for everyone.
“I talked to an amazing Native Title lawyer, Taylor Gray, who talks about landback and food as the basis of a black economy,” recalls Lui. When I ask what she allows herself to imagine when she imagines our people with land and food back, she wonders.
“What if our cities had bits of land returned? And not only that, what if we lived in a city, I’m talking about Sydney, where you had land that was returned to First Nations people, cared for by First Nations people, but everybody had access to fruits and vegetables, and particularly native fruits and vegetables and medicines for free.”
Lui continues, “so often with food, I noticed when people would talk about First Nations ingredients, especially in hospitality industry who weren’t First Nations, they’ll talk about the fruit or the vegetable, the plant. They’ll completely leave out the culture and the people and the practice and the knowledge that it came from. So I think that’s really kind of… emblematic of our acknowledgement of First Nations people and land in this country.”
As we wrap our interview, I congratulate Lui on her recent deal with HBO (Blak Succession, anyone?), and ask her if she has anything else she wants people to know about her or her new podcast, First Eat. “People should listen to it as a form of allyship. Don’t be racist. No, that’s not true,” she jokes. But then she offers something more sincere. “I hope that the generosity and laughter that was had over those meals really translates to the listeners and that when they listen that they can laugh, learn, and get hungry.”
First Eat is available to stream on Audible.
Merryana Salem is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster. Follow them on Twitter.