Christmas is tomorrow, which means food prep is in full swing. Is anyone planning on having roast scrub turkey on the day? Find out more from Barbara Santich’s discussion of fauna-eating practices in Bold Palates …

There wasn’t any hesitation in accepting wild duck and other game birds in the same way as kangaroo—indeed, wild birds often took the place of scarce domesticated poultry. In 1794 John Macarthur employed a game shooter with a team of dogs at his property, Elizabeth Farm, supplying wild ducks and kangaroos for the dinner table; ‘averaging one week with another’, he wrote, ‘these dogs do not kill less than three hundred pounds weight’. Knopwood regularly shot quail, pigeons and ducks in Tasmania. The intrepid Lady Franklin, wife of the governor of Tasmania, gladly ate a variety of local fauna on her travels overland from Port Philip Bay to Sydney in 1839, while Katherine Kirkland relished native fowl as a change from the monotony of mutton. Mrs Maclurcan, manager of the Criterion hotel in Townsville at the end of the 19th century, similarly considered native fowl as substitutes for European species. In her 1898 cookbook, Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes, Specially Suitable for Australia, she gave a recipe for roast scrub turkey—‘a small bird, not much larger than a wild duck, with a breast like a pheasant and flesh as white. I have often served it as pheasant and people have not known the difference’.