Boonah, Queensland. Night. A gang of white-haired pensioners in head torches are running through final checks. These are the Women Against Cane Toads (WACT) and they’ve come to a golf course, not to putt the pests, but to plonk them into buckets. They call it toadbusting.
“Be decisive,” they instruct Tony Armstrong, presenter of Eat the Invaders, as he dithers over a particularly portly Bufo marinus.
When the WACT first formed, they made a “toadometer” to record their nightly hauls – but immediately had to adapt its parameters when they caught nearly 10,000 toads in one week, rather than the projected hundreds.
Cane toads – introduced to north Queensland in 1935, to control beetles destroying sugar crops – go to sleep when put in the fridge, then into the big sleep if put into the freezer. It’s the most humane way to kill them. But would you eat one?
Eat the Invaders is a six-part ABC TV series that attempts to sell Australia’s invasive species – rabbit, carp, cane toad, camel, feral cat, deer – as efficient protein sources, if we could just overcome our prejudices. (The cane toad is a top source of omega 3!) The show brings a playful approach to enduring problems: a GPS is attached to a pet cat named Snuggles, to demonstrate to its shocked owner how many kilometres a domestic kitty will prowl at night, let alone a feral one; and a TV advertising agency is challenged to make the cane toad palatable to kids, resulting in Croaky Crunches (which go down well with a young focus group). “Am I shaping up to be the Colonel Sanders of cane toad?” Armstrong wonders.
Armstrong, who previously brought his laid-back style to Great Australian Stuff and Tony Armstrong’s Extra-Ordinary Things, clearly relishes traversing the country to meet ferreters, cattle farmers, Aboriginal rangers and CWA groups, rolling up his sleeves to get his hands dirty.
He is joined by artist and professional mischief-maker Kirsha Kaechele, who recently made headlines with her Ladies Lounge at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), and Mona’s executive chef, Vince Trim.
Eat the Invaders piggy-backs off Kaechele’s 2019 compendium Eat the Problem. The vision for that book – and a notorious nine-course feast created by Trim – came to Kaechele during a psychedelic trip. In sober terms, she is dedicated to finding sustainable solutions for food while also protecting our native species.
“The environmental imperative is to eat less meat, but there are a few loopholes, and that’s where these invasive species come in,” she says, “because you can eat as many as you want and not feel bad.”
Each episode – during which Armstrong meets experts and eager early adopters – culminates in a sumptuous dinner at Mona, where pests are served to guests including Nat’s What I Reckon, Claire Hooper and Poh Ling Yeow (who wears rabbit-foot earrings for the occasion). Trim and Kaechele have fun making each meal a pompous affair, down to the settings and elaborate costumes. Deer, for example, is beautifully presented with sea urchin that are clogging up kelp forest, washed down with a rosehip and hawthorn negroni. Antlers are provided as cutlery.
Among the challenges the series explores are viruses intended to keep populations down that could make them inedible, such as calicivirus and myxomatosis in rabbits; and the proposed herpesvirus that may be introduced to carp.
Then there’s stigma. Armstrong finds Nigerian and Somali butchers who sing the praises of camel, which he himself declares “succulent”, but it’s not sold anywhere in Queen Victoria Market. Similarly, Australians have been convinced that carp tastes of dirt – and yet, the “dumpster dolphin” is a popular fish in Germany. And while it’s legal to eat cat, it is illegal to sell as food – but as Australians own 5.3 million cats as pets, Trim presents Dr Karl Kruszelnicki with starling, pheasant and blackbird instead, shredded, to reflect that damage that cats do.
Some guests offer thoughtful solutions. Barrister and academic Geoffrey Robertson argues that the Tasmanian tiger should be cloned to prey on the deer (work is indeed under way to create a proxy to take the thylacine’s place in the ecosystem, although this is not likely to happen for many decades). Discussing how to convince the masses that an invasive species is desirable, director Warwick Thornton says that any approach “needs to not be elitist” – which may or may not be a nod to both Trim’s sumptuous meals and Kaechele’s $277.77 book.
And what of the cane toads? Even if Australians aren’t keen on chowing down, there could be a healthy export market. As Prof Philip Hayward, whose research interests cover terrestrial-aquatic relations, points out: “In France, over 100m frogs are imported each year from south-east Asia, decimating the populations of frogs in Indonesia and Vietnam.” We have them on tap.
There’s just no short-term fix, unfortunately. After many calls to laboratories, Armstrong can’t find one who will vouch that cane toad toxins can be safely removed (although the ibis seems to manage), which means they can’t put their dinner guest’s life on the line: Queensland MP Bob Katter receives a cane toad leather bow tie and a dish containing Indian myna birds instead.
Maybe Katter can come up with a decent publicity stunt though. In the past, he has called for kids to be allowed to have low-powered air rifles and for a 50c-a-toad bounty.
“How has that idea been received so far?” asks Armstrong.
“Extremely badly,” Katter admits.
Taste. It’s so subjective.
Eat the Invaders starts on the ABC on Tuesday 7 January at 8.30pm
