Damien Coulthard / Warndu (Adnyamathanha Native Food Enterprise)

Damien Coulthard is an Adnyamathanha and Dieri man from the Flinders Ranges of South Australia — co-founder (with Rebecca Sullivan, non-Indigenous) of Warndu, an Indigenous-owned native food enterprise. Their cookbook, Warndu Mai (Good Food): Introducing Native Australian Ingredients to Your Kitchen (Hachette Australia, 2019, ISBN 9780733641428), contains 80+ recipes using native Australian ingredients. The word "warndu" means "good" in Adnyamathanha language; "mai" means "food." Coulthard's approach is different from Woods's: where Woods operates a restaurant, Coulthard operates a food business that sources, processes, and sells native ingredients directly to consumers and chefs. His knowledge base is Adnyamathanha — the semi-arid landscape of the Flinders Ranges, which produces a different ingredient palette from the subtropical Bundjalung Country of Woods. The Adnyamathanha ingredient set includes quandong, bush tomato, wattleseed, native citrus, and Flinders Ranges saltbush-fed lamb. Coulthard's contribution is specifically commercial: he has built a supply chain that connects Indigenous harvesters on Country with chefs and consumers in urban Australia, creating economic value for Indigenous communities through their traditional food knowledge.

Coulthard's culinary method centres on the Adnyamathanha larder applied to modern Australian cooking. His published repertoire includes: quandong in tarts, crumbles, and chutneys; bush tomato as a spice rub for lamb and kangaroo; wattleseed in baking and as a coffee substitute; Kakadu plum as a preservative and flavouring; saltbush (Atriplex nummularia — a native plant used as a herb and as animal fodder that imparts a mineral-salt character to the meat of animals that graze on it); and native pepperberry as a finishing spice. Warndu Mai also documents the cultural significance of each ingredient — the stories, the seasonal calendars, and the land-management practices that produced these foods. The book is co-authored with Sullivan, who provides the recipe development and food-writing expertise while Coulthard provides the cultural authority and ingredient knowledge.

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The Adnyamathanha ingredient palette is drier, more arid, and more spice-focused than the subtropical Bundjalung palette. The defining flavours are: earthy-savoury (bush tomato, wattleseed), tart-sweet (quandong), peppery (mountain pepper), and mineral-salt (saltbush). These are warm, autumnal, full-bodied flavours that pair well with red meats (kangaroo, lamb, beef) and with baking (wattleseed in bread, quandong in pastry). The Flinders Ranges landscape produces food that tastes of the arid inland — red earth, dry heat, native grasses. This is a different Australia from the green, wet coast.