All her life, Bonnie Cook has foraged for mushrooms in the damp hills and fields of Gippsland, Australia’s wild southern tip overlooking the stormy sea that reaches to Tasmania.
It is a forested land of flowering trees, hidden coves and cliffs, whose appeal in the post-pandemic era is seen in the new housing estates at the edges of towns, pushing back the plentiful kangaroos and kookaburras.
“A field mushroom is very obviously a field mushroom and most people would never pick something else,” Cook, a widow of 76 who has lived in South Gippsland all her life, told The Times. “I know what I would never eat or pick or touch, even.” Her voice trailing off, she adds: “So I don’t know – it’s just
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