Meet the proud Bundjalung woman championing Indigenous cuisine. Her work has won her the Champions of Change Award as part of the The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025 programme.
Certain words come up often in conversation with Mindy Woods. First there’s ‘jingella’, a greeting in the Bundjalung language. Next is ‘deadly’ – slang for ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’. Then there’s ‘mob’, meaning ‘family’, both in the literal sense and the wider First Nations community.
Language is important to Woods, not least because until very recently, her elders were banned from using the native tongue of Bundjalung Country, an area spanning from north-east New South Wales to south-east Queensland.
“It was illegal for my nan to speak her language,” says Woods, referring to government policies that forced Indigenous communities to speak English in the 20th century. Assimilation extended across culture too. “When I cook for my elders, I'm cooking them food that they haven't eaten for 40 or 50 years.”
A salad made with green mango and karkalla, an edible succulent that also acts as an anti-inflammatory
Woods, 43, is on a mission to reclaim the culture that her grandmother’s generation lost. Through her restaurant, cookbook, social media platform and involvement in non-profit initiatives, she dedicates her life to promoting native ingredients, working towards an Australia where Aboriginal cultural heritage is valued and respected.
“I really believe native food will be such an important part of the reconciliation of our nation,” says Woods, who will collect her award at The World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in Turin next month. “Most people don't even realise how many native foods we have. If you went into the pantry of an everyday Australian, you’d be lucky to find any native foods. You might find macadamias or lemon myrtle, but we’ve got 6,500 ingredients that are unique to this beautiful place we call Australia.”
Finding karkalla
Woods’ grandmother, Margie Felton, was a “beautiful Bundjalung woman” who raised 17 children in a three-bedroom home in North Lismore, NSW. “The only way she could feed that big mob of kids was by going out on Country and harvesting all these beautiful native foods like freshwater mussels, warrigal greens, mud crabs and mullet.”
Akoya oysters on hot coals with macadamia nuts and lemon myrtle
When Woods got sunburnt from picking mud crabs on the beach, Felton would take her to find karkalla, an edible succulent that also acts as an anti-inflammatory, soothing burns and bites. “She would break it in her hands and rub it on my skin,” Woods recalls. “Food for us wasn't just food; it was medicine. It was connection and cultural tools.”
Decades later, she found a way to honour her grandmother, who passed when she was 12. “Karkalla was the first native food that I picked with my beautiful nan when I was little girl, so I named my restaurant and business in her honour.”
Karkalla opened at Byron Bay in 2020, when Woods was in her late thirties. After a career in physiotherapy, she turned to cooking in her early thirties, becoming a finalist in MasterChef Australia in 2012 and working her way up to running a restaurant group in Sydney. At the end of her thirties, she felt the call to return to Bundjalung Country, where her 30-seat debut restaurant introduced Australians to First Nations ingredients like finger lime, whose pearls are known as citrus caviar.
Karkalla on Country is a cultural experience where guests connect with the land
The restaurant was a hit but, after almost five years, Woods felt there was something missing, so she closed the site and transformed it into something new: Karkalla on Country. A culinary and cultural experience running over two weekends each month, it sees guests kicking off their shoes to connect with the land, experiencing a traditional smoking ceremony with community elders and walking through native food forest.
At a beautiful homestead, Woods cooks a long lunch inspired by many different nations that make up Australia, with dishes like paperbark-smoked native rock oysters with lemon myrtle or kangaroo massaman pie. It’s a full cultural immersion complete with Indigenous art and music.
Superfoods without the hashtag
In 2024, Woods published her cookbook, Karkalla at Home: Native foods and everyday recipes for connecting to Country. Her recipes are approachable: think scrambled eggs with the addition of spinach-like warrigal greens or fluffy ricotta pancakes with macadamia praline butter.
Mindy Woods with her cookbook, Karkalla on Country
Since European seasons like summer and winter don’t adequately cover Australia’s vast and varied terrain, the book shares the Bundjalung calendar, whose six seasons range from thunderstorm to mullet season. There’s also an encyclopaedia of Indigenous produce.
“Native foods are an important part of our past but they're going to be vital for the future of Australia,” she says. “They are foods that are sovereign to this land. They’re drought-tolerant and salt-resistant, they don’t need herbicides, pesticides or fertilisers to grow. They're superfoods without the trendy hashtags.”
Woods is keen to create an appellation system to recognise native foods while making sure Indigenous communities receive recognition and fair compensation. She also wants to bust stereotypes.
Native-inspired poke bowl from the Karkalla on Country cookbook
“Australians have been under this impression that the best we can do is sausage-sizzle on the weekend, but we've got a rich, abundant history here and it starts with food,” she says. “We're not only the world's oldest living civilisation, we're the oldest food culture in the world.”
Empowering the matriarchy
Beyond Karkalla, Woods works as a consultant with an Indigenous-led non-profit called The Returning, which teaches bush skills and food to teenage schoolgirls, re-empowering them in a way that their mothers and grandmothers were denied.
“In First Nations culture, we were culturally responsible. We're very lucky because we come from a matriarchal society.”
She has also recently been appointed to the board of Black Duck Foods, an Indigenous-led enterprise that advocates for native agricultural practices and food sovereignty. The organisation is working towards establishing a native grain industry in Australia.
“We're doing really deadly stuff with native grains,” she says. “First Nations Australians are the oldest bakers in the world. We've got grinding stones that go back 60,000-plus years.”
If any of these facts sound surprising, Woods says it’s because so much of Australia’s Aboriginal history has been hidden.
Woods wants to shout about the 6,500 native ingredients found across Australia
“Since colonisation, a lot of the perceptions of the First Nations people and culture were really from a white perspective,” she says. “I'm proudly mixed heritage: my dad's a beautiful white man, my mum's a beautiful Black woman and I see both sides. But what we haven't really tapped into is a true history of our nation because it doesn't get taught in schools.”
That’s exactly why Woods has taken on her mission to educate the world about native ingredients – all inspired by her grandmother, of course.
“The fact that I could go out on Country with my beautiful nan, she could break karkalla in her hands and show me that it was medicine as well as an edible… Food’s such a powerful way of bridging the gap. It's a safe place for people to connect. That’s why I think native food will be such an important part of reconciliation of our nation.”
As for sharing it on the global stage thanks to her new title of Champion of Change Award winner, she says that’s truly “deadly”.
The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna will be announced on 19 June from Turin.
