Bill Ivinson

My first interest in Australian Bush Plants started when I was quite young and roamed in the bush-land of the ‘Top-End’ of the Northern Territory with my mother and elderly Aboriginal women looking for food and medicine plants using signs that I had learned, to harvest the many varieties of plums, vine-fruit, yams, fruits, berries, seeds and plants that were readily edible and available.
Growing older I keenly remembered this information and sought out similar information in other geographical areas.
In 1983, my interest in bush plants developed further as I started to record plants I already knew by revisiting areas of my ‘growing up’ and sketched them.
I have spent 34 years obtaining information about plants in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities I have worked in and visited throughout Australia. It has been a journey of learning, healing, enlightenment, personal satisfaction and so much more.
As I get older and it is time to pass on this information to protect it. I have included 325 drawings within a book – ‘Australian Bush Plant Usage by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’, – available through Amazon book outlets and plan to release a further edition soon.