With the arrival of Europeans and pre-milled white flour, this bread-making process has almost disappeared (although women were still recorded to be making seedcakes in Central Australia in the 1970s).

Some species were eaten at the green stage and, when ground, would produce a juice at the side of the millstone, which was drunk directly.

[3] In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, women observed that, after the dry season, many seeds would be gathered around the opening of harvester ants' nests.

The seeds of the cycad palm, Cycas media, are highly carcinogenic when raw, and require elaborate treatment including shelling, crushing, leaching in running water for up to five days, then cooking.

Ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills survived on bush bread for some time after they ran out of rations due to the death of their camels.

The Yandruwandha people at Cooper Creek gave them fish, beans called padlu, and bread made from the ground sporocarps of the ngardu (nardoo) plant (Marsilea drummondii).

Wills' last journal entry includes the following:...starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move oneself, for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction.

Certainly, fat and sugar would be more to one's taste, in fact, those seem to me to be the great stand by for one in this extraordinary continent; not that I mean to depreciate the farinacious food, but the want of sugar and fat in all substances obtainable here is so great that they become almost valueless to us as articles of food, without the addition of something else...It is possible that the explorers, in preparing the bread themselves, were not preparing it in the traditional way of the Aboriginal people,[4] which may have involved soaking seeds prior to grinding in order to remove the enzyme thiaminase, which depletes the body of vitamin B1.

It is therefore believed that the deaths of Burke and Wills resulted in part from the vitamin deficiency disease beri-beri.