Rayleen Brown
Founder & Owner
Rayleen Brown’s story is a story of humble beginnings, hard work and passion. Born in Darwin. Travelling up and down the Territory with her parents and siblings to follow the work. From Wave Hill to Adelaide River to Leanyer to Humpty Doo. Learning all the while.
Inspired by the Putupi walk-in to become involved in land rights through activism and supporting families and anthropologists with recording genealogies to protect land rights, Rayleen’s passion to preserve knowledge and connection to country grew.
Her passion for cooking and food came from both her mother and father who were both very good cooks. Growing up she was always helping her mother with the cooking. Her father’s marinades were heavenly. Fortunately her father hand-wrote all his recipes to be passed on to his kin.
Rayleen’s and Gina’s first catering job were for 100 Warlpiri women at a big meeting at Laramba to support Indigenous teachers. Rayleen and Gina Smith (Co-founder) cooked 300 meals a day out of a domestic kitchen. After the meeting, which was a success, the old women thanked the two cooks for their beautiful food and suggested they should start a cooking business. And so Kungkas Can Cook was born. Her next catering job – their first professional job was for 1000 people at the Yeperenye Festival. They didn’t even own a knife or fork or plates to serve the food on. That was 18 years ago. Kungkas is still catering but has now diversified into Tourism and bush food products and two years ago opened Kungkas Café, the café is a way of opening the door to the locals and tourists alike that want to experience the wonderful bush food flavours from the desert.
“I hope I leave a legacy for the younger generation, my own family and my extended family, to be proud of who we are and our culture, to have respect for it, passed down from generation to generation, living through our grandmothers story. ”
Rayleen Brown and Kungkas Can Cook are known throughout Australia and many parts of the world where Central Australian bush foods are increasingly receiving due recognition as unique, speciality, gourmet and delicious. Rayleen has contributed and shared her unique recipes in publications such as the Great Australian Cookbook (now a tv program on Foxtel) and an ABC publication Australia Cooks, and just recently finished filming with the BBC Great Rail Journeys of the World highlighting the journey of the Ghan Adelaide to Alice Springs.
Rayleen’s insistence on using only wild harvest bush tucker sourced directly from the women who gather the food, as a way to support livelihoods and the continuation of connection to story and country, is well known and respected. Rayleen has also contributed to much research in her region around the growth and development of bush foods and their potential. Rayleen is continuing to help raise the profile of bush foods, opportunities for people on country using bush foods and wants better protection for the ecological knowledge rights of people to the food that has sustained their communities for thousands of years.
Now Kungkas Can Cook is a family business, there is always the sound of footsteps around the kitchen. The 8 grandkids ‘the grannies’ and 3 daughters and 2 sons have all worked in the kitchen at some point including work experience for school in the Kungkas kitchen. Rayleen often takes ‘the grannies’ out on country to have picnics out in the bush learning from grandma, helping the kids to get connected with the bush more than the screen. This is to help the grandkids centre on what’s real, and that’s family. It’s Rayleen’s hope that the grannies connect with the bush and being familiar with it and spend their spare time in the bush camping, fishing, hunting.