Over the past ten years, Gerald Power has built and grown a successful business, Indigenous Cultural Adventures, sharing the rich culture, cuisine and history of Australia’s First Peoples with visitors and school groups.

But Gerald always has an eye to the future, and it is this journey that is his real adventure.

“I was a public servant for the state government, and after 12 years, I just needed to quit,” Gerald says, explaining how he came to start Indigenous Cultural Adventures in 2016.

“I was always travelling. I covered 73 per cent of the state. My son was going into high school; I just wanted a break.”

A Juru man from Bowen in Queensland, Gerald had been living in Orange for decades and learned the local traditions and stories from Wiradjuri Elders.

But his extensive travel for work also meant he was exposed to the incredible variety of living cultural traditions found across the state, something he felt needed to be shared with the wider community.

“I'd go to Goodooga, and they'd say come get some Snottygobbles, and we’d find all this beautiful fruit… Then I’d be in Broken Hill and all of a sudden, they’d say, we're gonna have to get some bananas and they were literally singing this Barkinji rhyme, which is how they know when the bush bananas are in season,” Gerald says.

“At Brewarrina, the fish traps out there are the oldest man-made fish traps in the world! And I realised, travelling around and being in Orange, there was a closing off of a lot of our stories, a lot of our journeys, our cultural sites... I felt I wanted to take everybody on that whole journey.”

Taking the leap, Gerald registered the business in August 2016, with his first big event selling Kangaroo sliders down at Barangaroo on Sydney Harbour.

“Everybody was saying it’ll be big; there's going to be 5,000 people, you gotta take at least 400 patties… and for the whole day, mate, we sold 23 burgers!” Gerald recalls.

“It was really a shock; people were walking by us and saying I'm not eating Skippy. In the end we were just giving it away!”

While not the ideal start to his dream, Gerald was not giving up that easily. A couple of months later, he set up his stall once again at the Banjo Paterson Festival in Robertson Park.

This time with more success.

“It was still a bit of a struggle, but now we don't even do those things because the business is that busy now through the catering and other stuff,” Gerald says, who’s moved on from just kangaroo sliders and makes his own native ingredient jams and relishes, branded kangaroo and crocodile sausages, along with sweets like lemon myrtle roasted wattle seed and macadamia nut biscuits.

“So the business has really built into something. I work with 16 communities and 25 schools - people are already booking me into 2027! And it’s an international business. I had people from Hong Kong on Saturday; they hired a helicopter, flew out here from Sydney, and took them for a tour!” Gerald says, still surprised by how it has all grown.

“I still don't understand the word success, but a lot of people say it's very successful. I say, well everybody gets paid, I get paid, and I'm pretty busy!”

But for Gerald, Indigenous Cultural Adventures is about more than just taking people on tours and cooking bush tucka. Having grown up in a politically active family, he doesn’t shy away from talking about the impacts of colonialism on Aboriginal people.

“My catchphrase is ‘Sharing our Journey’,” Gerals says. “I want to take everybody on a whole journey of food, cultural sites, our cultural laws, our protocols, but also policies that affect us from colonisation into now. I really want to unpack the whole thing.

“This is not about being negative; just understanding each other,” he continues. “What I want to do is nurture the next generation. My role is now to educate people about who we are.

“We’re the oldest continuous culture on Earth, and yet it's like an unknown. People say, leave it back here in the past; let's leave that to you. But no, I think we can all walk together and celebrate who we are.”