Dr Richard Walley OAM is a Noongar Elder, statesperson, artist and musician who has dedicated his life to sharing and preserving Noongar culture. He has worked across the fields of music, theatre, visual art and education. A champion of cross-cultural understanding, Dr Walley has been instrumental in bringing Noongar knowledge into contemporary contexts — from the stage to the dining table. His guidance in shaping Wildflower’s Six Seasons menu is part of a lifelong commitment to ensuring that Indigenous knowledge remains both celebrated and alive for future generations.
The Indigenous Noongar people of Western Australia have lived in deep connection with their land for tens of thousands of years, guided by an ecological calendar of Six Seasons. Each season — Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang — is marked not by dates but by changes in the environment: the blooming of native flowers, the life cycles of animals, the way plants grow, the arrival of cool winds or the intensity of summer heat. Each change signals another shift for the Noongar people, who in past centuries, would move with each season, walking between the coast, along the Swan River and up into the Perth Hills.
“While the four conventional seasons are widely recognised, the six seasonal calendar is far more detailed and special to this part of the world,” says Dr Richard Walley. “It’s not just about the weather, but the plants and the animal life cycles. We’re lucky in the south-west to be a biodiversity hotspot, and to have unique flowers bloom in every one of the Six Seasons.”
That precision shaped Wildflower from the outset. In 2015, as the restaurant was being developed as a hyper-seasonal, local foraging concept, Walley made a suggestion: if the team was serious about native ingredients, could they also work in tune with the Noongar Six Seasons?
Wildflower’s culinary identity was tethered to the land and its people
From that moment, Wildflower’s culinary identity was tethered to the land and its people. As the menu evolved, Walley collaborated with other Indigenous knowledge holders who knew where to find rarer plants — and how to harvest them responsibly. “The six seasons is a sustainability practice,” he says. “The purpose is to not exhaust any resources at one location. It’s a seasonal planner and an education system of teaching the next generation their cultural knowledge and the ways of the land.”
For Wildflower, respecting Noongar culture also means partnering with Indigenous suppliers such as Tucker Bush, whose Indigenous-grown produce — from Geraldton wax and finger limes to karkalla and native herbs for infusions — threads through the seasonally shifting dishes.
The result is a menu that moves as the land changes. “We need to remember that native foods aren’t limited to the local animal species like kangaroo and emu,” Walley notes. Native seeds such as wattle, seafoods like crayfish, and seasonal plants form the backbone of Wildflower’s cooking, appearing and disappearing in step with the Six Seasons. Ask Walley for a favourite ingredient and his answer lands close to home: “Yellow tail fish. That is what I was brought up with, fishing and sharing.” And which of the Six Seasons is best to dine in? Walley won’t be pinned down — deliberately. “My favourite is always the one we are in — because you’re either planting, participating, or celebrating.” In other words: come now. The experience is always timely. For Dr Walley, it’s also powerful: seeing his culture take root in contemporary fine dining “shows how traditional Noongar knowledge is highly relevant.”
With its sweeping views across Perth’s landscape, and dishes that are as artful as they are seasonal, Wildflower makes each visit a chance to experience Western Australia as it is in that moment — alive, shifting, and never the same twice. Guided by the Noongar Six Seasons, every meal goes far beyond flavour. It carries forward what Dr Walley calls “the ancient and still living stories of this place” — rare knowledge of a worldview in which food, culture and country are inseparable.
For more information, or to make a reservation at Wildflower, please contact our concierge team at COMO The Treasury.
