There may be a few reasons for this.
Firstly, unlike conventional herbs and spices, which have been used to season and preserve food in many cultures for many centuries, Australia’s native spices have a sketchy history of being used as seasonings. Australian indigenous people used them for sustenance and for their medicinal and spiritual properties, however there is very little evidence of Australian native spices being traditionally used to actually flavour food before or during cooking.
Perhaps the native food industry has to catch up with the long and colourful history of the world’s spice trade. After all, consider that India had no chillies before the Americas were discovered, Europe had no allspice until it was brought back from Jamaica, mistaken for pepper. Cooks the world over are now more adventurous than ever, and information technology spreads news millions of times faster than Vasco de Gama or Christopher Columbus ever could have dreamed.
Another reason for the tardy adoption of these flavours is that Australian native spices bear the burden of “gimmick appeal”. Gimmick value has helped to generate awareness here and overseas, but the whole imagery of “bushfoods” is at odds with the way consumers see themselves preparing everyday meals. Although Australians may have watched the Bush Tucker Man eating witchetty grubs, strange leaves and pods on their television screens, home cooks are unlikely to relate his experiences to their own suburban existence.
A third barrier to the success of these indigenous flavours relates to the cooking methods required for a lot of our Australian native spices. Many have delicate fresh top notes that cannot sustain long cooking periods, or when used in too large a quantity leave an unpleasant eucalyptus taste in the food. A basic understanding of how to use these spices will overcome this problem. After all, you can imagine the result of using too much pepper, chilli, cardamom or cloves in a meal. The skills that have been acquired through generations of traditional spice use, can be applied equally to these native flavours, so that eventually using native pepperberry (Tasmannia lanceolata) or lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) becomes no more mysterious than adding chilli or lemongrass to a recipe.