In 2005 botanist Robert Price introduced me to Christopher Spain, a student from Southern Cross University who was studying the genetics of Macadamia tetraphylla and needed a sample to analyse. I showed them trees high up in the forest, and on the edge of the cleared land and down on the creekside. Eventually Rob and Chris marked out a quadrat and Chris went to work. The upshot was that the selected trees were genetically identical. It was back to the drawing board for the proponents of accidental hybridisation.
I took a chance on another proteaceous species as well. I hadn’t seen a Floydia at Cave Creek, but I knew it had to be there. It was the tree that Ferdy Mueller had originally called Helicia praealta; Bailey then decided that, like another of Mueller’s Helicias, it was a Macadamia (The Queensland Flora, 4:1330); in 1975 Lawrie Johnson and Barbara Briggs finally determined that it was a distinct genus, and called it after our guru, Alex Floyd (APNI). The name didn’t appear on Jinks’s survey, but every now and then as I rambled around the forest I would pick up a perfectly round and perfectly rotten nut, about the size of a squash ball, that seemed as if it had to be the Ball Nut that gives the Floydia one of its common names. It is also known as Big Nut and Possum Nut. Floyd remarks that the woody outer shell of the Ball Nut encloses one or two seeds ‘which are somewhat bitter’. Another popular reference book updated as recently as 2009 declares that the fruit of F. praealta is downright poisonous (Leiper et al., 334).
Floydia is listed as endangered, which made it even harder to resist the impulse to plant it, but we couldn’t find it on the property. I weakened and, breaking all my own rules, bought in twenty from a nursery. One day I was botanising on the old snigging track with Rob, when he stopped to look at some fallen blossoms among the leaf litter. He held one up, so I could see that it was a short helical raceme of tiny tubular flowers that split into fours, with a style projecting from each.
‘Floydia,’ he said.
‘Where?’ I squinted up into the canopy forty metres above our heads.
‘Here.’ Rob slapped his palm against a solid column that soared into the foliage far above us. I swung the binoculars over my shoulder and peered through them. I was looking for the lanceolate leaves with the wavy margins that I knew from the baby trees.
‘I can’t see it,’ I moaned.
‘That’s because the canopy leaves are smaller, and don’t have wavy margins. This is it all right.’
‘Good Lord! Everyone says Floydia’s a middle-sized tree. This is huge. This must be the biggest ever recorded.’
Someone has revised the data on Floydia praealta, because the new edition of Floyd says it grows up to thirty-five metres and sixty centimetres in diameter. Cave Creek isn’t listed among the places where it does that, which is fine with me. The giant Floydia is beyond price, more than we could ever have hoped for. The best way of keeping it safe is to create a haven for it, and keep it well away from people and barbecues and four-wheel drives. That’s what they haven’t been able to do for another recently identified proteaceous species, the Nightcap Oak, one of only two species in a sole genus in its own subfamily, with the scientific name Eidothea hardeniana. The binomial is cooler than usual: Eidothea, for whom the genus was named in 1995, is one of the daughters of the god Proteus; the name given to the second species found in 2006 honours a woman, one of very, very few. She is Gwen Harden, distinguished editor of The Flora of New South Wales and one of the authors of the field guide Rainforest Trees and Shrubs, otherwise known as the Red Book, that we use every day. The entire population of Eidothea hardeniana numbers only sixteen trees living somewhere in the Nightcap National Park. The whereabouts of the Wollemi Pine was kept a secret too, but walkers found it, brought pathogens into the gorge with them, and Wollemia nobilis is now said to be extinct in the wild. The only place for the vulnerable Floydia is in the wild, the unvisited wild, nowhere near the beaten track.
It’s easy to become obsessed by the Proteaceae. The family numbers about eighty genera – I say about because they’re always changing. About half of them are Australian, a quarter South African, the rest are endemic to South America, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Malesia, South and East Asia, tropical Africa, Central America, Madagascar, New Zealand, Fiji, southern India, Sri Lanka, Vanuatu and Micronesia. They are a quintessential Gondwanan family.
‘Funny isn’t it?’ said I to Jenny. ‘In Enzed you’ve got two genera of Proteaceae and both are monotypic, making a grand total of two species. Mind you, there are many monotypic genera in the family. Out of forty-two genera in Oz sixteen or seventeen have only one species. Isn’t it odd that New Zealand only 2,000 ks or so off the coast of Australia should have only two proteaceous species when Australia has more than 850?’
Said Jenny, ‘There used to be many more; they’ve found a high proportion of different kinds of proteaceous pollen in coal deposits in the South Island. You have to remember that New Zealand suffered a massive extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous and then most of it gradually sank below sea level, so it was just a chain of small islands. These grew into today’s New Zealand, as the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates kept on grinding against each other and pushing up new mountains, and the vegetation was regularly incinerated by eruptions. So the biodiversity took a bit of a hit. How many proteaceous species have you got on this property?’
‘More than you’ve got in the whole of Enzed. Let’s see. There’s my precious Macadamia tetraphylla, which grows in isolated patches in the coastal ranges from the Richmond River northwards. Grevillea robusta, on the other hand, grows all over the place. It’s as common as dirt and we have thousands of them, but I tolerate them because the bowerbirds love them. We’ve got a Triunia, as well. I assumed it was Triunia youngiana when I first collected it, but the flower doesn’t seem quite pink enough, and it has a dusting of moss green, almost metallic. Orites excelsus, Stenocarpus sinuatus. I found a Helicia growing down on the creek, Helicia glabriflora I suppose, but the inflorescence is a bit more gracile and greener than the type. It’s supposed to have dark purple fruit, but I haven’t found any yet. And then there are the Floydias.’
‘What – no Banksia?’
‘There’s one near the old house. Banksia filicifolia. It grows on the rhyolite; I don’t know how one ended up down here, but we’ve propagated it because the bats and birds besiege it for the flowers.’
I couldn’t stop thinking about Macadamias. It seemed obvious that Aboriginal people would have been eating the Queensland or Bush Nut for sixty thousand years or so before Allan Cunningham is supposed to have ‘discovered’ it in 1828. You might ask which of the two it was he found, Queensland or Bush, because though there is a tendency to call Macadamia integrifolia the Queensland Nut and M. tetraphylla the Bush Nut, the practice is not consistent. For example, Tom Cowderoy recording his childhood in Numinbah in the 1890s says that Aborigines used to turn up in the valley ‘when the Queensland nuts were ripe’ when the nuts that grow in the Numinbah Valley are M. tetraphylla. Jenny Graham, a Kombumerri woman from Beechmont, is said to have told her grandchildren that as a young girl she would carry nuts with her when she travelled and plant them along the way. ‘The Macadamia nut trees that can still be seen on the upper reaches of the Nerang River may be the same ones she planted as she strolled as a child around the 1870s.’ (O’Connor, 33)
When I read that I yelped so loud that Jenny spilt her tea.
‘For goodness’ sake. Is there no end to this Kombumerri nonsense? Here they are trying to get me to believe that they planted the Macadamias on the Upper Nerang!’
‘They might have,’ said Jenny. ‘We’re only just learning how much of the Australian vegetation was managed by Aboriginal people. But I grant you, it’s hard to think of them traipsing up here to stick Macadamias all over the place.’
‘Especially when they were already growing around Tamborine and Guanaba, which is a lot closer to Beaudesert where she was actually living.’
Jenny brandished a piece of paper. ‘I printed this
up for you, from the Springbrook website.’ She began to read:
Gumburra (macadamia nut) were grown in this region long before Europeans arrived.
I interrupted. ‘Were grown my foot. Grew dammit. Grew.’
The Yugambeh traded them with settlers for tobacco and other goods.
(I have yet to come across a contemporary reference to Aborigines of any clan using Macadamias for barter with white people.)
Jenny kept reading:
It is believed that long before Australia was mapped by European explorers Aboriginal people would congregate on the eastern slopes of Australia’s Great Dividing Range to feed on the seed of two evergreen trees. One of these nuts was called gyndl or jindilli, which was later corrupted to kindal kindal by early Europeans, while in the southern range of the tree it was known as boombera—
I interrupted. ‘In 1843, when Leichhardt was staying on the Darling Downs and using the Archers’ station at Durundur as a base, he got a young Aboriginal stockman called Kippar Charley to guide him around. Charley’s supposed to have taken Leichhardt to the summit of Mount Bauple, where he saw a tree that Kippar Charley told him was called “Jindilli”. Leichhardt’s biographer gets into a muddle with this, saying that this was the first time the Macadamia was described, which is wrong, because Cunningham collected a Macadamia specimen near Tamborine Mountain and sent it to Kew in 1828 [Bailey, J., 111]. He also describes the Macadamia Leichhardt found as “a middle-sized tree with sawtoothed leaves”. The species found at Mount Bauple is Macadamia integrifolia, which has entire leaves. And it gets worse; Leichhardt himself said he collected his specimen in the “Bunya Bunya brush”, which is 140 kilometres or so south of Mount Bauple.’
Jenny simply repeated:
One of these nuts was called gyndl or jindilli, which was later corrupted to kindal kindal by early Europeans, while in the southern range of the tree it was known as boombera – We now know it as the Macadamia. There were at least twelve Aboriginal tribes in the region where the tree grew and they were used as an item of trade with other tribes.
I interrupted again. ‘Who were used? The twelve tribes?’
‘Oh, shush. You and your grammar. You know what they mean’
With the arrival of white settlers nuts were bartered, often with native honey, for rum and tobacco . . .
I interrupted again. ‘It would help if we knew where Kippar Charley originally hailed from. He might have given the New South Wales name for the Queensland Nut. If Kindal kindal is the name from northern New South Wales it does in fact apply to Macadamia tetraphylla. The only near-contemporary mention of trading nuts I’ve been able to find refers to a “King Jacky”, possibly Bilin Bilin, Aboriginal elder of the Logan clan and sole patriarch of the Kombumerri, doing so in the 1860s.’
Jenny read on:
. . . some coastal middens contain large quantities of bush nut shells along with sea shells, often 15–20 kms from the nearest trees.
‘Surely any nutshells would have rotted away within months. The midden with Macadamia shells in it is supposed to be one at Redlands, south of Brisbane, but I’ve never seen any documentation.’
Jenny ignored me and read on.
Nuts were eaten raw or roasted on hot coals. Many processing stones have been found in eastern rainforests, consisting of a large stone with a delicate incision for holding the nuts and sometimes a smaller, flat stone sits on top which is then struck by a larger hammer stone.
If it is true that the Yugambeh traded Macadamia nuts with all and sundry, it is strange that there is no word or group of words in Yugambeh which can be securely related to the trees or the nuts. Bullum does not mention them at all. W. E. Hanlon, who grew up in ‘the Yugambe language region’ and was the first postmaster at Southport, collected words and phrases, largely from the family of the same Jenny Graham as is supposed to have planted the Macadamias in Numinbah. He includes two versions of a name for the Queensland Nut, ‘gumburra’ and ‘bumburra’, apparently because he confused it with the ‘Honeysuckle’, that is, Banksia latifolia. The version ‘boombera’ that Jenny read out seems to be simply a continuation of the same mistake, but the confusion persists (Sharpe, 1998, 45, 78).
The Aboriginal peoples can hardly have traded nuts, be they Queensland or Bush, with clients who believed them to be poisonous. Botanists continued to believe that the Queensland Nut was poisonous until at least 1867, when Walter Hill, Director of the Brisbane Botanic Garden, asked his assistant to crack some Queensland Nuts in a vise, thinking that he needed to free them from their hard shells to assist germination. He forgot to tell his assistant that the nuts were poisonous and was horrified to find him eating them. Seeing that the young man came to no harm, Hill tried one for himself and found it ‘tastier than a filbert’. He wrote to the Brisbane Courier announcing the discovery of a ‘new fruit indigenous to Queensland’ and confessed, ‘I was not aware until recently that it bore an edible fruit, and, singular to say, the aborigines appear to have been equally ignorant.’ (BC, 6 March 1867) This was greeted by a chorus of disagreement. As one correspondent to The Queenslander (6 April 1867, 11) pointed out: ‘The nut is now well-known to the timber-getters, to the natives and others, and quantities are being daily gathered and eaten, this proving its wholesome qualities.’ Within days another letter arrived in the offices of the Brisbane Courier informing readers that the tree was growing ‘in considerable abundance, though circumscribed in locality, on high exposed ground about ten miles nearly due south from Brisbane’. (BC, 17 April)
Hill is credited with the establishment of ‘the first commercially grown macadamia, which he brought from the Queensland bush to the Botanic Gardens in 1858’ (ADB) which, seeing as he didn’t know that the nut was edible until nine years later, is curious, to say the least. Nuts collected around Lismore had been planted in the Sydney Botanic Garden three years before this (SMH, 5 November 1867). Within the year plants were available from commercial nurseries (SMH, 3 February 1868). These must all have been Macadamia tetraphylla, the rough-shelled nut, which was still confused with at least two other species of Macadamia and with other proteaceous species as well.
Faulty botany continued to befuddle horticulturalists who had still to take advantage of their opportunity to develop a new cash crop. In Flora Australiensis (5:406) Bentham, who was obliged to acknowledge the assistance of Mueller, includes Triunia youngiana (with extremely poisonous nuts) and M. verticillata as two of his three Macadamias, citing Mueller but including the variant names for which Mueller was also responsible, which placed all three in the genus Helicia (Fragmenta, 2:91, 4:84, 6:191). Which leaves only one Macadamia species, M. ternifolia, with a description quoted from Mueller’s original description as given in his talk to the Philosophical Institute of Victoria:
A small tree with very dense foliage, glabrous or the young branches and inflorescence minutely pubescent. Leaves sessile or nearly so, in whorls of 3 or 4, oblong or lanceolate, acute, serrate with fine or prickly teeth, glabrous and shining, from a few in[ches] to above 1 ft. long. Racemes often as long as the leaves, with numerous small flowers, the pairs often clustered or almost verticillate. Pedicels at first very short . . . (Mueller, 1857, 72)
The illustration to the talk as published shows a section of twig, with four leaves, of which only three are prickly, arranged in a whorl, with four flower spikes springing upward from the four axils (when they actually hang downward), in a peculiar composite of attributes of at least two distinct species. To this day the Economic Botany Collection at Kew acknowledges only one Macadamia species, and has filed all its specimens under the name Macadamia ternifolia.
The first Australian to try to grow Macadamia Nuts as a crop was Charles Staff, of Rous Mill near Lismore in north-eastern New South Wales. The species he chose was the despised M. tetraphylla, so evidently he was of the opinion that the nuts were palatable.
The total number of species in the genus seems to have settled at four. The name Macadamia ternifolia has been resurrected for
the small-fruited Macadamia or Maroochy Nut (probably identical with the aforementioned Gympie Nut). Twenty-one individuals of a fourth species have been found in a rainforest gulley off Granite Creek, north of Gin Gin, in the Bulburin Forest in Central Queensland. These multi-stemmed trees springing from a lignotuber were given the specific name jansenii, for the original collector, R. C. Jansen, a cane farmer from South Kolan. He was bushwalking with friends in 1983 near Granite Creek, north of Gin Gin, when he came across what he recognised as some kind of Macadamia trees and informed the Macadamia Conservation Trust (Gross and Weston, 725). The trust has enlisted the aid of the traditional owners, the Gidarjil Aboriginal community, in protecting the trees and in finding more. Gidarjil elder Merv Johnson was quoted in the local press as saying: ‘It’s a big thing for us. We come from a hunter-gatherer background; our people hunted and gathered nuts . . . I went out and saw the nuts. They’re only small but they taste beautiful, I reckon – a little bit bitter, but very sweet.’ The hope is that genes from M. jansenii can be bred into commercial varieties of Macadamia to improve their heat tolerance.
All four Australian species of Macadamia are now listed as endangered, so we don’t hesitate to propagate and plant as many of our native Macadamia as we can at CCRRS, mindful that, in our plant community, it is an occasional, slow-growing and rather picky about where it grows and with whom. It fruits erratically, but when it does, and the nuts finally fall, small earthbound mammals have a party, gathering in their hundreds to gnaw round holes in the woody nutshells and feast on the starchy kernels rich with oil.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 33