White Beech: The Rainforest Years

by Greer, Germaine

  Across the wide spectrum of rainforest nut nomenclature flits the ghost of the Bopple Nut. According to some, the name refers to Mount Bauple, in which case it should be Bauple Nut, but it is also Poppel Nut and Popple Nut. Just what the name refers to is anybody’s guess. Some think it refers to M. tetraphylla, others M. integrifolia, and others both. The Mount Bauple National Park Management Plan (2011) identifies the local Macadamia species as M. integrifolia, which puts the matter beyond doubt. What is baffling about this situation is that an unattributed and apparently unscientific notion persists that ‘wild nut trees were first found growing around Mount Bauple’, 220 km north of Brisbane, in 1858, when the first wild Macadamias had been collected thirty years earlier. Certainly Macadamia nuts are recorded as a staple food of the Dowarbara and Butchulla peoples of the Mount Bauple area. As for the Cave Creek Macadamias, the Macadamia is not listed among the foods eaten by the Kombumerri, who did eat the fruit of Hicksbeachia pinnatifolia, otherwise known as the Red Boppel Nut (or simply the Red Nut, or the Monkey Nut). The Hicksbeachia, so named by Ferdinand Mueller to oblige Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Secretary of State for New South Wales, is a wonderful tree with fantastically lobed juvenile foliage, purple pendent flower spathes, and vermilion fruit hanging in clusters, but it does not grow north of the border.

  The most important nut for the local Aboriginal people was the Moreton Bay Chestnut, which is not a nut at all, but a huge bean. The tree, which is in the subfamily Faboidae of the family Fabaceae, is usually called Black Bean, though its seeds compressed into their fat pods look more like gigantic brown peas. The Black Beans show up on the slopes of our rainforest as faintly bluish smudges on the green, probably because of the reflection of the sky on their glossy leaf surfaces. They flower prodigiously; when racemes crowded with red and gold bean flowers burst from the scars left by fallen leaves every nectar eater in the forest comes crowding in, honeyeaters by day, possums and bats by night.

  The Black Bean was first collected at the Endeavour River in 1770. Sydney Parkinson drew the original plant portrait, and in 1779 Frederick Polydore Nodder produced the finished sketch that was engraved by Gerald Sibelius for a Florilegium that cost Sir Joseph Banks £10,000 though it was not actually printed until 1962. No attempt was made to name the plant until it was collected again by Alan Cunningham on his trip to the Brisbane and Logan Rivers in 1828. Cunningham named it then Castanospermum australe. When Hooker came to publish the new taxon in his Botanical Miscellany in 1830 he attributed it to both Cunningham and his travelling companion, Charles Frazer, evidently by mistake. Cunningham’s specimen was forwarded with the rest of Banks’s collection to the British Museum, and is now in the Natural History Museum.

  A desperate hack called Robert Mudie, who is responsible for ninety volumes on all kinds of subjects, collared the new information for two of the books he churned out in 1829, The Picture of Australia and Vegetable Substances. He correctly described Castanospermum as a ‘pea tree’ but slightly mis-rendered its name as ‘castanospermum Australis’. He then waxed lyrical.

  The odour, especially when they are undergoing the process of roasting, is agreeable, intermediate between that of good oaten bread and a potato newly dug and roasted. The flavour, though not so sweet, is nearly as grateful as that of the Spanish chestnut. As the tree produces abundantly, if it be found in sufficient quantity it may be an object of commerce, or may be worthy of cultivation, especially if the wood correspond in value with the seeds. (150)

  If you simply roast a Moreton Bay Chestnut and then eat it, you are certain to be very sick and you may possibly die. Floyd tells us: ‘The seeds are poisonous to man and beast, although they were reportedly eaten by Aborigines after preparation and prolonged washing in water to remove the saponin.’ (159) Cattle agisted at Cave Creek regularly ate the Black Beans whenever they could find them. This may not have done them any good. In 1987 eighteen Brahman bulls grazing in a paddock where there were fallen Black Beans were found on testing to be heterozygotes for Pompe’s disease (Reichmann et al.).

  For Black Beans to be wholesome, they must first be split, then soaked, skinned, sliced and pounded into a meal. The meal is then placed in a woven bag and left in running water for several days, then drained, dried, shaped into cakes and roasted. The active toxin in the seeds, castanospermine, has been shown to have anti-HIV and anti-cancer properties (Roja and Heble). The Black Bean’s range extends from Lismore in New South Wales as far north as Vanuatu and New Caledonia. (Dispersion over such vast expanses of ocean is possible because when the Black Bean pod is wet it seals shut.)

  Our true nut trees by contrast are genuinely Gondwanan. Most of them are lauraceous; the fossil megafloras of 50 million years ago show the Lauraceae to have been the most numerous family in Gondwana subtropical rainforest; at the present count there are seventeen lauraceous species in the Cave Creek rainforest in six genera, and quite a few of them are called nuts.

  The genus Endiandra was named by Robert Brown. The name means ‘inner male’, referring to the inner series of stamens which are the fertile ones in this genus. All six of the Cave Creek Endiandra species are called walnuts in common parlance. In 1864 Meisner gave two of them scientific names. One is the Endiandra we know best, E. pubens, also known as the Hairy Walnut; the other, Mueller’s Walnut, he called E. mulleri, so perhaps Mueller misspelt Meisner on purpose when he named Cryptocarya meissneri two years later. Bentham named the Rose Walnut Endiandra discolor (Flora Australiensis, 5:301). The Black or Ball-fruited Walnut was named E. globosa by Maiden and Betche in 1899 (149). The last to be named, by Kostermans in 1970, was E. hayesii after H. C. Hayes who first collected it.

  When I learnt from the third edition of Mabberley’s Plant-Book (2008) that the edible fruit of Floydia praealta (prealta in Mabberley’s spelling) was called a ‘coohoy’, I pounced on the word and used it in as many ways as I could, until I began to wonder why nobody else did. The Australian National Dictionary illustrated the word by a quote from a diary of the trailblazer Christie Palmerston. On 21 January 1885, when he was amid the headwaters of the Johnstone River, he recorded:

  dinner consisted of a few coohoy nuts, so named by the aborigines. The nut is perfectly round and about six inches in circumference, with a thin shell. When in fruit it is green and ribbed with a few converging [lines]. The fruit, which is useless, fastens to the nut like glue. Hit it against some hard substance and the fruit breaks, allowing the nut to roll out clearly. The nut needs no preparation, only roasting till nicely browned. If eaten raw it resembles the uncooked English potato. Some of the trees run to the height of 100 feet before breaking. They are as straight as an arrow and the stems measured four arms’ length in circumference. (Savage, 181)

  In the diary of a later expedition, in the entry made on 12 July 1886, Palmerston tells us: ‘The nut can be gathered all the year round in countless numbers, containing no evil properties. The simple operation of roasting it on coals will prepare it for food; or, if crushed to meal, it assumes a coffee-color, and can be mixed and be cooked into excellent cakes.’ (Savage, 190) Though Palmerston was no botanist his description is exact. The species was eventually collected by Bailey on the Russell River during the Bellenden Ker expedition and in 1891 named Cryptocarya palmerstonii. Twenty years later when William Guilfoyle gave the name ‘coohoy’ to the fruit of Helicia praealta, as the Floydia used to be known, he was simply wrong (Guilfoyle, 1910, 210), and Mabberley has repeated the error. Eventually it was realised that the Cryptocarya was in fact an Endiandra (White & Francis, 1920), but nobody remembered that it was also the ‘invaluable’ Coohoy. Palmerston also describes the preparation by which the fruit of Endiandra pubens is divested of its poisonous properties. That does grow at Cave Creek, but E. palmerstonii does not grow south of Millaa Millaa.

  The most important of the many lauraceous genera at Cave Creek is Cryptocarya. The name Cryptocarya means ‘hidden nut’, and, again, given the fact that the name is simply descriptive, we are not surprised to
find that it too was coined in 1810 by Robert Brown (402). Brown did not name a type. What he seems to have had before him were specimens of two species, Cryptocarya glaucescens, and again the specific name is descriptive, referring to the bluish bloom on the underside of the leaves, and C. obovata, referring to the shape of the leaves which are upside-down-egg-shaped, broadest at the tip. So the type is one or other of these. CCRRS has both. C. obovata is also known as White Walnut. The next to be named was C. laevigata by Carl Ludwig von Blume in 1826 (11:556), and then C. microneura by Carl Daniel Friedrich Meisner, Professor of Botany at Basel and expert on the Lauraceae, in 1864 (de Candolle, 15(1):73). Mueller intended to name the next one for Meisner but spelt the name wrong (again) and gave it the wrong suffix (Fragmenta, 5:38, 170); it was not until 1976 that D. D. Frodin sorted it out, but even he misspelt the species name as ‘meisnerana’ when it should have been ‘meisneriana’.

  The next to be named was Stinking Cryptocarya, C. foetida, by R. T. Baker, economic botanist at the Technological Museum in Sydney, in 1907 (517, ADB). Why he called it that nobody knows. The flowers are actually sweet-scented and beloved of bees. (The species had in fact been collected much earlier, by Cunningham in 1828.) The tree is now so rare as a consequence of the clearing of its coastal habitat for development, that the Cave Creek specimens are amongst very few surviving. In the same year Maiden named Cryptocarya erythroxylon in his Forest Flora of New South Wales (3:26, 111). In 1924 C. T. White and W. D. Francis named one of the biggest Cryptocaryas C. foveolata, known to some as Mountain Walnut (APNI).

  One afternoon as I mooched about the forest I found myself standing ankle deep in shiny black berries. I took some to the workforce who knew it at once as the fruit of Cryptocarya erythroxylon, the Pigeon-berry Ash. Who wouldn’t grow pigeon berries, especially when our pigeons are killing themselves by eating immature Camphor Laurel fruit? In the caldera, known to me as Laurel Canyon, multiple death events of Topknot and Wonga Wonga Pigeons have been reported, and in each case the birds’ crops and stomachs contained nothing but Camphor Laurel berries.

  One of the first revelations of what regrowing the forest might bring was the arrival in numbers of pigeon species that are known to be in serious decline. These days we often see Topknot Pigeons who wear a toupee of swept-back ginger plumes and fly in battalions. Wompoo Fruit Doves, papally magnificent in their white, green, gold and purple vestments, can be heard making their obscenely gobbling call. I sit on the verandah with my binoculars following Rose-crowned Fruit Doves, Cicadabirds and Green Catbirds as they work through the canopy. Every now and then a Wonga Pigeon comes waddling through the leaves. And now we have Emerald Doves breeding somewhere just off the main track. We collected a bucketful of pigeon berries; it won’t be our fault if Cryptocarya erythroxylon is not soon growing once more all over these mountains. If you’d like a seedling, let us know.

  The Inhabitants: Non-Furry

  The most important creatures in the rainforest are the smallest, the microbes and the invertebrates. The survival of the forest ecosystem depends on them. A rainforest, being a closed ecosystem, survives by recycling itself, and for that it needs the help of the living beings that break down dead material. A leaf falls; bacteria help it to decay; worms pull the dead matter back into the soil. A tree falls; wood-chewing beetles transmute its timber into dung which is quickly mineralised and becomes soil. If the process should slow down, the survival of the forest is threatened. So no matter how serious an insect infestation of young trees at CCRRS may turn out to be, we leave it to run its course. Our young Red Cedars, for example, can be severely damaged by the larvae of a moth, Hypsipyla robusta, but we make no effort to control any infestation. Generally the affected trees recover but, the leader being irrevocably damaged, they are thenceforward multi-stemmed and will never fulfil their optimum role as rainforest emergents. The continued presence of the moth is necessary if the resistant Red Cedars are not to lose the genetic trait that protects them.

  The Cave Creek invertebrates deserve a book of their own, with photographs, and perhaps one day they will have one. I’ve photographed magenta katydid nymphs, black and white striped worms, green-winged butterflies, huge hawkmoth caterpillars, much bigger millipedes, stick insects as long as an arm, iridescent blue flies with sizzling gold eyes, male and female longhorn beetles in each other’s arms, bladder cicadas like green balloons, fireflies, glow-worms, turquoise dragonflies with transparent black wings, and giant land snails. I can put names to no more than half of them; the others may not have been described and may have no names yet, for all I know. (Of the 98 per cent of terrestrial species that are invertebrates only a fraction has ever been described; an estimated five and a half million species await description.) The creek is thronged with water-mites, water-fleas and shrimps as well as the nymphs of stone flies, mayflies, dragonflies, not to mention caddis-flies, flatworms, snails and leeches, more and more of them since we began to remove the weeds that infested the waterway. The most famous inhabitant of the creek is another invertebrate, a blue crayfish, probably but not necessarily Euastacus sulcatus. After torrential rain we can come across blue crayfishes washed out of their creeks and wandering about on land. When they see us coming they rear up and wave their red, white and blue claws in a vain attempt to strike fear into our hearts. Our creek is too rocky for platypuses or long-neck turtles to make homes on, or so I think. Besides, when the freshes come, which they do regularly but unpredictably, the creek is so violently reconfigured that the nests of such burrowmakers would be destroyed.

  The creek is one place the sun can always get to, and so the weeds come back year on year, and year on year we remove them. As a result even our threatened frog species have been able to build up their numbers. These days, when the rains come, the frog chorus is deafening.

  One wet night the frog noise was so very loud that I went out to see what was afoot. I followed the unholy din towards the old muster yard, and the cattle drinker in the middle of it. The drinker, which held a couple of feet of warm rainwater, was full of Southern Orange-eyed Treefrogs (Litoria chloris) all yelling fit to bust, their throat membranes inflated to transparency. As I watched other tree frogs climbed in, or hung from the rim of the tank, and joined in the yelling. In the water I could see frogs grabbing other frogs, and other frogs grabbing them, in a mad group grope. When frogs mate the male does not penetrate the female, who simply ejects her eggs into the water while the male frog ejaculates in the same water, so all this embracing was hardly necessary, but the frogs were hugging anyway. Altogether it was the wildest party that could ever be imagined. It went on till dawn. (My rather inept video of this event can be seen on the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest website.)

  The next day the drinker was full of spawn, but the sun was up and the water level in the drinker was falling. The tadpoles that hatched ate the tadpoles that hatched after them, till there were only a few dozen metamorphs left to climb out of the drinker on the branchlets I had positioned to take them safely over the rim. A few days after rain we will find tadpoles in most of the puddles, but I have never been able to figure out how many of them ever make it to being frogs.

  Frogs are stupendous creatures because, even when they are metamorphs no bigger than a fly, they can hear and see, and catch prey, and leap forty times their own length. It is tempting to think they are smart. An old Green Treefrog who turned up on the bedroom windowsill one evening sat there through the night and the whole of the following day, apparently dozing, but every time I turned to look at him, I’d find his horizontal pupil trained on me. He was as big as a half-kilo bag of sugar and much the same shape. To get to such a size he must have outwitted a long line of predators, for frogs are food for most rainforest creatures, including other frogs. I didn’t try to pat him for fear that my hand on his silky green skin would have felt scalding hot. He was still there when I fell asleep the next night; in the morning he was gone as quietly as he came. His scientific name is Litoria caerulea; the species name, whi
ch means ‘blue’, came about because the spirit in which the specimen sent to Banks had been preserved had dissolved the yellow glaze over its blue underskin. The genus name has changed several times, but the misleading epithet hangs on.

  Tree frogs are the insignia of rainforests the world over. Of the dozen or more species that make their home at Cave Creek my favourite is the Cascade Treefrog (Litoria pearsoniana). The scientific name given to the species by Stephen J. Copland in 1960 commemorates Oliver Pearson, Professor of Zoology at Berkeley. Copland had two gos at the name, which he rendered first as Hyla pearsoni (1960) and then Hyla pearsoniana; in 1970, after the Litoria genus had been separated from the genus Hyla, Michael Tyler renamed the frog Litoria pearsoni; that name was corrected to Litoria pearsoniana by John Barker and Gordon Grigg in 1977. The confusion has not quite dissipated; the genus Litoria is once more under revision. There is considerable variation in the colouring of Cascade Treefrogs. The ones at Cave Creek are pale green with pearl-white bellies, and their skin is shagreened, so that it looks like frosted glass. To my eye they are the most beautiful tree frogs of all.

  Under the Queensland Nature Conservation Act of 1992 the species is listed as endangered, but you can hear Cascade Treefrogs calling any warm evening along Cave Creek. There is nevertheless a good deal that we don’t understand about these little creatures. Immature frogs are very seldom found, so the current thinking is that this is one tree frog that ascends to the canopy as a juvenile and doesn’t come down again for two or three years, until it is mature and ready to mate. Until we have ways of observing canopy life without disrupting it, this hypothesis cannot be verified. In the winter Cascade Treefrogs are supposed to group together in large mixed-sex aggregations, squeezed tightly into narrow rock crevices, in lethargy, with their eyes closed.