White Beech: The Rainforest Years (46 page)

‘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.

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.