None of the three species of Davidson’s Plum is being produced commercially on a large scale. In 1999 botanist Kris Kupsch set up Ooray Orchards at Burringbar south of Murwillumbah; he is now growing upwards of 2,000 Davidsonias, including eighteen D. johnsonii types from eighteen different sites. It is Kupsch’s intention to collect and propagate Davidsonias from as many genetic populations as possible, in a bid to increase their chances of survival.
Most of the seed developed by any rainforest fruiting species is first and foremost a life-support for the invertebrate members of the forest community and for its birds. Ripe fruit hits the ground carrying a larval load that can be anything from microscopic to gross. All the seeds we collect for planting must first be soaked to drown the larvae that would otherwise eat the seed before it germinated. For the fruit-eating birds, the worms that infest the fruit they eat are an important, often their sole, source of protein. Every single rainforest tree has at least one dedicated insect species that pollinates its flowers and lays its eggs in either flower or fruit. Drosophila, the genus that includes the fruit-fly species that helped us to understand genetic mutation, is well represented in the rainforest. No sooner had the settlers cleared the rainforests and planted their fruit groves than the dispossessed fruit flies mounted their counter-attack on behalf of the nurturing forest.
In the rainforest a single tree species is likely to host up to three fruit-fly species in densities of up to seventeen fruit flies per 100 fruits. What this signifies is that populations of endemic fruit flies exist in balance with their host trees and do not threaten their survival. The great majority of fruit flies in their natural habitat are limited to a single plant genus, and most to a single species within the genus (Novotny et al.). Pest fruit flies, whether from the Mediterranean or islands in the Pacific, tend to infest a wide variety of fruits, from stoned fruit to citrus, guava and papaya. Attempts to keep pest fruit flies out of Australia have been both expensive and largely ineffective. Our best bet is to nurture the native fruit-fly populations in the hope that they can hold their own.
For years Australians have been planting olive trees, some as a tax dodge, others because lifestyle magazines recommended them for hedging, and some because they hoped to make money from olive oil. Unfortunately the select European types were deemed unsuitable for Australian conditions, and vigorous new varieties were grafted onto African rootstocks (Spenneman and Allen). Because the cost of the manpower needed to collect the fruit and prune the trees was prohibitive, many commercial olive groves were found to be uneconomic and subsequently abandoned. Birds ate the fruit left on decorative olive trees, foxes ate the fruit that fell in the abandoned orchards, and both excreted the seed kernels up hill and down dale, where they sprouted, grew into more trees, produced more olives that fed more birds and foxes and so on exponentially ad infinitum. Since 1992 the olive has been listed as a noxious weed in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. I would have grown the native olive, Olea paniculata, even if it hadn’t been eaten by eight rainforest bird species and even if it hadn’t been impossibly elegant, with its glossy dark leaves and pale branchlets, because its dedicated fruit-fly species are our only defence against weed olives.
It is probably important to point out at this juncture that the Queensland Fruit Fly that is a major pest of Australian horticulture is not a Drosophila but a tephritid fly called Bactrocera tryoni. This fly too is endemic to northern New South Wales but, unlike the dedicated Drosophila species, it attacks more than a hundred different fruit crops; its hosts in its native forests are thought to be Syzygium species.
The forest fruit harvest is deeply unpredictable. One year we will have cartloads of native tamarinds and another year none. Some years the forest will be carpeted with black apples, variously called Planchonella or Pouteria australis. As I crawl around the forest floor, picking up black apples and ticks in almost equal quantities, I am very aware that I am in competition with other animals. One (or more) species eats the apple flesh, leaving the big seeds in little heaps, and the other (or others) leaves the flesh and eats the seed. I needn’t have begrudged them. Pouterias were amongst the first tree species we propagated, and we propagated far too many. We would have had to turn our rainforest into a black apple orchard if I hadn’t taught the workforce their first bitter lesson and made them throw half the precious seedlings away. I stewed the black apple flesh, which was woody enough to make your teeth squeak, and then strained it, to see if there was any pectin in it. There wasn’t. The syrup didn’t set, so I added water and froze it in moulds to make popsicles.
The exploring botanists of the nineteenth century were supposedly looking for ‘useful’ plants that might be suitable for cultivation. Any botanist must know that even the most delicious European apples are descended from small sour crabs, and all the plums from bitter sloes, but wild Australian fruits were expected to be of the same order of toothsomeness as highly bred European ones. It was not until 1851 or so that Australians were informed that they had a native version of the famed Tamarind: ‘The Australian Tamarind is a tall tree, growing in nearly all the scrubs and jungles near the coast, and bears a fruit resembling in appearance and taste the tamarind of the West Indies.’ (SMH, 28 August) The Australian tamarinds belong to the sapindaceous genus Diploglottis, whereas the historic Tamarind, originally endemic to the Sudan, and now grown from West Africa to China, is fabaceous. The fruits of the Australian tamarinds are held in brown, furry capsules, which split to release brown seeds encased in orange-yellow arils. The sharp tang of the fruit of Tamarindus indicus is a valued element in cooking across half the world, but rather than develop the Australian fruit to rival it, Australian horticulturists imported seedlings of T. indicus from anywhere and everywhere. The Australian version remained unexploited until ‘Bush Tucker’ became the fashion in the 1980s. Even now nobody seems to want to do anything with Australian tamarinds but make them into jam or a drink.
The settlers in the Numinbah Valley were not horticulturists but farmers with families to feed. One of their motives for choosing the Numinbah Valley was that it gave them the opportunity to grow a wide range of tasty and nourishing fruit. The trend was set by the very first settler. From childhood Frank Nixon would have been regaled with his mother’s praises of the paradisaical fruit gardens made by her forebears in the West Indies. Thomas Dougan’s Profit plantation boasted an astonishing array of fruiting trees.
At its sides are smooth walks of grass; and between these and the sugar-canes are borders planted with all the choice tropical fruits, rendering a promenade upon the water, or its banks, most fragrant and inviting, and offering to the eye and the palate all the variety of oranges, shaddocks, limes, lemons, cherries, custard apples, cashew apples, avagata pears, grenadilloes, water-lemons, mangoes and pines. (Pinckard, 203–4)
Shaddocks are the citrus we now call grapefruit; cashew apples are Linnaeus’s Anacardium occidentale, which is called ‘marañon’ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and ‘caju’ or ‘cajueiro’ in Portuguese; ‘avagata pears’ are avocadoes, ‘pines’ pineapples. When William Guilfoyle visited the Tweed in 1870 he was impressed by the fruit garden Rosalie Adelaide Nixon had planted at the Hill.
Mr [George] Nixon’s house stands upon a very charming site and one day, not far distant, it will be surrounded by an orchard of the choicest fruits. (BC, 7 January)
Around his Numinbah homestead Frank Nixon had ‘a garden planted with oranges, lemon trees, vines etc.’. The settlers who moved into the valley after him followed his example. Queensland government agents tried to lure settlers by portraying the colony as offering extraordinary opportunities for horticulture, with ‘supernatural yields of fruit . . . oranges and grapes growing by the wayside . . .’ ([Carrington], 8–9)
The very first exotic fruit to be grown in Australia was probably an apple. In 1788, when his ship the Bounty, then charting the south-east coast of Tasmania, called in at Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, William Bligh planted ‘three
fine young Apple-Trees in a growing state’. When he returned in 1792 he found that one had survived. In the 1820s Tasmanian settlers began to sell the surplus production of their private orchards on the open market and by 1860 apples were an important export. In 1966 6 million boxes of apples were shipped from Port Huon, but the industry was already in decline. Australia now produces only 0.1 per cent of the world’s apples, while China produces 40 per cent. The variety most often chosen for Tasmanian cider is the Sturmer Pippin, born and bred only fifteen kilometres from my house in England. In England it has never been favoured for cider production, which is centred not on Essex in the rain-poor south-east of the country where I live, but on Somerset and points south-west.
In 1797 when George Suttor decided that, with twenty pounds to his name, he would emigrate to the infant colony of New South Wales, he turned to Sir Joseph Banks for assistance. He and the other settlers who arrived on HMS Porpoise in 1800 were each given a grant of 200 acres of land, a house, tools and two or three indentured labourers. Suttor had no sooner secured his land in the Baulkham Hills than he set about growing oranges; by 1807 he was selling them at the market in Charlotte Square for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence a dozen. In 1839 Richard Hill acquired land on the Lane Cove River, where he established a successful citrus orchard to which he often travelled in a boat rowed by ten Aboriginal oarsmen. When George Bennett visited The Orangery, as it was called, in 1858, he found Seville, Navel and Mandarin oranges as well as lemons growing in profusion; Hill, who was shipping oranges to the goldfields, had already sold nearly half a million that year, and was making £50 profit per day (ADB).
Nobody stopped to consider whether or not such introductions might disrupt the native vegetation. The native vegetation, on which the indigenous inhabitants had thrived for forty thousand years or more, was thought to be mere scrub, valueless. Nobody sought to quarrel with the conviction that ‘There are few wild fruits in Capricornia, and such as there are, are poor and tasteless.’ (Bennett, 131)
Even as they headed out to collect specimens of an astonishing variety of native plants, the first explorers took with them cherry pips and peach stones to plant as they went along. Allan Cunningham, travelling with John Oxley along the Lachlan River in 1817, planted acorns, quince seeds and peach stones wherever the soil seemed particularly good. As the son of the head gardener at Wimbledon House, Cunningham must have known not only that his peaches were most unlikely to survive without cosseting, but also that if they did, they would almost certainly revert to a wild form. The many cultivars of the peach are assumed to belong to a single species which, although it is originally Chinese, was named by Linnaeus Prunus persica. What the type may be nobody knows, because Chinese horticulturalists had been selectively breeding peaches for at least two thousand years before the fruit came to the knowledge of Europeans. Self-seeded peaches have turned feral in thirteen of the United States; they are listed as significant weeds in the Adelaide Hills and on the Galapagos Islands.
Ludwig Leichhardt too was given peach stones to take with him on his journey overland from the Darling Downs to Port Essington. On 26 January 1845 he reached a creek north of the Mackenzie River which he named Newman’s Creek after the horticulturist Francis William Newman: ‘Here I planted the last peach-stones, with which Mr. Newman the present superintendent of the Botanic Garden in Hobart Town kindly provided me. It is however to be feared that the fires, which annually overrun the whole country, and particularly here, where the grass is rich and deep even to the water’s edge, will not allow them to grow.’ (Leichhardt, 122) When Leichhardt passed that way again two years later he found no vestige of a peach tree (Bailey, J., 304). We should be grateful that Leichhardt’s peaches didn’t grow. Thanks possibly to that same Mr Newman, feral peach trees are now serious weeds in the bushland around Hobart.
Leichhardt never gave up hope that he might find on his travels some delicious new something. He tasted every single fruit he encountered.
In the gully which I descended, a shrub with dark green leaves was tolerably frequent; its red berries, containing one or two seeds, were about the size of a cherry and good eating when ripe. (Leichhardt, 71)
He ate many of the native fruits in quantity, defying gripes and diarrhoea:
Yesterday in coming through the scrub, we had collected a large quantity of ripe native lemons, of which, it being Sunday, we intended to make a tart; but, as my companions were absent, the treat was deferred until their return, which was on Monday morning, when we made them into a dish very like gooseberry fool; they had a pleasant acid taste and were very refreshing. They are of a light yellow colour, nearly round, and about half an inch in diameter; the volatile oil of the rind was not at all disagreeable. (Leichhardt, 77)
Like most of his contemporaries Leichhardt was attracted by the idea of ‘acclimatisation’, which prompted the founding of ‘acclimatisation societies’ in all the Australian states. Their primary aim, as defined in the First Annual Report of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, founded in 1861 with the Government Botanist, Ferdinand Mueller, as its guiding light, was the ‘introduction, acclimatisation and domestication of all innoxious animals, birds, fish, insects, and vegetables whether useful or ornamental’. Nobody knows whether any species is truly ‘innoxious’, that is, harmless, until years after it has been introduced into a new ecosystem.
Acclimatisation had been one of the pet projects of Sir Joseph Banks, who in 1788 sent Bligh in the Bounty to collect breadfruit seedlings from Tahiti and transport them to Jamaica to be grown to provide food for the slaves in the sugarcane plantations. (Sugarcane, indigenous to south-east Asia, is the earliest example of spectacularly successful acclimatisation.) Bligh’s crew mutinied, setting him adrift in a small boat, and threw the breadfruit seedlings into the sea, but a second attempt in 1792 resulted in breadfruit’s becoming a staple food of the West Indies. It was also established in South India and Sri Lanka. Even more famous feats of nineteenth-century acclimatisation were the establishment in India in the 1860s of plantations of Cinchona succirubra, indigenous to Peru, for the industrial production of quinine, and the collection of 70,000 seeds of the Amazonian rubber tree by Sir Henry Wickham at the behest of Sir Joseph Hooker, who distributed them to Colombo, Singapore and Bogor in Indonesia. In both cases the plant material was removed surreptitiously, in an act of botanical piracy, for both the Peruvian and the Brazilian authorities were aware of its commercial value. Australia seemed to have no indigenous plants worth acclimatising elsewhere – at least not before an unsuspecting world acclimatised the eucalypt. Now Spain, Portugal, California and Brazil are amongst the many countries learning the hard way that eucalypts cohabit with fire.
The first colonists were reminded every year that the south-east coast of Australia was very much warmer than northern Europe, and that was thought to mean that the mouth-watering fruits that were raised at home in greenhouses could be grown much more cheaply and easily than in the old country. Mueller exhorted his listeners to be mindful:
how we can have under the open sky around us the plants of all the mediterranean countries, Arabia, Persia, the warmer Himalyan regions, China and Japan; how we can rear here without protection the marvellously rich and varied vegetation of South Africa; how in our isothermal zone we can bring together all the plants of California, New Mexico and other southern states of the American union; and how we need no conservatories for most of the plants of Chili, the Argentine state and South Brazil. (Mueller, 1872, 157)
The die was cast. Since that time the fabulous biodiversity of the island continent has been reduced year on year as weed after introduced weed rampages through one finely balanced ecosystem after another.
The genus Rubus, from which hundreds of European fruit cultivars have been grown, is represented by several Australian species. In his ‘Account of some New Australian Plants’ published in the Transactions of the Philosophical Insititute of Victoria in 1857 Mueller described Rubus moluccanus, which he c
alled R. hillii, because the specimen he had before him was collected ‘on the Brisbane River’ by Walter Hill. The plant collected by Hill was the same as that identified by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum (1753) as R. moluccanus, originally collected in Amboina. Mueller’s mistake was, as usual, silently corrected by Bentham in his Flora Australiensis of 1864 – at least, I think it was. As usual in such matters there are dissenting voices. Eric Lassak, in Australian Medicinal Plants, states quite confidently that Rubus moluccanus is not an Australian species and prefers to follow Mueller in calling what appears to be an identical species R. hillii. In the same article Mueller identified another Rubus which he dubbed R. moorei, after Charles Moore who collected it on the Clarence River. Our commonest wild raspberry, R. rosifolius, was named by Sir James Edward Smith in 1791, from a specimen collected in Mauritius by Commerson.
Any one of these native brambles could have been improved by selective breeding to produce desirable fruit. Instead, as Mueller botanised all over Victoria in 1861, he carried in his saddlebags seeds of the European blackberry, R. fruticosus, and sowed them everywhere he went. For this crime every Australian landowner would consign him to the lower depths of hell. Mueller did not limit his nefarious activities to Victoria. In 1868 a visitor was delighted to see four varieties of blackberries growing well in the garden of the Queensland Acclimatisation Socety at Bowen Park, from cuttings kindly given to the president of the society by ‘Dr Mueller’ (BC, 29 December). The European blackberry is now the most intractable weed in Australia, infesting more than 9 million hectares in five of the six states. The Animal and Plant Control Act of 1986 requires land managers to spend time, money and energy in futile attempts to eradicate it. At Cave Creek can be found two of the Australian Rubus species. R. rosifolius is so vigorous as to be a nuisance but the fruits are too insipid to eat, unless you’re a wren or a mouse and covet the seeds. R. moluccanus on the other hand is not rampant, very handsome and rather tastier.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 30
