Wattle seed icecream, anyone? Bracken ointment? A cumbungi bag? Terri Allen lists some locally indigenous plants useful for food, fibre and medicine.
FERNS
Pteridium esculentum, Austral Bracken
MONOCOTYLEDONS
Dianella revoluta, Spreading Flax-lily
Poa labillardierei, Common Tussock
Acacia mearnsii, Black Wattle
Pteridium esculentum, Austral Bracken
- The rhizomes are edible late summer to autumn – pound to extract the starch and cook as cakes on the coals.
- Tips of the fronds are nutty – eat raw.
- Eat uncurled fronds (fiddle heads) – heat and eat. High in protein and zinc.
- Leaves and stalks were made into a drink
- Brown skin from the rhizomes (underground stems) was peeled, boiled and the decoction drunk as an antidote for pain.
- Rhizome stem used to treat diarrhoea and intestinal inflammation.
- Rhizome can be boiled in lard or oil to make an ointment for wounds.
- Used to prepare leather.
- Juice from young stems used to relieve insect bites.
- Juice used in Underwood’s snake antidote.
- Poisonous to introduced domestic animals.
- Initiates the regeneration of degraded land – holds the soil from eroding, fronds cool the soil and maintain humidity to allow plant germination.
- Important coloniser.
- Reproduces vegetatively so makes viruses ineffective.
- Five poisonous principles in bracken – heat in cooking destroys these poisons.
MONOCOTYLEDONS
Dianella revoluta, Spreading Flax-lily
- Aborigines ate the fruits (but some poisonous), seeds (sweet nutty flavour), roots after pounding and roasting.
- Used the berries for a permanent blue dye.
- Leaves made a strong fibre for string and plaited in baskets.
- Used for weaving.
- Used for weaving.
- Aborigines soaked the flowers to make a sweet drink, ate the tiny creamy flowers and seeds.
- Important plant for string manufacture and weaving e.g. baskets, eel traps. Leaves picked, split into two, dried for 3+ days and dampened 24 hours to make pliable.
- Used for tying up limbs, for bandages.
- Aborigines ate the tuber as a medicine – for arthritis, jaundice, food poisoning.
- Underground shoots are like bamboo shoots – edible.
- Sharpened ends of the stems were used to skin animals and to cut the umbilical cord.
- Stems were used as hafts for spears, cut into segments for necklaces and nose ornaments, used as snorkels when catching water birds.
- Stems were woven into rope for bags and baskets.
- Early settlers used the plant for thatch and explorer Eyre made a thatched hut.
- Today used in wetlands to purify water.
Poa labillardierei, Common Tussock
- Woven into string for nets, baskets, mats.
- Edible tubers.
- Aborigines baked the underground stem, chewed it to extract the starch and the stringy leftovers were rolled into twine.
- The stem tasted of leek, the young shoots like artichoke, the pollen nutty. New shoots were eaten raw, roots and stem baked. Pollen could be baked into a cake.
- The starchy tuber was used for dysentery.
- Aborigines used Cumbungi string to make large nets, the flower head for torches.
- Cumbungi pollen has been used as an absorbent in surgery and a dressing for wounds.
- Soft down was a bandage for wounds, pillow stuffing and used for flotation in life rafts.
Acacia mearnsii, Black Wattle
- Aborigines chewed the gum or mixed it with water to make a jelly.
- Wattle barkers from Van Dieman’s Land pre-1835 used bark in tanning.
- Aborigines used bark and twigs as a poison to stun fish.
- Timber used for boat building as could be easily steam-bent.
- Aborigines infused bark in water and bathed arthritic joints.
- The gum was edible.
- Inner bark fibres were used for string, to make fishing lines.
- Bark and twigs used as a poison to stun fish.
- Timber was used for spears, woomeras, boomerangs, shields, coolamons.
- Was used to make walking sticks, gun stocks, racquets, sounding boards of pianos, beer barrels, casks for whale oil, cabinet timber.
- Aborigines steamed the young pods over a fire, eating the cooked seeds.
- Liquid from the bark used to tan skins, fishing nets and sails.
- Blossoms cooked in fritters and pikelets.
- Wattle seed in biscuits, cakes, icecream (dried seed twice roasted and ground).
- Stabilises coastal dunes, provides shelter.
- Named after the cassowary as the leaves resemble the bird’s plumage.
- Aborigines ate the young shoots and emerging cones.
- Wood was suitable for boomerangs, spears and woomeras.
- Needles could be used for tinder, bedding, although ghostly wind through the leaves kept people from camping in the groves.
- Easily split, it was used by settlers for shingles and firewood.
- Sapwood to make a gargle for toothache.
- Aborigines soaked the flower cones to make a sweet drink; flower syrup was used for sore throats and colds.
- Dry flower cones were used as strainers or as fire carriers.
- Early settlers filled the dried cones with dripping and used them as night lights.
- Timber was used for bullock yokes, boat knees and for wood turning.
- Honey producers put the hives into groves of banksias.
- Contains aesculin, a product in sunburn creams and UV filters and prescribed in medicines.
- Soaked leaves turn the water blue, absorbing ultraviolet light; add vinegar or lemon juice and water turns red; add caustic soda, back to blue. Acts like litmus paper.
- Useful in gardens, farm corridors.
- Flowers attract native wasps which lay their eggs in Christmas Beetle larvae and thus stop defoliation.
- Aborigines made coarse string for bags and nets from the inner bark.
- Bark was used for fishing torches, tinder, canoes.
- Leaves can be used for dyeing: yellow, green, grey.
- Timber for Wonthaggi mines, sleepers, shingles, joinery, furniture, wine casks, fence palings.
- Used in paper pulp.
- Koala habitat; old trees have hollows for birds, animals, bees.
- Aborigines moistened the bark and leaves and applied to sore eyes; leaves were chewed to cure diarrhoea; the smoke from burning leaves reduced fever.
- Aborigines ate lerp (manna) and the sugary pellets of dried sap caused by insect borers.
- Timber used for shields, coolamons, water containers.
- Cook and early explorers used the tips to make a tea to prevent scurvy.
- A passable lemony tea can be made from the tips.
- Ripe berries were nutritious and thirst-quenching in summer.
- When in flower, the snapper are on the bite.
- Indicator of swampland – soaks up excess moisture.
- Aborigines used the flowers for a sweet drink, the soft papery bark to swaddle babies.
- Bark was used to make fishing floats.
- Wood was suitable for spears, clubs, digging sticks.
- Nectar and crushed leaves were made into a drink.
- Planted to subdue malarial vapours in swamps.
- Edible but bitter fruit.
- Infuse the branchlets in boiling/hot water – with the liquid scrub the head to treat general ailments.
- Use as a windbreak or quick-growing shelter belt.
- Fire retardant.
- Aborigines ate the leaves and berries (which are bitter).
- Squashed berries gave a dye, used by the settlers as red ink.
- Ripe berries were an Aboriginal delicacy.
- Raspberry leaf tea was used as a gargle for sore throats, for diarrhoea and to ease pain.
- Edible berries.
- Berries when soft are edible but not tasty – some say too poisonous to eat.
- Rub-on treatment for sunspots and skin cancers (Curaderm cream, produced Brisbane).
- Steroidal saponins in leaves, stems, fruit (solasodin) – major source of steroids; contraception pill, treat asthma and arthritis, sex hormones used for menopausal disorder, infertility and impotence. Huge plantations are grown in Russia and Hungary to source the contraceptive pill.