Literary Imaginings of the Bunya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600002968Keywords:
Bunya pine, local civic culture, South-East QueenslandAbstract
By the time that Europeans became acquainted with the bunya, the gum tree was already well established as the iconic Australian tree. The genus Eucalyptus, with all its locally specific variants, was both distinctive to the continent and widely dispersed throughout it. In contrast, the bunya tree (classified as Araucaria bidwillii in 1843) grew in a small area of what is now South-East Queensland and was seen by few Europeans before the 1840s, when Moreton Bay was opened to free settlement. The physical distinctiveness of the bunya tree, and stories of the large gatherings which accompanied the triennial harvesting of its nut, aroused the curiosity of early European explorers and settlers, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the bunya tree achieved a special status in local civic culture. Although heavy logging had largely destroyed the great bunya forests, the tree was planted extensively in school grounds, around war memorials and in long avenues in parks.
References
Aboriginal understandings of the bunya are addressed elsewhere in this issue of Queensland Review.
George Mitchell's story as reported to Allan Cunningham, in J.G. Steele, Brisbane Town in Convict Days 1824-1842 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975), 109: Cunningham's rough notes on the bunya focus on its botanical character and the preparation of the nut for eating. Cunningham is more closely associated with another local Araucaria, the hoop pine which bears his name (Araucaria cunninghamii). Petrie's interest was primarily commercial in nature.
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Leichhardt, Letters, vol 2, 707. Leichhardt's descriptions of the bunya were well known to early Queensland colonists through their publication by John Dunmore Lang in Cooksland in Northeastern Australia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847).
Leichhardt, Letters: Leichhardt to Lynd, 7 August 1843, 666; Leichhardt to his mother, 27 August 1843, 671; and Leichhardt to Lynd, 9 January 1844, 708.
E.g. Marianne North: see Vellacott, Helen, ed, Some Recollections of a Happy Life: Marianne North in Australia and New Zealand (Caulfield East, Vic.: Edward Arnold Australia, 1986), 18.
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In Tom Petrie's Reminiscences, 252, Constance Petrie writes: ‘The blacks had a strange idea about that same blindness – they declared that the spirit of the mountain [Beerwah] had caused it in order that Mr Petrie would be for ever afterwards unable to see his way up again’. See also Dornan and Cryle, 51.
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Walter Hill (1820-1904) was the first Superintendent of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, appointed in 1855, retired in 1881. He made an important contribution to the development of agriculture and horticulture in Queensland with his pioneering efforts to find native plants and introduce exotics. He grew the first sugar cane in the Gardens in 1862, distributed more than 50,000 cuttings of cane, coffee, grapes, ginger, tobacco and other crops, and introduced the jacaranda, poinciana, mango, tamarind and pecan trees to Queensland. He was the author of the catalogue, Botanic Gardens, Brisbane: A Collection of Economic and Other Plants, printed for the Melbourne Exhibition of 1880.
An extant example is the alternating planting of bunyas and cottonwood trees around the perimeter of the Graceville Memorial Park.
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