White Beech: The Rainforest Years (42 page)

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 called
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.

European brambles cannot survive in subtropical rainforest, thank goodness. In their stead, we have to struggle with descendants of Suttor’s oranges. We call them ‘bush lemons’. They are probably versions of the ‘rough lemon’ or
Citrus jambhiri
that was used extensively for more than a hundred years as the rootstock for Australian citrus, especially in Queensland.
Citrus jambhiri
was thought to have originated as a distinct species in the foothills of the Himalayas, but biotechnological data now suggest that it is a hybrid of
Citrus limon
and an unknown co-parent. Because they are highly sensitive to citrus root rot (
Phytophthora citrophora
) and to citrus nematodes, rough lemons do best in land where citrus has never been planted before, which means that they do especially well in rainforest.

Given copious rain and rich basalt soil a bush lemon grows into a stout suckering thicket, so well equipped with long sharp spines that the only way to get rid of it is to thread a chain around it, hook it up to a tractor and drag it bodily out of the ground. Every fragment of root left behind will send up an aggressively spiny new shoot. The fruits, often huge and knobby, are jammed with seeds. Cockatoos, corellas and other fruit-eating birds besiege the bush lemon trees when they are in fruit, so that the seeds are scattered far and wide. Often as I tramp in the most inaccessible parts of the forest, a citrus twig will catch at my leg and my eyes will suddenly water as the bruised leaves emit their piercingly acrid smell, vaguely recognisable as an intensification of the bridal scent of the cultivated varieties. Then I open my scrip, take out my bright yellow plague tape and brave the stout spines to tie a fluttering length around a branch. Next time the workforce comes by with the herbicide and the brush hooks it will be put to death. Except for one tree, that I have marked three times and still it survives. It bears a thin-skinned fruit rather like a clementine, brim-full of sweet juice much appreciated by the workers. So far the young’uns have refused to kill it, and simply assure me that no fruit is ever left for the birds and that all the seeds end up in the garbage.

There are native citrus species that could have been developed to provide the infant colony with its necessary Vitamin C, but nobody was looking for them. The first was not discovered until Walter Hill came across it ‘in nemoribus circum sinum Moreton Bay’ in 1857 and called it ‘
Citrus cataphracta
’. Because its fruits were small, when Mueller came to revise Hill’s work in 1858 he called it
Microcitrus australiasica
(
sic
), and published the new name in his
Fragmenta
(2:26). He should have known better; a citrus is a citrus whether it is small or large. He made a similar mistake in dubbing the desert citrus ‘Eremocitrus’. Both fake genera have finally bitten the dust.
Eremocitrus glauca
is now
Citrus glauca
, while the rainforest Finger Lime is
Citrus australasica
(Mabberley, 1998, 4). The native citrus that grows along Cave Creek produces an abundance of fruit of an irregular fusiform shape that might suggest a swollen finger, on some trees dark green, on others almost black and on others red or translucent yellow. A red form found at nearby Tamborine Mountain in 1892 was identified by F. M. Bailey as
Microcitrus australasica
var.
sanguinea
, but the variability demonstrated by those at Cave Creek suggests that the varieties are anything but distinct. The flesh, whether palest green-white, blush-pink or red, is formed of tiny faceted vesicles much more solid than the vesicles in oranges or lemons. It takes a strenuous tongue to pop one against the roof of the mouth, but the taste is worth it.

I use Finger Limes to make an Australian version of the Brazilian caipirinha. After the seeds have been removed for propagation, I pound the whole fruit, skin and all, in a mortar, then add cane syrup and a measure of white rum, leave it to steep for five minutes, and then pour the lot over cracked ice. In the wild
Citrus australasica
grows leggy and straggling in deep shade. It responds well to shaping at first, growing into a handsome buffle-headed tree, but the tighter vegetation soon develops fungal diseases, the overcrowded head dies back and the tree reverts to its old habit. Like many citrus the Finger Lime has fruit and flowers all the year round, and a clean and pleasant scent. There should be one in every frost-free garden in Australia, but you are much more likely to find nurserymen offering any of literally thousands of exotic citrus cultivars – bergamots, calamondins, clementines, mandarins, orangelos, satsumas, tangerines, tangors, tangelos, Buddha’s hands.

Part of the job description of a nineteenth-century government botanist was to search for new cash crops; appointed Queensland Colonial Botanist in 1881, F. M. Bailey played his part by sending examples of Australian citrus to Kew for the Economic Botany Collection in 1895. Then the species of native citrus were thought to be three: the finger lime,
Citrus australasica
, the round lime,
Citrus australis
, and
Citrus inodora
, the Russell River lime, discovered by Bailey in 1889 and described by him as ‘resembling a small Lisbon lemon with a flavour like that of West Indian Lime’. Besides examples of all three preserved in spirits, now kept in the Joseph Banks Building at Kew, there is a small wooden box of dried Finger Limes. Alas for Bailey, another botanist has horned in on his
Citrus inodora
; a subspecies has been reclassified as a species of its own,
Citrus maidenii
, in honour of J. H. Maiden. It’s enough to make Bailey regret he didn’t call his lime ‘Citrus baileyii’ when he had the chance. Another rainforest lime has now turned up on the Cape York peninsula,
Citrus garrowayae
, Mount White Lime. Those who, like Queensland government botanist C. T. White, cannot believe that Bailey named the species for Mrs Garroway rather than her husband, often render the name incorrectly as
Citrus garrowayi
.

For a hundred years nothing was done about exploiting the Australian citrus species, although early settlers did use them for marmalades. In the 1960s there was some investigation of their possible usefulness as rootstocks for exotic species and possibly breeding desirable characteristics into new cultivars, but no one attempted selective breeding within the species themselves. In the 1990s, with a new awareness of native food sources, exploration of the potential of the Australian citrus species suddenly took off. By 2005 six cultivars had been registered with the Australian Cultivar Registration authority: ‘Alstonville’, ‘Jali Red’, ‘Judy’s Everbearing’, ‘Mia Rose’, ‘Purple Viola’ and ‘Rainforest Pearl’. At CCRRS we concentrate on propagating our wild stock, so that it will still be there when the cultivars conk out. Meanwhile both the Mount White Lime and the Russell River Lime have been brought to the verge of extinction.