Hostname: page-component-6d856f89d9-8l2sj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T04:23:09.320Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Literary Imaginings of the Bunya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Get access

Extract

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.

Type
Special Issue: On The Bunya Trail
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Aboriginal understandings of the bunya are addressed elsewhere in this issue of Queensland Review. Google Scholar

2 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.Google Scholar

3 Lang, John Dunmore, Cooksland in Northeastern Australia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 136.Google Scholar

4 Petrie, Tom, Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland (Dating from 1837) Recorded by His Daughter (Brisbane: Watson, Ferguson and Co., 1904).Google Scholar

5 Leichhardt, F.W. Ludwig, The Letters of F.W. Ludwig Leichhardt, collected and newly translated by M. Aurousseau, 3 vols, (London: published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol 2, 665666.Google Scholar

6 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).Google Scholar

7 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.Google Scholar

8 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.Google Scholar

9 Leichhardt, Ludwig to his mother, 27 August 1843, in Leichhardt, Letters, 671.Google Scholar

10 Petrie, Tom Petrie's Reminiscences, p 19. See also Dornan and Cryle, 41.Google Scholar

11 Mrs Praed, Campbell, My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life, Colonial Edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), 2728.Google Scholar

12 Praed, , My Australian Girlhood, 5462; Praed, Campbell Mrs, Australian Life: Black and White (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), 50–65. For a study of the Hornet Bank massacre, and an analysis of the accounts of it by Rosa Praed and her father, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, see Gordon Reid, A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser Family at Hornet Bank Station, Central Queensland, 1857, and Related Events (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982). Reid is highly critical of Praed's inaccurate accounts of the massacre. See also ClarkePatricia, Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1999), 16–19.Google Scholar

13 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.Google Scholar

14 Praed, , My Australian Girlhood, 4546.Google Scholar

15 Praed, Rosa, ‘The Bushman's Love Story’ (1909) in Giles, Fiona, ed., From the Verandah: Stories of Love and Landscape by Nineteenth Century Australian Women (Fitzroy and Ringwood: McPhee Gribble / Penguin, 1987), 203.Google Scholar

16 Praed, , My Australian Girlhood, 911.Google Scholar

17 Praed, , My Australian Girlhood, 27.Google Scholar

18 Praed, Campbell Mrs, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1881), vi.Google Scholar

19 Praed, Rosa, Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915; London: Pandora, 1987).Google Scholar

20 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed (London, 1759), Part I, Section VII, 78.Google Scholar

21 Praed, Rosa, Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land (1915; London: Pandora, 1987), 6465.Google Scholar

22 Praed, , Lady Bridget, 62.Google Scholar

23 Praed, , My Australian Girlhood, 4.Google Scholar

24 Cross, Zora, Daughters of the Seven Mile: The Love Story of an Australian Woman, London: Hutchinson and Co., [1924?].Google Scholar

25 Praed, , Policy and Passion, Vol 1, 33, 108109.Google Scholar

26 Praed, , Policy and Passion, Vol 2, 8990.Google Scholar

27 Praed, , Policy and Passion, Vol 2, 17.Google Scholar

28 Praed, Campbell Mrs, Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893; London: Pandora, 1987), 103.Google Scholar

29 Praed, Rosa (Praed, Campbell Mrs), Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893; London: Pandora, 1987), 278.Google Scholar

30 Praed, , Outlaw and Lawmaker, 104, 208.Google Scholar

31 Praed, , Outlaw and Lawmaker, 281.Google Scholar

32 Praed, Rosa (Mrs Praed, Campbell), Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893; London: Pandora, 1987), 306.Google Scholar

33 Mayne, Robert West, The Two Visions; or The Contrast. An Australian Story (Sydney: F. Cunninghame and Co., 1874), 3738.Google Scholar

34 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.Google Scholar

35 An extant example is the alternating planting of bunyas and cottonwood trees around the perimeter of the Graceville Memorial Park.Google Scholar

36 Moynihan, Cornelius, The Feast of the Bunya. An Aboriginal Ballad (Brisbane: Gordon & Gotch, 1901), 1113.Google Scholar

37 Moynihan, Feast of the Bunya, 59.Google Scholar

38 Moynihan, Feast of the Bunya, 13, 14.Google Scholar

39 Moynihan, Feast of the Bunya, 21.Google Scholar

40 Moynihan, Feast of the Bunya, 23.Google Scholar

41 The Bunyip of Wendouree and Other Poems by Cornelius Moynihan’ (Brisbane, 1910). Typescript in Fryer Memorial Library, University of Queensland.Google Scholar

42 Connolly, Roy, Southern Saga, 3rd ed. (Sydney: Dymocks Book Arcade, 1946), 169.Google Scholar

43 Connolly, 173.Google Scholar

44 Connolly, 172.Google Scholar

45 Connolly, 488.Google Scholar

46 Connolly, 488.Google Scholar