Araucaria bidwillii
Araucaria bidwillii, commonly known as the bunya pine, banya or bunya-bunya, is a large evergreen coniferous tree in the family Araucariaceae which is endemic to Australia. Its natural range is southeast Queensland with two very small, disjunct populations in northeast Queensland's World Heritage listed Wet Tropics. There are many planted specimens on the Atherton Tableland, in New South Wales, and around the Perth metropolitan area, and it has also been widely planted in other parts of the world. They are very tall trees – the tallest living individual is in Bunya Mountains National Park and was reported by Robert Van Pelt in January 2003 to be in height.
Description
Araucaria bidwillii will grow to a height of with a single unbranched trunk up to diameter, which has dark brown or black flaky bark. The branches are produced in whorls at regular intervals along the trunk, with leaf-bearing branchlets crowded at their ends. The branches are held more or less horizontally – those towards the top of the trunk may be somewhat ascending, those on the lowest section of the trunk may be somewhat drooping. This arrangement gives the tree a very distinctive egg-shaped silhouette.The leaves are small and rigid with a sharp tip which can easily penetrate the skin. They are narrowly triangular, broad at the base and sessile. They measure up to long by wide with fine longitudinal venation, glossy green above and paler underneath. The leaf arrangement is both distichous and decussate – that is, one pair of leaves are produced on the twig opposite each other, and the next pair above is rotated around the twig 90° to them, and so on.
The cones are terminal, the male cone is a spike up to long which matures around October to November. The female cone is much larger, reaching up to long and wide, which is roughly equivalent to a rugby ball. At maturity, which occurs from December through to March, female cones are green with 50–100 pointed segments, each of which encloses a seed, and they can weigh up to 10 kg. Both seed and pollen cones are some of the largest of all conifer species.
The edible seeds, known as [|bunya nuts], measure between and long and are ovoid to long-elliptic.
Architecture
In the 1970s, botanists Hallé, Oldeman and Tomlinson studied the growth patterns of tropical trees and described a set of 23 "architectural models", named after various botanists, which can be seen as different growth strategy to occupy space. Araucaria bidwillii, like many species from the Araucariaceae family and the fir genus, changes its structural model over time. Initially its follows Massart's model and gradually changes to ''Rauh's model''Phenology
The trees' pollen cones appear in April and mature in September or October. The cones require fifteen months to mature, and the cones fall 17 to 18 months after pollination in late January to early March from the coast to the current Bunya Mountains. When there is heavy rainfall or drought, pollination may vary.Taxonomy
The species was described by the English botanist William Jackson Hooker in 1843, based on material collected in the "Mount Brisbane range of hills, 70 miles N.W. of Moreton Bay" by John Carne Bidwill in 1842. Hooker states in his paper that Bidwill took "not only branches and cones and male flowers, but also a healthy young living plant" to England where Hooker set about describing the new species, and his paper was published in his own journal London Journal of Botany.Etymology
The genus name Araucaria is taken from the Spanish word Araucanía, the name of the area in Chile where the first species of this genus originated, and/or Araucanos, the Spanish word for the original inhabitants of the area. Hooker coined the species epithet in honour of Bidwill, for his efforts in collecting specimens and bringing them to him.Vernacular names
In various Australian Aboriginal languages, this tree is known as banya, bonye, bon-yi, bunyi or bunya-bunya, leading to its common name 'bunya pine'. It is also less-known as the false monkey puzzle tree.Evolution
The bunya pine is a member of the Section Bunya of the genus Araucaria, and is the sole extant species within it. This section is thought to have been most widespread in the Mesozoic – fossils from the Jurassic period with cone morphology similar to A. bidwillii have been found in the UK and South AmericaDistribution
At the start of British occupation, A. bidwillii was abundant in southern Queensland, occurring in large groves or sprinkled regularly as an emergent species throughout other forest types on the upper Stanley and Brisbane Rivers, Sunshine Coast hinterland, and also towards and on the Bunya Mountains.Two more natural, but very small and very isolated, populations of the species occur approximately to the north, in the wet tropics region of northeastern Queensland – one close to Cannabullen Falls on the Atherton Tableland, and the other in the Mount Lewis National Park.
Today, the southeast Queensland populations exist as very small groves or single trees in its former range, except on and near the Bunya Mountains, where it is still fairly prolific, while the populations in north Queensland remain stable.
The limited distribution of A. bidwillii in Australia is in part due to poor seed dispersal, and also the drying out of the Australian continent over the millennia, leading to a reduction of areas with suitable climatic zones for rainforest.
Ecology
A variety of birds and animals, including sulphur-crested cockatoos, short-eared possums, fawn-footed melomys, and wallabies are known to eat the seeds. The cockatoos are also a dispersal agent as they will carry seeds to a distant perch to eat, but may drop them on the way.The suggestion that extinct large animals may have been dispersers for the bunya is reasonable, given the size of the seeds and their energy content, but difficult to confirm given the incompleteness of the fossil record for coprolites.
A. bidwillii has an unusual cryptogeal seed germination in which the seeds develop to form an underground tuber from which the aerial shoot later emerges. The actual emergence of the seed is then known to occur over several years presumably as a strategy to allow the seedlings to emerge under optimum climatic conditions or, it has been suggested, to avoid fire. This erratic germination has been one of the main problems in silviculture of the species.
A problem in small forestry plantations of the bunya pine in Southeast Queensland is the introduction of red deer. Unlike possums and rodents, the deer eat bunya cones while still intact, preventing their dispersal.
Cultural significance
The bunya, bonye, bunyi, bunya-bunya or banya tree produces edible kernels. The ripe cones fall to the ground. Each segment contains a kernel in a tough protective shell, which will split when boiled or put in a fire. The flavour of the kernel is often compared to a chestnut, although it is less intense in terms of aroma and flavour. The savory flavour and aroma is also comparable to cooked potato.The cones were a very important food source for native Australians – each Aboriginal family would own a group of trees and these would be passed down from generation to generation. This is said to be the only case of hereditary personal property owned by the Aboriginal people.
After the cones had fallen and the fruit was ripe, a large festival harvest would sometimes occur, between two and seven years apart. The people of the region would set aside differences and gather in the Bon-yi Mountains to feast on the kernels. The local people, who were bound by custodial obligations and rights, sent out messengers to invite people from hundreds of kilometres to meet at specific sites. The meetings involved Aboriginal ceremonies, dispute settlements and fights, marriage arrangements and the trading of goods.
In what was probably Australia's largest Indigenous event, diverse tribes – up to thousands of people – once travelled great distances to the gatherings. They stayed for months, to celebrate and feast on the bunya nut. The bunya gatherings were an armistice accompanied by much trade exchange, and discussions and negotiations over marriage and regional issues. Due to the sacred status of the bunyas, some tribes would not camp amongst these trees. Also in some regions, the tree was never to be cut.
Representatives of many different groups from across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales would meet to discuss important issues relating to the environment, social relationships, politics and The Dreaming lore, feasting and sharing dance ceremonies. Many conflicts would be settled at this event, and consequences for breaches of laws were discussed.
A Bunya festival was recorded by Thomas Petrie, who went with the Aboriginal people of Brisbane at the age of 14 to the festival at the Bunya Range. His daughter, Constance Petrie, put down his stories in which he said that the trees fruited at three-year intervals. The three-year interval may not be correct. Ludwig Leichhardt wrote in 1844 of his expedition to the Bunya feast.
In 1842, the government of what was then the Colony of New South Wales published a notice in the N.S.W. Government Gazette which prohibited settlers from occupying land or cutting timber within a proclaimed "Bunya district". This may have been in recognition of the local Aboriginal people's close association with these trees, or their "fierce protection" of them. Regardless, the proclamation was repealed in 1860 in one of the first acts of the government of the newly created Colony of Queensland. The Aboriginal people were eventually driven out of the forests and the festivals ceased. The forests were felled for timber and cleared to make way for cultivation.