Native Plants

Australian flora

One of Australia's greatest treasures is her flora - a staggering 24,000 species of native plants have been identified compared to England's 1700 native plants.

An Aboriginal garden

Australia's native plants vary across the many different natural environments of the country. In the tropical regions of north Queensland, Arnhem Land and the Kimberleys there are many native fruit trees, such as figs and green plums. Where water is scarce in central Australia, the plants are spread thinly over the land and Aborigines rely on fruits such as bush tomatoes and quandong or native peach. While fruits are seasonal, roots can usually be dug up all the year round. This regular digging-over of the soil meant that the whole country was, in a way, an Aboriginal garden.

Plants were used for many other things besides food. Medicines also came from plants. Native mints (Mentha spp.) were remedies for coughs and colds, and the gum from gum-trees, which is rich in tannin, was used for burns.

Botanical interest and ignorance

William Dampier first introduced Europeans to Australian plants in 1703 in his book A voyage to New Holland which presented illustrations of specimens from the Western Australian bush.

On Captain Cook's journey Endeavour voyage in 1770, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander collected over 30,000 botanical specimens and Sydney Parkinson made 674 drawings on the voyage. This material was not published for another hundred years.

On the other hand, French naturalists and scientists, such as Labillardiere, extensively promoted Australian plants with the publication of seven volumes. Napoleon's wife Josephine patronised botanists and the growing of Australian plants - growing over 100 Australian plants including grevilleas, banksias, eucalypts and casuarinas at Malmaison, outside Paris.

The clearing of Australian native plants during the last 200 years has markedly changed the Australian countryside. Robin Boyd in his book, The Australian Ugliness (1960) wrote that many people regarded even eucalypts and acacias as 'primitive landscape and elements - unfamiliar, strangely primeval - which must be eradicated from the home environment'. Since the 1990s, Landcare programs and Greening Australia have begun to conserve flora and combat problems, such as soil erosion and salination, which have occurred as a result of large scale clearing.

Common species

Acacia

Acacia is a genus of around 1200 species; 954 are currently recognised as occurring in Australia - from coastal zones and mountains to the dry inland. Collectively the Australian species are known as 'wattles'.

One of them, golden wattle, Acacia pycnantha, was first collected by the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell, in 1836.

As Australians became more patriotic towards the end of the 1800s, they began to appreciate Australian native plants more, and started a search for a floral symbol of the country. In 1912, the wattle was incorporated into the design of the Australian Coat of Arms.

In Spring, beginning in September in Australia, the golden wattle comes into flower with large fluffy, yellow, sweet smelling flower heads. Each flower head is a bunch of many tiny flowers.

Eucalyptus

Gum trees (eucalypts) are a vital part of the Australian natural environment. The only major environment where eucalypts are absent is rainforest. There are about 12 species which occur naturally outside of Australia but around 700 are native to Australia. Eucalypts serve as shelter for many species of native Australian animals and birds. A few varieties of gum leaves are the only food eaten by koalas.

Since early settlement, eucalypts have been a vital source of timber and firewood for Australians and they have been a key part of the hardwood timber industry. Soldiers returning by ship from the First and Second World Wars were able to smell the aroma of the eucalypt before land was visible on the horizon. A common use for eucalypts is eucalyptus oil.

Grevillea

The genus Grevillea is probably the most popular and widely cultivated of all of Australia's plant families. The plants occur in numerous shapes and sizes and the colourful flowers, in many cases, attract birds. Grevillea is a member of the Protea family (Proteaceae) and its close relatives include Banksia, Hakea, Dryandra, Isopogon and Telopea (the waratah).

Melaleuca

Melaleuca is a genus of around 170 species in the Myrtle family (Myrtaceae). Melaleucas are commonly known as 'paperbarks' in the tree forms and 'honey myrtles' in the smaller form as well as 'tea trees' . Melaleucas are often found along watercourses or along the edges of swamps. M. alternifolia is commonly used in the production of tea tree oil , an ingredient in many shampoos, antiseptic creams and soaps.

Eremophila

Eremophila is a genus of 214 species which are commonly called 'emu bushes' found only in Australia. They are generally plants of semi-arid to arid regions The plants produce fleshy fruits which are often eaten by birds and animals. The foliage of some species is toxic and stock poisonings have occurred although some other species are useful as fodder plants.

A common use of emu bush is 'emu oil' - as a skin tonic . Emu bush was important to the Adnyamathanha people of the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Rosemary Pedler (1994) noted it's use for medicinal purposes.

The bark of trunks was scraped off, reduced to ash and then mixed with emu oil. This preparation was then used for all manner of skin complaints with excellent results, according to several people in the group. This is still being used today.

Haemodoraceae

Kangaroo paws are from the Haemodoraceae family, a family of herb like plants related to the lilies (Amaryllidaceae), comprising over 100 species. In general, the plants are small, clumping plants with strappy leaves reaching about one metre wide and high. Flowers have little or no fragrance. Kangaroo paw flowers are long, narrow and tubular-shaped, resembling the paw of a kangaroo, which are ideally designed for low-beaked birds.

Australian floral emblems

Vase Decoration, by Mr L. H. Howie, a student at the School of Art and Crafts, Adelaide, SA. R.T. Baker (1915) The Australian Flora in Applied Art, Part 1, The Waratah, Sydney. Image courtesy of the Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Inspiration from Australian flowers has characterised the development of unique motifs in the visual arts in Australia. In 1915, R T Baker, a passionate advocate of the Waratah and other local flora as a motif in art, craft and industry wrote:

The entire plant (waratah) lends itself to such a boldness of artistic ideas in all branches of Applied Art that it has few compeers amongst the representatives of the whole floral world...

Artists like Margaret Preston used the bold shape of the Waratah in her hand-coloured woodcut prints and this contributed to recognition of native flowers and plants as being part of Australia's cultural identity.

Australian Desert

The Australian continent is one of the driest in the world apart from Antarctica. Nearly 50% of Australia receives less than 25cms of rainfall in a year. Australian desert areas are extremely warm and are one of the most difficult places for survival of plants, human beings and animals. Most of the Australian deserts are located in central and north-western parts of the country. The total size of the Australian deserts is 2.3 million square kilometre and it occupies 44% of the entire continental area. 

There are ten deserts in Australia: the Great Victoria Desert, Great Sandy Desert, Tanami Desert, Simpson Desert, Gibson Desert, Little Sandy Desert, Strzelecki Desert, Sturt Stony Desert, Tirari Desert, Pedirka Desert.

Only 3% of the Australian population live in the desert.

Great Victoria Desert

The Great Victoria Desert is a vast sand dune and sand plain desert, and the largest in Australia. Its area is shared equally by the States of South and Western Australia, north of the Nullarbor Plain and south of the Musgrave Ranges, and is bounded on the west by Laverton and the goldfields and to the east by Mabel Creek Station west of Coober Pedy and the Stuart Highway. The desert was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer Ernest Giles in 1875, and is the largest sand dune desert in Australia. Its dunes trend east west, and aside from the major palaeodrainage basin at Serpentine Lakes it has no major watercourses. Save for a few vehicle tracks, this vast wilderness is virtually untouched by man. The internatonal significance of the Unnamed Conservation Park that lies on the South Australian side of the desert was recognised in 1977 when it was proclaimed a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO. It is one of the larges arid zone biospheres in the world.

Sandplains and dunefields are the dominant landform, forming the southern part of the anticyclonic whorl of dunes that include the Simpson and Great Sandy Deserts. The dunes are longitudinal, from 5-20 metres in height and can run for up to 100kms. Salt lakes are another feature of the desert, the best known are the Serpentine Lakes, other lake systems are the Nurrari and Wyola Lakes, Lakes Maurice and Bring, and Plumridge Lakes and Yeo Lakes in Western Australia.

There are numerous stony rises and breakaways on the north west edge of the desert, and the Musgrave, Mann, Tomlinson and Everard Ranges contain it to the north. To the south is the vast limestone Nullarbor Plain, and to the south east Tietkins Plain and the Ooldea dunefields.

Great Sandy Desert

The great sandy desert is australias sencond biggest desert. It's made up of dunes and ergs. It is a hot desert that is dry, but when the monsoons cross the north of Australia from September to April it will rain.It has a average yearly rainfall of 250mm. In winter it can get very cold with no cloud cover from above and during the day it gets very hot for the same reason. In summer you are looking at a temperature of 38-42 degrees celcius (100-108 degrees fahrenheit.) In the winter it's a plesant but still hot 25-30 degrees celcius (77-86 degrees fahrenheit.) 

The great sandy desert is flat and as the name says sandy. This desert has sand dunes. It also has sandstone country, low hills, and even chains of salt lakes. You can see most of the sand dunes from the rocky ranges and hills in the Kimberley or Pilbara. 

The Tanami Desert

The Tanami Desert covers the central region of the Northern Territory and expands over the border into Western Australia. Less than a third of the desert is suitable for pastoral use, the rest made up of Aboriginal lands and Mining leases. The Tanami Road, the major vehicular thoroughfare dissects the desert on a north west, south east axis, with the remote Rabbit Flat Roadhouse about half way between Alice Springs and Halls Creek. The prevailing vegetation is hummock or Spinifex grassland, and the landscape is typified by a profusion of anthills, or termite mounds. There are also rocky outcrops, sand dunes and salt lakes. Gold is mined at the Tanami and Granites mines, as well as the Coyote Field in Western Australia. Major Aboriginal communities in the Tanami are Balgo, famous for its vibrant art, Yuendemu, Lajamanu and Jarra Jarra.

The Simpson Desert

The Simpson Desert is a longitudinal sand dune desert that that occupies an area of 170,000 square kilometres just east of the geographical center of Australia. The southern edge of the desert is bordered by Lake Eyre, to the west stony tablelands and the rivers of the Finke, Macumba, Sevenson and Todd Rivers, to the north the Plenty Highway, and to the east the rivers of the Diamantina, Georgina, Warburton and Goyder's Lagoon. Witjira National Park is on the western boundary, Simpson Desert National Park on the eastern.

The original inhabitants were Wangkangurru Aboriginal people who lived at wells called Mikiri. The main tracks across the Simpson Desert are the French Line, the Rig Road, the WAA Line and the QAA Line. Most of these follow straight lines as they were made by bulldozers following compass bearings, hence they being named lines. The most popular trek through the Simpson Desert is from Oodnadatta to Birdsville. There are other tracks into the desert, some requiring special permission to enter, like the Colson Track and the Hay River Track. There are also endless disused lines, some going nowhere. Whilst the desert has a uniform topography and a severe climate - from below freezing on winter nights to temperatures reaching into the sixty degree Celsius range in summer, it is a place of extraordinary beauty and contains a great diversity of flora and fauna. 

Gibson Desert

The Gibson Desert is on the central Western Australia plateau south of the Great Sandy Desert, east of the Little Sandy Desert and north of the Great Victoria Desert. At its highest point it reaches 500 m. Having an area of about 155,000 km2 (60,000 miles2) of Western Australia, the Gibson Desert is the 5th largest in Australia, after the Great Sandy, Great Victoria, Tanami Desert and Simpson deserts, and is still largely in an almost "pristine" state. It is situated between Lake Disappointment and Lake Macdonald on the Tropic of Capricorn. The Gibson bioregion includes extensive areas of undulating sand plains and dunefields, with some low rocky or gravelly ridges, the pebbles have been laterised - an iron coating. There are also large areas of upland and there are some saline lakes in the centre. There is a series of small salt water lakes along a palaeodrainage channel to the southwest. Groundwater is present under the desert where it covers parts of the Officer Basin and the Canning Basin. Large areas of the Gibson have a surface of gravel, as noted by early Australian explorers such as Giles (discussed below). Geographically, the Gibson Desert area forms part of the plateau of central Western Australia.

Little Sandy Desert

The Little Sandy Desert lies south of the Great Sandy Desert and west of the Gibson Desert. It is a cousin of the Great Sandy in so far as it has a similar land form and ecology, but smaller. To the north of the desert is Lake Disappointment, a vast salt lake. Within the Little Sandy Desert are numerous rocky outcrops and small rangeland areas which rise like islands in a sea of sand. The best known of these are the Durba Hills, a popular stopover on the Canning Stock Route, but there are also others, like the Calvert Range and Constance Headland which contain spectacular Aboriginal rock art galleries.

Strzelecki Desert

The dunefields of the Strzelecki Desert fan out from the Naterannie Sandhills in a north easterly trend. The sandhills are intersected with numerous claypans and floodplains.The desert stretches from the western edge of New South Wales across to the Birdsville Track in South Australia. The Birdsville track cuts a swathe between the Tirari Desert and the Strzelecki. The salt lakes Callabonna and Frome mark its southern edge along with the northern tip of the Flinders Ranges. The deserts northern edge is roughly the woodland of the Cooper floodplain, beyond which lies Sturt Stony Desert. Through the middle of the desert runs the Strzelecki Creek, which is a branch of the Cooper that terminates at Lake Blanchewater alongside which runs the Strzelecki Track. The Strzelecki Regional Reserve is within the desert.

Sturt Stony Desert

The red iron clad plains shimmering in the heat haze gives the impression that Sturt Stony Desert is perhaps the most inhospitable place on earth. The Diamantina River flowing into Goyders Lagoon, and beyond that the Simpson Desert borders Sturts Stony Desert to the west. To the south are the dunefields of the Strzelecki Desert. Nothing could have prepared the explorer Captain Charles Sturt for his 1845 encounter with the desert that is named in his honour. Iron clad treeless plains stretch to an eternity, baking in the shimmering heat. The only trees appear to be the occasional grevilleas that line the dry creek lines. Occasionally the iron coloured horizon is punctuated by an orange sand dune that appears through the mirage. Plants and shrubs, especially saltbush and bluebush dominate this hard country, but to the casual observer all one can see is stones. Surprisingly the succulence and nutrients of these plants sustain millions of kangaroos and some profitable cattle stations, like Clifton Hills, the largest on the Birdsville Track, and the historic Cordillo Downs to the east. The southeastern border of the desert includes parts of the Moomba and Jackson gas and oil fields and there are numerous exploration sites,well sites and seismic lines.

Tirari Desert

All the deserts of Australia have their own character, and perhaps none appear as wild and windswept as the little known Tirari Desert, that makes up the dunefields and myriad of salt lakes east of the vast Lake Eyre. Typified by white sands with little vegetation and lots of salt lakes, the desert is the least visited in Australia due to there being no public access routes into its arid heart. The longitudinal dunes trend NNW-SSE, and are quite dense, their spacing around 9 dunes per kilometre on average. The desert is bordered to the south by the Clayton River, to the east by the Birdsville Track and to the north by the Warburton River. The two great rivers the Warburton and the Cooper cut through the Tirari. The Cooper slices through the sand dunes leaving steep gypseous banks. The western side of the desert contains parts of the Lake Eyre National Park. Clayton, Dulkaninna, Etadunna, Mulka, Mungerannie, Cowrie and Kalamurina Stations all contain parts of the desert within their pastoral leaseholds.

Pedirka Desert

The Pedirka Desert is Australia's smallest desert, a longitudinal dunefield to the north east of Oodnadatta. It is bordered to the north by the Hamilton Creek, where the dunes end abruptly. North of the creek are stony tablelands. The dunefield runs east almost to the border with Witjira National Park, the deep red dunes trend north east to south westThere are several bores within the desert for pastoral use. The dunes trend north east to south west, and the interdunal corridors are up to one kilometre wide.. The dunes are deep red sand, and the interdunes are made of deep red sandy loam. A large proportion of the desert lies within the Hamilton Station Pastoral Lease,operated by the Williams Pastoral Company. The land use is rangeland cattle grazing.

The Hamilton Creek is lined with River Red Gums coolibah, mulga, dead finish and prickly wattle. Grasses include silky brown top and native millet. Species such as verbine grow thickly after flooding.

A dense scrub of shrub and grasses is found in the interdune areas. The shrubs include satiny bluebush, Giles emubush, weeping emubush, and spiny saltbush. Woollybutt, broad-leaf wanderrie, mulga grass and bandicoot grass are the most common grasses with annuals like mulga grass growing after rains. The dunes support an open mulga woodland, with an understorey which includes tall kerosene grass and woollybutt.

The Pedirka Desert is accessed by the public road that connects the Oodnadatta Track with Dalhousie Springs and Witjira National Park.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The main reason for the formation of the Australian deserts is their location. Like most major deserts across the world the they are found around a certain latitude (roughly 30° north/south of the equator) where the weather phenomena create a dry climate.

Evolution Record in Australia

Evolution in Australia

Australia is a continent of contrasts. Its interior is brown, burnt by the sun and parched for water, but its margins are kinder to life and support most of its human population. Its plants and animals are for the most part quite different to those of the rest of the world - not surprising really, since they are the product of tens of millions of years of evolution on an island continent, isolated for that great span of time from contact with other large land masses.

Evolution in Australia followed a different course and produced very different creatures, perhaps none more so than its mammals. While the rest of the world contents itself with one, or at the most, two major kinds of mammals, Australia has three: two monotremes - the platypus and echidna, many, many marsupials (not just kangaroos and koalas), but only a few of the placental mammals so dominant in the rest of the world. Apart from the dingo, which appears to have arrived in Australia only thousands of years ago, the continent's only native placental mammals are rats and bats.

Australian vertebrate fossils

Until very recently, not much was known about the evolutionary history of Australia's unique mammal fauna. Soon after European's settlement in Australia, discoveries were made which showed that even more unusual mammals had once lived here.

These included giant plant-eating marsupials as big as a rhinoceros, giant long-armed kangaroos with short blunt faces and even leopard-sized meat-eaters, related not to modern meat-eating marsupials but to plant-eating possums.

Animals such as these became extinct as recently as the end of the last ice age, a time when Australia was at its most arid. Unfortunately the history of these animals could be traced back through the fossil record no more than a few million years. The kinds of land animals that lived in Australia earlier than that could only be imagined.

Fossil discoveries at Riversleigh

All that has changed in the last decades with new discoveries of fossil mammal remains in several sites in the Australian outback. The most spectacular of these discoveries was made at Riversleigh, an isolated cattle station in the far north-west of Queensland.

Here, Professor Michael Archer and a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales and other Australian institutions are resurrecting the bones of a vast array of vertebrate animals entombed in deposits of freshwater limestone.

Riversleigh is Australia's most important source of information about the evolutionary history of its vertebrate animals. Well over a hundred different fossil sites are now known from an area covering tens of square kilometres. In them are preserved in sometimes stunning detail, the remains of animals as diverse as lungfish, frogs, crocodiles, turtles, snakes, lizards, birds (including giant, flightless birds), marsupials, bats, rats and even insects and other arthropods.

It is not just the diversity and sheer numbers of animal remains preserved that makes Riversleigh so important to science, but the fact that different Riversleigh sites preserve glimpses of life at different ages in the past - from as long ago as about twenty-five million years through to yesterday afternoon. The Riversleigh fossil deposits are of such importance to Australia and the world that they have been given World Heritage listing.

Why so many Riversleigh fossils?

Why are so many animal remains preserved so well at Riversleigh? The answer to that lies in the underlying rocks which are also limestone, but laid down in the bed of an ancient sea more than five hundred million years ago.

As these rocks were exposed on what became land, rainwater began to dissolve them. The limestone-charged run-off flowed into pools, streams and lakes.

Water also carved out extensive cave systems, ideal roosts for bats and shelters for other animals. Sometimes holes in the cave roofs formed pit traps for unwary animals. The flesh decayed from the bodies of animals which died in or were washed into caves and pools, streams and lakes. The limestone rich waters quickly encased the bones in new layers of limestone, sealing them from view, but preserving and protecting them from damage for millions of years.

Ancient environments of Riversleigh

Studies so far reveal a staggering number of different kinds of animals preserved at Riversleigh. The diversity of animal life in its older sites (late Oligocene/early Miocene) is far greater than that known from Australia to-day, even in the tropical rainforests of northern Australia where diversity is at its highest.

The kinds of land animals in these older sites include many varieties of leaf-eating possums, lots of ground-dwelling browsing animals such as kangaroos and now extinct diprotodontids, together with many different omnivorous bandicoots.

Such a variety of animals could only have survived in a stable habitat containing a wealth of food sources supporting specialist as well as generalist feeders. Modern rainforests provide such conditions and it is thought that these ancient animals also lived in a rainforest environment. Significantly, many of these older Riversleigh animals have modern descendants which still live only in rainforests. As the accompanying photographs show, the rainforests are long gone from Riversleigh, the result of increasing aridity in Australia after about mid-Miocene times (about fifteen million years ago). Fossil remains in younger Riversleigh deposits reflect that change - species diversity decreases and some kinds of animals become extinct and are replaced by others better adapted to drier conditions.

Exposed high on the cliffs which confine the upper reaches of the Gregory River at Riversleigh, is an ancient cave floor from five million years ago. Remains of animals from here include more modern grass-eating kangaroos, demonstrating the spread of grasslands as the interior of Australia became increasingly arid. Also preserved in this deposit are remains of rats - which had at that time recently invaded Australia from Asia.

These fossil rat bones are remains of the midnight feasts of the large, carnivorous ghost bats who roosted in the cave by day and hunted rats and other small animals by night. The bats have a much longer history in Australia than the rats, occurring in their millions in many of the older Riversleigh sites. Interestingly, some of Riversleigh's leaf-nosed bats have close relationships with those known from Oligo-Miocene deposits in France.

Australia's Rainforests

Queensland

You can trek through all five climatic types of rainforest in Queensland. In north Queensland, the World Heritage-listed Wet Tropics includes Kuranda Rainforest and the Daintree - the oldest tropical rainforest on earth. Accessible from Cairns, Port Douglas, Cape Tribulation and Cooktown, the Daintree is home to an incredible array of plants and animals. Cruise the Daintree River, taste bush tucker with an Aboriginal guide or sleep in a tree-top eco-lodge. In the Gold Coast hinterland, Lamington and Springbrook National Parks have sub-tropical and cool temperate rainforests dating back to the supercontinent of Gondwana. Explore them on day hikes or do the Great Gold Coast Hinterland Walk.

Tasmania

Tasmania is home to Australia’s largest swathes of cool temperate rainforest, most of it protected as part of the island’s World Heritage-listed Wilderness. These cool, dark and magical places support a rich array of life, including species found nowhere else on earth. Trek the Overland Track through ancient forests of King Billy Pine in Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park.  Get up close to moss-covered Gondwanan on the Creepy Crawly Nature Trail in Southwest National Park. Glimpse rare Huon pines on the Franklin River Nature Trail through Wild Rivers National Park. Or explore the rainforest around Liffey Falls at the northern edge of the World Heritage Area.

New South Wales

The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia spill across 50 separate parks in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland. Accessible from Byron Bay, this vast World Heritage-listed area embraces the world’s largest subtropical rainforest, along with warm and cool temperate rainforest types.  Bushwalk through the rainforest in Nightcap, Mount Warning or Border Ranges National Parks, which all flank the ancient, eroded volcano of Mount Warning Wollumbin.  Listen for the call of the rare Albert’s Lyrebird, picnic amongst Antarctic beech forest, spot native marsupials or take a scenic rainforest drive. There are also rainforest pockets in the World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains near Sydney, in Budderoo National Park in the Southern Highlands and Myall Lakes National Park, north of Port Stephens.

Northern Territory

The south of World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park is dotted with monsoon rainforest. Explore it on the walk to spectacular Jim Jim Falls, which drops more than 250 metres to deep, cool plunge pools. Follow the Gubarra Pools walk or take the Gu-ngarre Walk through savannah woodlands to the edge of a billabong. Kakadu is also famous for its lily-dotted wetlands, rich wildlife and treasure trove of Aboriginal rock art. Cruise the rivers past crocodiles, barramundi and birds, see rock crevices cut by Dreamtime ancestors or take a scenic flight over Kakadu’s waterfalls and rugged escarpments.

Victoria

Victoria’s cool temperate rainforest survives in small patches across Gippsland and the Dandenong, Yarra and Otway Ranges. In Gippsland, you can do rainforest walks through Tarra Bulga National Park and Morwell National Park or wind through scented sassafras and black olive berry in Errinundra Saddle. Walk through the tops of towering mountain ash trees in Yarra Ranges National Park, an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Or hop off the Great Ocean Road to explore the lush, green world of Great Otway National Park. The Melba Gully Boardwalk leads you past cool myrtle beeches, moss-covered blackwoods and tree ferns.