The Magnificent Mallee; long despised, finally treasured. #1

 This is a topic close to my heart. I grew up in South Australia, and Adelaide is nearer to
remaining mallee than any other state capital (with the possible exception of Melbourne).
Dad loved it, and I spent time in the mallee long before I encountered any real forests,
let alone wet ones. It seems strange then that it has taken me this long to tackle it
here, but maybe I've never felt ready to do it justice. Such excuses however can lead to us
to never doing anything worthwhile so, prompted by a recent camping trip to
north-western Victoria, here's my tribute to a uniquely Australian habitat.

"No-one knows who made the mallee, but the devil is strongly suspected", at least according to an anonymous writer in The Bulletin in 1901. 

Mallee to the horizon from Warepil Lookout in Hattah-Kulkyne National Park,
north-western Victoria.

The Bulletin disparager came from a long line of whitefella mallee-bashers. Surveyor-General John Oxley (admittedly pretty much always a glass-three-quarters-empty character, judging by his journals), wrote of the mallee country along the Cocoparra Range in south-western NSW in 1817 as "country of the most miserable description... abandoned by every living creature capable of getting out of there". (The local people were understandably uninterested in making his acquaintance.) Others wrote similarly. Later reports however revealed the real reason for the general antipathy. Charles Sturt in 1833, the first to enter the vast South Australian-Victoria mallee lands, of which Hattah-Kulkyne above is but a remnant, described it as "barren and unproductive as the worst of the country we have passed through". An 1851 report to the Victorian Government Surveyor reported that "throughout the whole of the scrub there is neither stone nor timber fit for any useful purpose". The crime of this lovely, subtle and uniquely Australian landscape was that it wasn't apparently 'useful', so there was no point to it. 

Sandhill Wattle Acacia ligulata flowering in mallee in Wyperfeld NP, north-western Victoria.

Nor was this attitude limited to the 19th century by any means. The term 'desert' was applied to the spectacularly rich and highly floral mallee heath country of eastern South Australia and western Victoria - the Ninety Mile Desert in SA, Big and Little Deserts in Victoria. Now, I love the desert lands, but there was no affection in these labels. They couldn't grow wheat or wool, so were effectively sterile.

But there were mallee farmers, and they were tough. Low rainfall, low soil nutrients (ie by European farming standards) and the incredible resilience of the mallee eucalypts, which resprouted from massive underground lignotubers (of which more in a moment) immediately after clearing, made the farmers' lives hell. Moreover the lignotubers ('mallee roots') simply broke their ploughs. In time though ingenuity, technology and science proved too much for even the ancient mallee habitats. Mulleinising in the 1870s meant clearing the bush by dragging water tanks on chains between horses (later tractors), then burning, rough planting and again burning the stubble to knock the regrowth back again. Taller wheat strains just kept their heads above the regenerating scrub. About this time too a Mr Smith of Maitland on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula invented the 'stump jump plough' so that it wasn't necessary to grub out all of the stumps. The invention of superphosphate at Roseworthy College north of Adelaide in the 1880s allowed continuous cropping to assist in controlling regeneration. After this over a million hectares of mallee in the higher rainfall, sandy loam soils north of Adelaide, on the Yorke Peninsula (where almost no original vegetation now remains) and in Western Victoria, were rapidly cleared. 

Millions of hectares more followed in the periods after both world wars, in western NSW, the far north-west of Victoria, Eyre Peninsula and out towards the Nullarbor, and in the south-west of WA. The pace slowed though as erosion issues and soil degradation followed, though the discovery of the role played by missing trace elements (especially cobalt and copper) triggered another burst in the 1950s and 60s. Ironically the Ninety Mile Desert was now redubbed Coonalpyn Downs... It wasn't until the 1970s that mallee conservation became something to consider.

So, perhaps belatedly on my part, what is 'the mallee'?

This map (courtesy of the Australian National Botanic Gardens) gives an indication of
the current (green) and estimated former (pink) distribution of mallee woodlands,
mostly in the semi-arid 200 - 550mm rainfall zone. However we should note that the
current range by no means implies continuous or undamaged mallee.
Most is fragmentary, and what remains doesn't reflect the
original diversity of the different mallee habitats.

The word apparently echoes one used by people in western Victoria to describe the multi-stemmed habit of eucalypts that grow in these low rainfall, low nutrient regions.

Mallee form, Mungo National Park, western NSW.

This form comprises a massive underground lignotuber (ie literally a woody tuber), a 'mallee root' up to a metre in diameter from which grow several equal-sized 'stems' which are actually branches. The foliage grows only at the tips of these branches. The key trigger appears to be low phosphate levels; it seems that low soil phosphate levels inhibit the cell growth which would otherwise lead to stem or leaf formation, and diverts it to carbohydrate production which is converted to wall material in the lignotuber. The lignotuber thus holds considerable nutrient reserves (but not water, despite a much-repeated myth). Roots grow from the lignotuber and these may hold water, a fact which was of course well known to Indigenous people. The lignotuber confers a remarkable resiliency, as the mallee farmers discovered. In a 1920s experiment scientists defoliated one-year-old seedlings 26 times in succession before they, not the eucalypt, gave up the battle.

The top of a large lignotuber protruding from the ground, with the branches growing
up from it. Hattah-Kulkyne National Park.

Some 130 species of eucalypts grow as mallees. However, only about 20 of these always grow thus; the other 130 surprisingly adopt the form only if the conditions - especially the low-phosphate soils - require it. Lignotubers are known in other plant groups elsewhere in the world, but what is unique to Australia is the ability of these species to adopt a mallee form only if the conditions are right. I have stood on dunes in the south-east of South Australia among mallee Pink Gums E. fasciculosa, and looked out at tall single-stemmed trees of the same species growing in the deep soil of the paddocks. This was before digital camera days I'm afraid, but here's another example.

Gum-barked Coolabah (though it has several names across its broad inland distribution)
E. intertexta, near Cobar, western NSW.

The same species growing as a mallee at Redbank Gorge,
western Tjoritja (MacDonnell Ranges) National Park.

This raises another point too; that mallee eucalypts can be found well outside of the area designated on the map above, provided of course that the soil conditions are right.

Port Jackson Mallee E. obstans, Currarong, north end of Jervis Bay, south coast NSW.
This mallee grows in sand and sandstone along the coast from here to Sydney.

Blue Mountains Mallee Ash E. stricta, Blackheath, Blue Mountains, NSW.
This one too, well out of the mallee zone, grows on shallow sandy soils on ridges.

And this in turn leads us the secondary use of the term 'mallee', which I have more than hinted at already. Almost inevitably the habitat that produced the mallee tree's unique form became in time known as simply 'the mallee'. But in this sense too there is not just one uniform 'mallee'. The model may have been updated since, but in Victoria back in the 1990s there were 31 major communities and some 100 vegetation sub-communities recognised. However for our purposes I'm going to look at just three basic mallee habitat 'types', defined by their dominant understorey (though course nature is never interested in being put in our boxes, so it's not always so clear cut).

Mallee-Heath, as the name suggests, has an understorey of heathy shrubs (banksias, hakeas, grevilleas, casuarinas and callitris for example) and grows in deep sand in higher rainfall areas of the zone. For this reason it was one of the first regions of the mallee zone to be cleared for agriculture. Here are a couple of surviving examples.

Sand Stringybark E. arenacea, Little Desert NP, north-western Victoria.
(This species was, until 1988, included with the more widespread Brown Stringybark, E. baxteri.)

Yalata Mallee E. yalatensis, Nullarbor Plain, South Australia.
This very attractive mallee is found around the fringes of the Nullarbor
and, curiously, in an isolated population far to the east near Mannum,
on the Murray River in South Australia.

Mallee with a sparse heathy understorey (with also some saltbush I think),
Gawler Rangers NP, north of the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia.

Fire in Mallee-Heath (as well as the following Mallee-Spinifex) is especially ferocious. All above ground vegetation is burnt and the volatile oils burn in great gas flares above the vegetation. Regeneration though is probably the most rapid of any tree formation in the world. A new stem cluster appears immediately, growing far faster than in other situations because of added potash in the soil, the resources in the lignotuber and reduced root competition for nutrients.

Regenerating burnt mallee, Gluepot Reserve, north of the River Murray in South Australia.
(Actually this was not at all the fiercest mallee fire, as the dead stems are still standing,
though most other plants have gone.)

Mallee-Spinifex also grows on deep sands but in lower rainfall areas. Spinifex refers to various species of the very prickly hummock grass Triodia spp., also known as Porcupine Grass, which forms very important animal habitat, especially for reptiles and invertebrates, but also small birds and mammals. Beyond the mallee, spinifex dominates some 25% of the Australian land area. Here are examples of Mallee-Spinifex from five different states and territories!

Sharp-capped Mallee Eucalyptus oxymitra in harsh gravel on exposed hillsides at the
start of the Ormiston Pound walk, western Tjoritja (MacDonnell Ranges) NP,
central Australia in the Northern Territory.

Normanton Box Eucalyptus normantonensis growing as a mallee form over
spinifex by the excellent dinosaur museum at Lark Quarry, central Queensland.

Mallee with a dense spinifex ground cover, Mungo National Park, south-western NSW.

Thick-leaved Mallee E. pachyphylla growing in a sandy spinifex plain,
Great Sandy Desert, central eastern Western Australia.

Huge (ie long unburnt) spinifex hummock in mallee, Wyperfeld NP, north-western Victoria.

The third broad mallee type is Mallee-Chenopod, ie various species of saltbushes, bluebushes, samphires etc. This is in low rainfall situations where the soil is sandy-clay. For some reason I find this habitat especially aesthetic.

Mallee with a bluebush (Maireana spp.) understorey, Red Banks Conservation Park,
mid-north South Australia.

Late afternoon over mallee-bluebush at Caiguna, west of the Nullarbor Plain
in south-eastern Western Australia.

Samphire (probably Tecticornia spp.) growing on a clay pan in mallee-bluebush
near Normantion, central southern Western Australia.

And I'm going to end this first instalment of a short series with some portraits of mallee species which I (totally subjectively) find particularly pleasing and/or interesting.

Blue-leaved Mallee E. gamophylla, Plenty Highway, central eastern
Northern Territory. The striking blueish rounded leaves are
juvenile leaves which remain in that form. It is found in sandy
country mostly dominated by spinifex.

Curly Mallee E. gillii has similar foliage. It grows in just two areas of
inland ranges; in the Barrier Range near Broken Hill,
in far western NSW (above) and in the Northern Flinders Ranges
of South Australia (at Weetootla Gorge below).

 Port Lincoln Mallee E. albopurpurea, Coffins Bay, South Australia.
This lovely mallee is found only here at the tip of Eyre Peninsula and on
Kangaroo Island. It was formerly regarded as a subspecies of E. landsdowneana
from the Gawler Ranges to the north.

Bushy Yate E. lehmanii, Cape Le Grande NP, in the east of south-western WA.
A spectacular mallee from Albany eastwards as far as Israelite Bay in hill country and dunes.

Mottlecah E. macrocarpa (above and below), Yandin Hill Lookout,
north of Perth, WA. Its flowers are possibly the most dramatic of all eucalypt flowers,
and can be up to 10cm across.

Red, Oil or Acorn Mallee E. oleosa has one of the most extensive distributions of
any mallee species, found from the south-west of WA to eastern Victoria. It flowers
profusely and its leaves were formerly harvested for their high oil content.
Here it is growing on the eastern fringe of the Nullarbor Plain.

Thick-leaved Mallee E. pachyphylla, here deep in the Great Sandy Desert of
central eastern WA though it is found widely in central Australia.

Moort E. platypus, Ravensthorpe, south-west WA. The name means 'flat or broad foot',
for the oddly shaped buds. It grows only along this section of coastline.

Bell-fruit Mallee E. preissiana, Stirling Ranges, south-west WA.

So, the first part of my ode to the marvellous mallee. I hope you've stuck with me through it, and that it has either aroused some good memories of your own, or perhaps sparked some curiosity in a habitat that you may not be familiar with. I'll be looking at some other plants and some animals of the mallee in forthcoming posts - not sure yet if it will two or three parts in all. Hope to join you then, and thanks for coming this far into the mallee with me.

NEXT POSTING THURSDAY 7 NOVEMBER

I love to receive your comments and in future will be notifying you personally by email when a new posting appears, if you'd like me to. All current subscribers have been added to this mailing list and have already been contacted. This will mean one email every three weeks at the current rate of posting. I promise never to use the list for any other purpose and will never share it.
Should you wish to be added to it, just send me an email at calochilus51@internode.on.net. You can ask to be removed from the list at any time,or could simply mark an email as Spam, so you won't see future ones.
If you do leave a comment - and I love it when you do - please remember to click the
box below your comment that says 'Email follow-up comments to...[your address]'
so you'll know when I reply - and I always do!

Corymbia; ghosts, blood and spots!

This is my first post for a while as we've been exploring the wonders of south-western Queensland, as I mentioned in my last post. We brought back plenty of material for future posts, but for now I'm going to offer something different while I sort out my photos. I also thought this one might be a relatively easy one with which to ease myself back in (my mind is still back with big blue skies, huge horizons, narrow roads stretching out of sight ahead, and surprises round each corner). However, as usually happens in such a situation, it's been a lot more work than I'd realised, as I discovered how much I didn't know and, with new knowledge, came across a couple of misidentifications in my photos. All for the good, I know.

Today I'm talking about an important group of eucalypts, including a few pretty familiar ones, which are no longer called Eucalyptus. That might sound contradictory, but in fact 'eucalypt' is a general name to describe any of the trees that have at some time been called Eucalyptus; they remain as closely related to each other and as instantly recognisable as they ever were.

Flowers of Red Bloodwood Corymbia gummifera, here at Tianjara Falls in Morton
National Park inland from Nowra, south coast NSW. There are a couple of issues here
that are relevant to today's post, the first being the way the flowers are clustered. You may not be
able to see it well here, but the relatively flattened shape of each flower cluster is caused
by the different lengths of the flower stems within the cluster. The lower stems are longer
than the higher ones, so the overall shape is flat, or only slightly domed. This, in botanical
terms, is a corymb, which is different from the way in which other eucalypt flowers grow,
hence the genus name - more on that in a couple of paragraphs time!

The other thing to note in the above caption is the name of the tree. 'gummifera', naturally enough, means 'bearing gum' and while we may not think this remarkable, many early Europeans who encountered eucalypts certainly did. In 1688 the English pirate-naturalist William Dampier reported from the far north-west of Australia that "the Gum distils out of the knots or cracks that are in the bodies of  the trees". Governor Arthur Phillip, who commanded the first British colony on what is now Sydney Harbour, used the term 'gum-tree' in 1778; he collected this gum, and send samples back home, doubtless to have its commercial potential tested. The German botanist Joseph Gaertner first used the name gummifera in a description, but it was Daniel Solander, who sailed with Cook and Banks in 1770 and became the first university-trained botanist to land in Australia, who formally described it in 1788. 

However more than 200 years later the respected botanist Lawrie Johnson of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, along with colleague Ken Hill, grasped a very large and forbidding nettle indeed when he tackled the problem of what to do about Eucalyptus. The problem, in a gum-nut shell, is that the differences between Eucalyptus and Angophora are no greater than between the various sub-groups of Eucalyptus. Logic demanded either incorporating Angophora into Eucalyptus, or splitting Eucalyptus; Lawrie boldly chose the latter. Before his sad death from cancer in 1997 he had got as far as separating out the bloodwoods, spotted gums and ghost gums as Corymbia; they remain in most books now as the only other non-Eucalyptus eucalypt. There are four sub-groups within Corymbia; in simple terms they are the red bloodwoods (59 species), the yellow bloodwoods (11 species), the ghost gums (24 species) and the spotted gums (3 species). (There are also three outliers, but we won't worry about them today). 

That's about as technical as I'm going to get here - for the rest I'll introduce members of the four main groups and we can just admire them! Many of the bloodwoods, including those most familiar in the south-east, readily 'bleed' sap on the trunk, often encouraged by the gnawing of glider possums.

Desert Bloodwood Corymbia opaca near Windorah, south-west Queensland,
'bleeding' copiously, though not to any detriment! This species was separated
from the much more widespread C. terminalis (see below) in 1985, though
not everyone accepts the distinction.

Many of this group have plated bark, like this one, though not all.

Red Bloodwood again, near Narooma on the NSW south coast.

Pink Bloodwood C. intermedia (like most tree 'colour' names, the pink refers
to the timber, not that I've ever seen it). This one was in the Coffs Harbour Botanic
Gardens on the north coast of NSW, though it is an original tree.

These last two species are trees of the temperate south-east, though a couple of other well-known red bloodwoods are from the south-west (though are not called 'bloodwood').

Red-flowering Gum Corymbia ficifolia, in Wagga Wagga Botanic Gardens.
This small tree has a very small natural distribution in the south-west of Western Australia,
mostly along roadsides, but is very widely planted in gardens and road verges across
southern Australia. This photo shows the corymbs fairly clearly.

Marri C. calophylla, Darling Ranges near Perth. This is a very impressive
tree which dominates some dry forests in the south-west, often along with
Jarrah Eucalyptus marginata. Its big hard fruits (very like those of the Red-flowering Gum
above) are key food for the Red-capped Parrot and the Endangered Baudin's
(or, more helpfully, Long-billed) Black Cockatoo, both of
which extract the tiny seeds with a thin elongated upper mandible.

Others, like the Desert Bloodwood above, are restricted to the arid inland and the seasonally dry north.

Inland, or Desert Bloodwood C. terminalis, above and below. The one above
is in Currawinya NP, in south-west Queensland, and the one below in
Boodjamulla/Lawn Hill NP in monsoonal north-west Queensland,
with torrential summer rains and arid winters.

I'm especially fond of this species, and I see it on any inland trip to the northern half
of Australia, in four of the five mainland states and the Northern Territory.

 Another closely related desert bloodwood was only recognised in 1995.

Sand Dune Bloodwood C. chippendalei, Great Sandy Desert, central eastern WA.
This one only grows on dunes in the central and western deserts.
It was named for George Chippendale, an expert on plants of the Northern
Territory and later the author of the mighty eucalypts volume of the Flora of Australia.
He was also a lovely person who delighted in sharing his knowledge with others.

Corymbia deserticola (another 'Desert Bloodwood' though without a formal English name)
also growing in the Great Sandy Desert. It has a similar distribution to the Sand Dune
Bloodwood, but a wider range of habitats though is usually found on the plains.

Other red bloodwoods grow only in the seasonal tropics.

Small-fruited Bloodwood C. dichromophloia, Boodjamulla/Lawn Hill NP.
This common bloodwood is found from north-west Queensland to the Kimberley.
It is smooth-barked except for the base of the trunk, to which flakes of old bark adhere.

(Another) Red Bloodwood C. erythrophloia, Undara Lava Tubes, north Queensland.
This very striking tree grows in eastern tropical Queensland.

The yellow bloodwoods are much fewer in number. This one is common, and especially conspicuous.

Yellow Jacket C. leichhardtii, Salvator Rosa NP, south-central Queensland
(part of the Carnarvon Range), above and below. This is its southern-most extent,
but it extends north on the western slopes to Mareeba and is readily seen on a
drive through the Queensland tropical woodlands, where sandy soil overlays sandstone.

And one familiar to readers from the Sydney region, is Yellow Bloodwood C. eximia, also found only on sandstone, from Nowra to the Hunter Valley.

Yellow Bloodwood, here at Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains
(and I really must get a better photo of this species!).

There are just three species in the spotted gum group, including the well-known Queensland endemic Lemon-scented Gum C. citriodora - well known because it is widely planted in southern Australia. I used to walk to university in Adelaide through a large stand of them in Botanic Park. However further south by far the best known spotted gum is, wait for it... Spotted Gum C. maculata, which grows all along the NSW coast south from Taree. It is a lovely and readily recognisable tree for its blotchy bark, caused by grey flakes of old bark sticking to the trunk. Here are three Spotted Gum portraits from the south coast of NSW - I'm very partial to them!

Spotted Gum forest along a walk to the beach, Murramarang NP.

Tall old Spotted Gum near Nowra - I couldn't get far enough away to fit
it all into a conventional photo.

Spotted Gum forest with typical understorey of Burrawang cycads,
Macrozamia communis, near Nelligen.

Finally, the last group of Corymbia comprises the wonderful ghost gums, which I blogged about in more detail seven years ago here. By far the best known is the Ghost Gum of central Australia, from eastern WA to western Queensland.

A Ghost Gum C. aparrerinja, estimated to be at least 300 years old, at Trephina Gorge,
eastern Tjoritja (MacDonnell Ranges). For more photos of this very beautiful species,
and some interesting information I was given about the origin of the unusual
species name, see the link immediately above.

Ghost Gum by the road west of Windorah, south-west Queensland.
This must be close to its south-eastern limits.
(It occurs slightly further east to the north of here, at Barcaldine.)

Other ghost gums occur in the tropics.

Rough-leaved Ghost Gum C. aspera, Boodjamulla/Lawn Hill NP. The species is
found across the northern tropics from here in north-west Queensland to the Kimberley.

Ancient C. blakei in Bladensburg NP in central Queensland, growing on
a substrate too hard to penetrate with its roots! It is restricted to this part of Queensland.

Two others in the ghost gum group are very striking trees from eastern Queensland, though to my frustration my photos don't do them justice. Oh well, I'll just have to go back!

Dallachy's Ghost Gum C. dallachiana, Barcaldine. This is a young tree (and drought-affected)
and doesn't give much indication of how handsome it will grow up to be!

And we end with another favourite of mine, the stately Carbeen, or Moreton Bay Ash
C. tessellaris. Heading north we encounter this tall white tree with a rough grey or black
bark stocking in northern NSW, and it continues right up to Cape York.

Well, if this topic didn't interest you much, you won't be still reading! For those who are, thank you for persevering and I hope you learnt something of interest (I certainly have) and at the least enjoyed some of the trees themselves. Next time I'll be back with a more general posting, almost certainly based on one of the lovely parks we've recently spent time in, in south-western Queensland.

NEXT POSTING THURSDAY 8 AUGUST

I love to receive your comments and in future will be notifying you personally by email when a new posting appears, if you'd like me to. All current subscribers have been added to this mailing list and have already been contacted. This will mean one email every three weeks at the current rate of posting. I promise never to use the list for any other purpose and will never share it.
Should you wish to be added to it, just send me an email at calochilus51@internode.on.net. You can ask to be removed from the list at any time,or could simply mark an email as Spam, so you won't see future ones.
If you do leave a comment - and I love it when you do - please remember to click the
box below your comment that says 'Email follow-up comments to...[your address]'
so you'll know when I reply - and I always do!