I mentioned earlier that we stopped on the highway to climb a hill and search for witchetty grubs. Scott located several witchetty bushes and had our students digging down into the roots with branches. Only one grub was located – they tend to stay dormant in dry weather and emerge in wet weather when there is a better chance of finding food. The Red Centre has had a surprising amount of rain the last 18 months, and so most grubs would have emerged already. I have been given permission from the student to use her name: Brittany Milliken found and ate the witchetty grub.
In Kings Canyon, Scott showed us the Desert Heat Myrtle, a plant that the indigenous people would use for energy when they were exhausted from hunting. If they had been unsuccessful for a while, they would poison a drinking puddle using rock mint. The kangaroo would become woozy after drinking the water, making it easy to track and kill. The hunter would leave a bit of mint by the puddle to warn other hunters of the sedative.
The ghost gum tree is a fascinating eucalyptus. Its bark is white, and it exudes a white powder which can be used as sunscreen. It has deep tap roots, but even so there are dry times when the tree performs triage: a branch is cut off from the water supply and dies. The dead branch stays attached to the tree. Over time, it will become hollow and thus will be a haven for small creatures. The trees are easy to recognize, what with the white bark and the bizarre jumble of dead branches attached to leafy branches.
We saw several feral camels at Kata Tjuta. The wild ones have not endeared themselves to the population of Australia as they eat the food consumed by native Australian mammals.
The blood wood gum tree is a eucalyptus whose sap is red. The fresh sap kills germs and takes away pain. The sap can be dried and ground into powder. When a pain-killing antiseptic is needed, water is mixed into the powder and the paste applied to the wound.
A piti is a shallow, oblong bowl which is used to carry anything from seeds to babies. A woman would cut a rectangle into the trunk of a blood wood gum, probably using a piece of quartz. To separate the wood from the tree, she would pour hot sand into a small gap she had created to cause the tree to blister and push the wood away from the trunk. The rest of the connection could be severed using the quartz tool. Women would take just one piti from a tree so as to keep the tree healthy.
Honey ants populate the blood wood gum. Women would follow the ants back to their nest and gather a tasty treat. I can’t remember if the entire ant was eaten or just its honey sac.
Scott showed us a spear bush. The very straight branches do look like the shafts of spears. If the branch wasn’t straight enough, it was easy to heat and straighten. Mulga wood, which is slightly poisonous, was used to make the spear head. This was attached to the spear with the sinews from a kangaroo and glue made of resin from spinifex grass.
The Dead Finish bush is the last thing a cow will eat in a drought. The cows die, and the ranch is finished. This bush has needles which are supposed to remove warts. A student presented a wart, and Scott inserted three needles into it. At least one needle was still in the wart an hour later. I haven’t heard if the procedure was successful.
The Dead Finish bush also provided us fodder for some kidding. Its seeds are edible, but rather than picking the seeds off one by one, the women would follow the ants, which also collected the seeds and stacked them around their anthill. The women would scoop up a handful of seeds, grind them up, and make a kind of porridge for their hungry children. It was enough of a meal to keep them quiet until the women could find more substantial food. For the rest of the day, any time someone complained about being hungry we would offer to make them porridge.
Now and then we would see kangaroos and wallabies bounding along the highway, and of course we saw all sorts of birds. I am told that due to those 18 months of good rainfall, we saw a green desert, not the typical desert. Parts of it were so lovely that I asked Scott if the park did grooming. He said no, we were just lucky to be here at this time.
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