WRONG NAME. USE THE CORRECT ONE.

OR; DON’T BOTHER: WHO CARES?

AS A NEW CHUM,  or annoying Pommy cunt, as the locals called me, I stared about me in wonder at the glorious technicolour marvels of of the place. And the other stuff, mostly shit-coloured.

I woke up in Australia in a camp-bed on a veranda. Until that very minute I had been a blank-eyed zombie, shuttled with family from city to city, boat to train, shank’s pony, more train, all day and night, to a final bed that didn’t rock. Three days with prams, suitcases, backpacks and blank-eyed zombie wife and children.

I woke up in Australia in a camp-bed on a veranda, from a nightmare that started months and oceans ago in a rented cottage in the cold rain, on the other side and hemisphere of the planet. But that’s another story.

My eyes opened and slowly focused on brilliant colour, movement and sound. Near my head, back-lit vivid green banana-leaves and pendulant black-purple flowers swayed and shrieked. No: two crazy-coloured upside-down lorikeets shrieking. There was no sky. No lowering black clouds. Just luminous, dazzling blue light.

I had become a child with endless questions. What’s that? What’s that bird? This plant? That tree? Frogs and bandicoots and snakes and lizards parrots birds ants more lizards spiders butterflies toads trees trees trees eagles hawks. I knew nothing. I recognised nothing. It was wonderful.

After a while, I discovered no-one else knew either. Everyone called the same item a different name. Even said the same name differently.

My troubles started with the cedar. And furniture. Being a carpenter, joiner, and cabinet-maker, and trained in all three allied trades, I thought I knew my wood. Well, Pommy wood, and a bit of exotic European and American stuff. So I knew what a cedar was. And I recognised the beautiful cedar furniture of colonial craftsmanship; or I thought I did.

Where were these cedars. I asked, over the years; many people, in many places. Almost none left, they said, cut down sixty, eighty years ago. Some rare ones they knew of and described; more puzzlement. I had seen cedars in the Old Country, on grand estates, and the descriptions folk gave me did not tally. Nowhere could I see a cedar, and the lack was beginning to irritate me. Every antique shop had Australian cedar furniture. Where were the bloody trees?

One day a wise person took me to the botanic gardens. There: THAT’S A CEDAR, he said.

Wot? No it fucking wasn’t. Even the label said Toona Australis. (Later changed to Toona Ciliata) That’s not a cedar, said I. Cedar is a CONIFER, a pine tree, looks like a Christmas tree, a sort of fir tree, has resin, not sap, makes amber after a while, has cones, etc..etc..

No wonder I couldn’t find the thing. There are NO cedars in Australia. Never have been. The wood is admittedly similar, but the smell is totally wrong: a Toona smell, not a Pine smell. Though both very nice: very different.

That’s when my problems with names started. Years of searching for a non-existent tree.

In Australia anyone can call anything whatever they like. And do, with conviction, ha ha.

Scientific names are poo-pooed, Aboriginal names sneered at. Though things are improving; after all, Aboriginal names came first, so there’s the precedent, undeniable. Except there are hundreds of local languages……..choose one! Ha ha again.

We are forced, when we wish to refer to a particular plant or beast, to use the scientific names, if there is to be no mistake. But for the most part, the Latin-based names are crap and irrelevant, and ‘honour’ some person, rather than being descriptive. And even common names are often totally misleading (Passion fruit, for example, and more later).

Common names have another issue: they change from generation to generation, place to place, and become utterly distorted over the centuries, as old Herbals illustrate. So we must fall back on the scientific names: there’s no alternative.

Except! Oh no! Even the scientific names suffer the bastardisation of the commons. Wistaria is now wisteria on all labels, to rhyme with ‘mysterious’. Wrong. And what the hell is a monsterio? Wrong again! The popular and lazy and ignorant version of a delicious-fruited, common, local, magnificent climbing plant, most aptly named though very seldom eaten. You don’t know what you’re missing! And more later, so read on, while I check some spelling and look-up a few things……..

Where was I? Well, for a start, the beautiful climber was named after Dr. Wistar, despite all the recent nursery labels. (Older labels got it right). And Monstera deliciosa is confused with, oh, I can’t be bothered.

Now Naturtium officinalis is Watercress! Yes! Delicious watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Two Nasturtium sandwiches please.

Then some loony thought that Tropaeolium, with its round leaves and pretty flowers, tasted a bit like Nasturtium and foolishly called it that. And so did everyone else, the pathetic idiots. Did the loony not know he was eating Tropaeolium? He must have known it wasn’t watercress; it looks totally different. How, then did he describe the plant? Er, it tastes a bit like Nasturtium? He could have died, eating stuff he knew not what. And so it goes on.

You can’t trust the name of Anything. Are you my father? Everything is insecure.

Mountain ash is Eucalyptus regnans. It’s not an ash. It’s another bloody gumtree.
Tassie oak is, ha ha, Eucalyptus regnans…….
Silky oak is Grevillea robusta. Neither the timber nor the tree is anything like oak.
And so on. Most of those trees with Pommy names are not what they’re called.

Prickly pear or Tree pear is Opuntia. Sure, it’s prickly. The plant has savage spikes, and the fruit, which neither looks nor tastes anything like a pear of any sort, is covered in tiny bunches of minute needles which break off into your skin, lips and tongue and irritate painfully for days, and can leave lesions for weeks………sure, very pear-like.  Nevertheless, handled with care, the fruit is delicious. And a noxious, invasive, imported species, all Opuntias are a bit of a pain in the arse: never crap on one by mistake.

And as for Bush Tucker; I can see that a kangaroo steak might be delicious, but being vegetarian I look to native plants. And with the exception of Bunya and Macadamia nuts, most seem to be decorative or toxic or both, and many have European mis-nomers. Any Australian fruit or vegetable with an English name is likely to be a totally unrelated species, and very painful eating. As Crocodile Dundee said: ‘Sure, you can eat it, but it tastes like shit.’

The Aborigines ate all sorts of stuff; they had to. Their whole existence was a knife-edge search for tucker. Feast or famine. And while we’re considering this, three nasty facts. Governor Phillip, and all-round good bloke, fed many parties of starving natives which stumbled into camp, some dying there. Their expected food source failed and all would have perished without his nurture. During his time this was a frequent event. Australia is a hard place.

‘Fire-stick-farming’ is a very polite term for habitat-burning. The bush creatures were burned alive: easy tucker, but so many must have died that couldn’t be found or eaten, and the bush became more impoverished with each burn-off. Now the white man is doing it, to protect housing. And on it goes.

The third nasty fact is the disappearance of the giant megafauna, which took place at the time Australia was first settled by humans, sixty-odd thousand years ago. The same dying that happened to the moas in New Zealand, for the same reason: easy pickings. Big tame food, stick in a spear, or light a fire, and run away. It is thought that the death of the mega-fauna combined with constant burn-offs permanently altered the climate through loss of rain-forest and grassland. It could all have happened in a few lifetimes. The vast areas of desert may have been green just 60,000 years ago.

The French, starved by wars, ate snails: read Guy de Maupassant. Now, of course, they are delicacies. The English would eat nothing but beef once; there must have been a lot of it about, but the Highland Scots thought plain oats in cold water was food, poor bastards.

Anyway, back to the plot. At a rellies’ farm near the Bunyas was a strange tree, native to the area. It was a tree that would have looked ok upside-down; roots like branches and branches like roots. The name I was given was fakkerlakker. Other farmers thought the same or didn’t know. It reminded me of a toilet-wall notice from long ago: ‘Max Factor knacker-laquer adds lustre to your cluster and glamour to you rammer’. Nice. Interesting spelling and alliteration. But I looked in vain for the real name, until I came across Phytolacca, which seemed to fit, except this was a South American tree, and it seems these Australian ones were scrub-remnants left as pets after tree-clearing, like occasional bunyas and figs. So there’s still a mystery.

Side-tracking, Aussie giant fig-trees really are figs, and some have quite edible fruit. An enormous one I know of, in an area of enormous ones, suffered sadly during one windy night, and two-thirds of it fell down. The tree had been visible for twenty kilometres around. The fallen, interwoven trunk smashed through the dense scrub, shaking neighbours in their beds: they thought earthquake. I climbed onto the enormous trunk, over four metres high (that was its diameter, and more) and stretching sixty metres into a massive tangle of branches and vines. Now here’s the strange thing. Within a year and a half there was nothing to see of all that fallen timber. It disappeared into dust and mulch. The moral: don’t build out of fig-wood!

As for Passion fruit and passion flower, Passiflora edulis, the problem is with the change in the meaning of ‘passion’ from tortuous pain to sexual desire, and its strange misuse for  sickly, fizzy, alcohol: Passion Pop. Check with the Roman religious industry for its ludicrous name………

This subject is never-ending. The name of absolutely anything you can shake a stick at is usually doubtful, often changing. And that’s just in one language, so there’s never a fixed reference-point. Scientific names attempt to standardise, and be universally specific, and naming things is an esoteric industry now, and we’d be lost without it. But the common folk  prefer our old colloquial terms from the gardens and bush of our childhood.  We’d probably get the name wrong. So be it.