Think
Kimberley and the iconic
Boab tree immediately springs to mind. In Australia this distinctive tree does not occur naturally anywhere else. The most easterly boabs are found around
Timber Creek and in the Image Could Not Be Found
Gregory National Park and extend west nearly to
Broome and south to the margins of the
Great Sandy Desert. Within that huge area boabs seem to be everywhere (
well almost).
The closest relatives of the Australian Boab (Adansonia gregorii) are about six species of baobab or bottle trees (Adansonia) from Madagascar and a single species from Africa. Australian boabs probably arrived here as recently as 17 million years ago, as seed pods drifting across from Madagascar and Africa. An alternative but possibly outdated theory is that Boabs may date from the time when Australia and Africa were part of the ancient continent of Gondwana.
However they came to be here, they are a distinctive and useful tree, full of character and charm.
Young trees are slender, gradually forming the distinctive bottle shaped trunk as the tree reaches maturity. However boabs are a very slow growing tree so maturity may take literally centuries. Frequently boabs are seen in mixed age groups, with slender juveniles, robust but upright middle aged trees and portly spreading elders making up family groups.Image Could Not Be Found
Boabs can be seen growing in a range of situations from harsh rocky outcrops, to sandy plains or clustered along drainage lines.
The trees are deciduous, losing their leaves in the dry season. Image Could Not Be FoundConsequently most of us dry season visitors to the
Kimberley only see the bare trees that make such a distinctive sunset silhouette. As the wet season approaches the trees sprout their big leaves made up of 5 to 9 leaflets radiating from a central point.Image Could Not Be Found
Flowering starts as the wet approaches, continuing from October to January. The flowers are large, about 10cm across, creamy white and fragrant. Hopefully someone has a photo of a boab flower.
The distinctive boab “nuts” follow the flowers. Each capsule consists of an oval shaped hard dark brown
shell covered with fine brownish hairs. The
shell encloses the seeds and crisp white pith both of which are edible. Tourist souvenirs are created by aboriginals who carve
the nut with a variety of traditional designs.
Boab trees are now grown commercially for the edible root of the
young seedling. The roots when peeled and sliced are sweet and crunchy. However boab trees are protected, meaning that trees must not be damaged and seeds may not be collected from the wild.
The wood of boabs is soft and very open in texture and does not form growth rings. We saw a boab cut down in
Derby and noted that the fresh wood has a rather unpleasant pungent smell. The huge trunk of fibrous wood enables the tree to store water in the dry season. Image Could Not Be FoundAborigines blended the sap with water to make a tasty drink. and ate the seeds and the pithy material surrounding them. They also used the wood fibres to make twine and nets.
As boab trees become mature the trunk may have a circumference of many metres. The wood in the trunk rots away leaving a large hollowed out space. Two exceptionally large trees were used by early settlers as Prison Trees to hold aborigines who were being taken to court at
Wyndham or
Derby. The
Derby prison tree is estimated to be about 1500 years old. Another venerable old tree can be seen beside the Great Northern Highway east of the Willare Image Could Not Be Found
Bridge Roadhouse. I estimated that this boab has a circumference of about 20 meters! The hollow inside is quite roomy and comes complete with aerial roots.
Mature boabs have bark that is
grey in colour and very smooth. Unfortunately this makes them tempting targets for initial-carving graffiti vandals. However many early
explorers used boabs as convenient landmarks and recorded details of their travels carved into the trunk. One such Tree is the
Gregory Tree on the banks of the Image Could Not Be Found
Victoria River near
Timber Creek. It is a marked boab, inscribed by the explorer
Gregory in 1856. It marks the site of his base
camp from which he explored the surrounding region.
Another such tree is the Hahn Tree off the
Gibb River Road, marked by Frank Hahn in 1898. Perhaps the oldest European inscribed boab is at Careening Bay off the
Kimberley coast, visited by Phillip Parker King in 1820 while undertaking a hydrographic survey of the Australian coastline. King and his crew careened his ship the HMS “Mermaid” and carved the ship’s name into a nearby boab. These carvings have mostly survived the passage of time with new bark not significantly overgrowing the contours of the initial carving.
In July 2008 West Australian Aboriginals replanted a mature
boab tree in King’s Park in
Perth. A road widening project near Warmun north of Hall’s Creek meant the tree, estimated to be 750 years old, would be destroyed. To save the boab, it was carefully uprooted, Image Could Not Be Foundplaced on a low-loader and driven for 6 days and 3200 kilometres with a
police escort to
Perth's
Kings Park. There it joined a family of 14 other much younger boabs. Does anyone have a photo of it in its new
home?
We were fortunate to see this travelling tree as we were stopped for lunch at the big boab east of
Broome.
I’m hoping we can create a whole family of boabs on here, complete with flowers and nuts.
Cheers,
Val.
| J and V
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
- Albert Einstein
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