BOTANICAL SCIENCE
DECOLONISING SCIENCE EFFORTS ARE UNDERWAY FOR THE BOTANICAL WORLD TO BETTER ACKNOWLEDGE AND EMBRACE THE VAST KNOWLEDGE OF AUSTRALIA'S INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. PROFESSOR BRETT SUMMERELL, CHIEF SCIENTIST AND DIRECTOR RESEARCH, REPORTS.
Views of Bunya Pines
22 THE GARDENS SPRING 2022
of the trees – probably facilitated by extreme weather conditions and fluctuationsoverthatperiodoftime. Bunya Pines are amazing trees. Some of the mature specimens at the national park are a metre wide, 40–50 metres high and estimated at between 500and800yearsold. They are a relic of Gondwanan times, with close relatives preserved in the fossil records from the Mesozoic era (252 to 66 million years ago) and recovered from as farafieldasSouth mericaandEuorpe. To see such beautiful trees devastated by this disease is heart breaking and it mirrors similar issues in the North Island of New Zealand with kauri dieback, in Chile with dieback of Monkey Puzzle Pine (Araucaria araucana), and of course
with the Wollemi Pine in New South Wales. In all cases it is a situation where an exotic pathogen is introduced by humans and then proceeds to attack a plant species that has limited capability figh ot back t . All of these species are members of the Araucariaceae – a type of conifer (although not a true pine) that was once distributed widely around the world but is now restricted to Australia, NewZealand,partsofthePacific islands and South America (especially Chile). These trees were a major part of Australia's forests in wetter times. Bunya Pines have enormous cultural significanceto boriginalpeople– particularly to the Wakka Wakka people within whose land the Bunya Mountains
Photos: Alamy, © Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust
R
ecently I had the great experience to travel around 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane to the last storngholdofthemagnificentBunya Pine (Araucaria bidwillii), which was once widespread across southeast Queensland but is now greatly reduced due to logging and land clearing. Unfortunately, I was there because of a disease in this species, bunya dieback, which is associated with the presence of a species of Phytophthora (Phytophthora multivora) that has killed a number of trees in the national park. It appears that this pathogen, which is believed to have originated in South Africa, was introduced into the park in the past two decades and has slowly spread and attacked the root system
