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| Two of the volunteers trying quandongs.....obvious what they think! |
At Mount Gibson many of the Quandong fruits
are just ripening. There are three different types of quandongs in Australia:
the desert quandong, the bitter quandong and the blue quandong. One article
describes quandong as a’sweet and juicy apple sized fruit’; so I think the ones
here must be the bitter quandongs since they are smaller then apples, not sweet
and the flesh is very thin. The blue
ones I think I saw in Daintree, where they were referred to as Cassowary plums,
because the cassowaries liked to eat them.
The quandongs here are loved by emus. They
eat them and their droppings are full of the rather large and pricky seeds
which are in the centre of the fruit. All the volunteers tried the fruit and
although it wasn’t as bitter as we thought it probably wasn’t something we
would sit and eat a bowl of. However as a survival food it would be acceptable.
The word quandong comes from the Wiradjuri
language and means ‘nut’. It is possibly one of the oldest fruits found on the
planet, there are fossilized remains dating back 40 million years. The leaves
can be used to produce a tropical ointment for skin sores. The fruit can also
be eaten fresh, dried or as an infusion for tea. The seeds can be crushed and
used as a hair conditioner. Stockman sometimes put quandongs into a damper for
a little variety.
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| Quandongs on the tree |
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| Quandongs on the ground |
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| Emu droppings....full of quandong seeds |
