Towards Intimate Relations: Gesture and Contact Between Plants and People

The Christmas Tree ('Nuytsia floribunda') is a small tree that flowers brilliantly in yellow-orange in the middle of December and only grows in the Southwest corner of Western Australia. It is the world's largest parasitic plant and one of the first Australian flowers recorded by the crew of the Dutch vessel 'Gulden Zeepaert' in the early seventeenth century. For the Nyoongar, the Aboriginal people of the Southwest, the Christmas Tree is the final resting place of the soul of the deceased before embarking to the afterlife. Although spiritually significant, the Christmas Tree has also been used as a food. Writing in the 1880s, Ethel Hassell reported that 'Nuytsia' root was eaten like candy: "[Aboriginal people gave me] one of the roots to taste, telling me it was called mungah. The outer skin was pale yellow but easily stripped off leaving a most brittle centre tasting very like sugar candy". As Hassell further relates, a ghoulish creature called a gnolum, in the form of a very tall and thin man enticed boys away by offering them 'mungah' roots.