macadamia

The lowland subtropical rainforests of eastern Australia, from south-east Queensland to north-east New South Wales; one of few international food crops to come from the flora of Australia, likely a food of the peoples whose Country it grows on, though Western science holds no record of its cultivation before European occupation

Named Macadamia by Ferdinand von Mueller in 1858 for John Macadam, who almost certainly never saw or tasted a nut; taken to Hawai'i twice, by W. H. Purvis between 1881 and 1885 and by R. A. Jordan in 1892, Purvis planting it as a windbreak on his sugar-cane plantation, and grown in commercial orchards there from the 1920s; its largest producers now Australia, South Africa, Kenya and the United States, with plantings expanding fastest in China and South Africa

Maiden's survey of 1889 wrote down kindal-kindal as the name used by the aboriginals and never recorded whose language it was, though it noted that timber-getters were not allowed to fell the trees because the nut fed Aboriginal people. The growers' industry body now gives kindal kindal to the Kabi Kabi nation and likely other clans, the Dauwa among them, without saying on whose authority, and records other names beside it: baphal in Butchulla and gumburra or goomburra in Yugambeh, a word Muurrbay's Bundjalung dictionary also keeps, from Hanlon's record of gumburra for the Queensland nut tree. A Yugambeh Elder, Patricia O'Connor, gives the name in her grandmother's words: as a little girl she planted those nuts walking with her father along the Nerang river, and what others called Queensland nuts she called Goomburra. Western science records no cultivation before the colony, and a Yugambeh family remembers planting: what counts as the record depends on who was asked. The genus carries instead the surname of a politician who almost certainly never tasted the nut, and the industry was built in Hawai'i from seed taken there twice in the 1880s and 1890s, where chloroplast sequencing has since traced most cultivars to one maternal line, found at two wild sites, Mooloo and Mount Bauple, at the northern edge of the range. Hawaiian cultivars account for most of the world's production. The nut kept its many names among the peoples whose Country it grows on, and the version that went round the world carries a stranger's surname and a single maternal line.