QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Ein ‘Vater’ von der Macadamia

Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Müller, KCMG (30 June 1825 – 10 October 1896) was a German-Australian physician, geographer and most notably, a botanist. Müller was born at Rostock, Germany. After the early death of his parents, Frederick and Louisa, his grandparents gave him a good education in Tönning, Schleswig. Apprenticed to a chemist at 15, he passed the pharmaceutical examinations and studied botany under Professor Nolte at Kiel. He received his doctorate in 1847 from Kiel University. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy when he was 21 for a thesis on the flora of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1847, having been advised to go to a warmer climate, he sailed for Australia with two sisters from Bremen. It is said that, still on the ship, he already fished the first plants out of the water to analyse them. He arrived at Adelaide on 18 December 1847 and found employment as a chemist. Shortly after, he obtained 20 acres (8ha) of land not far from Adelaide but, after living on it for a few months, returned to his former employment. He travelled through the colony from 1848 to 1852, discovering and describing a large number of plants previously unknown to Western science. He contributed a few papers on botanical subjects to German periodicals, and in 1852 sent a paper to the Linnean Society at London on The Flora of South Australia . He moved to Melbourne, capital of the new colony of Victoria in 1851, and was appointed to the newly-created post of Government Botanist of that state in 1853.

For thousands of years before European settlement of Australia, the Aborigines ate the native nut that grew in rainforests of the east coast. One of these nuts was called gyndl or jindilli (Macadamia integrifolia) , which was later borrowed as kindal kindal by early Europeans. In 1828 Allan Cunningham became the first European to discover the macadamia plant. Just shy of 30 years later, the German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Müller gave the genus the scientific name Macadamia in 1857 — named after von Müller’s friend Doctor John Macadam, a noted scientist and secretary to the Philosophical Institute of Australia. The following year, Walter Hill, Superintendent of the Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, observed a boy eating the nut without any ill effects, thereby becoming the first non-indigenous person recorded to eat a macadamia. Fittingly, it was an indigenous Australian (and a new Queenslander!) who became known as the first ‘macadamia nut entrepreneur’ during the 1860s. King Jacky, an elder of the Logan River clan south of Brisbane, and his tribe, regularly collected and traded the nuts with the new settlers. Macadamia Nuts Pty Ltd opened Australia’s first purpose-built processing plant at Slacks Creek in Brisbane’s southern suburbs in 1964. By 1997 Australia was the world’s major producer of macadamia nuts, and the boxed, chocolate-covered variety remain a perennial favourite selection at international airport gift shops around the country, with Queensland’s plantations a key source.

Macadamia is a genus of nine species of flowering plants in the family Proteaceae, with seven native to eastern Australia and one each to be found in Indonesia and New Caledonia. Although claimed by the USA, the macadamia was

Baron von Müller died in 1896 and is buried in Melbourne’s St Kilda Cemetery.

introduced to the Hawaiian Islands in 1881 as a windbreak for sugar cane crops, before Ernst van Tassel established the first commercial macadamia nut farm, near Honolulu in 1925. Other common names: Queensland nut, Bush nut, bauple nut. They are small to large evergreen trees growing to 2–12 m tall.

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