tasmanian medicinal natives

[obtuse]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post here and i am hoping someone can help me out.

I have UTSE, but haven't found much. Maybe i'm just not doing the right searches.

Anyway as the title suggests, I am interested in finding out what tasmanian natives are used as medicinal plants.

Subsequent to that i am also interested in tas natives used as herbs or spices (i know of Tasmannia sp.)?

With thanks,

Cheers, Obtuse.

[JumpedAngel]

I just began reading "Australian Medicinal Plants" by Lassak & McCarthy today, you may find the following quote interesting:-

The assumption that the Tasmanian Aborigines had no knowledge of herbal medicine, except for the use of the 'pigface', a species of Carpobrotus as a purgative is unlikely to be entirely correct and may simply reflect our lack of knowledge of them owing to their early extinction

The book itself will probobly suggest several plant medicines native to Tasmania, however, for any region all we really have now is fragmented and often unreliable sources that we must some how try to reconstruct.

I've just written a paper called 'Tools of the vegetable kingdom' focused mostly on plant materials used in making tools but also covering some aspects of drugs, medicines and poisons as applicable to subsistance as well as some plant processing such as fermentation, leaching and salt leaching as a tool in food production and have suffered from a lack of reliable source material. (it should be in print and available from your state library by Xmas)

You may be able to derive some good info from the following books for your locality:

Bush Medicine - Tim Low
Aboriginal Plant Collectors - Philip A Clarke
Aboriginal People and their Plants - Philip A Clarke

Their are others by Peter Latz which are always high on my resource list, however I havent sighted these in some years and can't recall if they had much southern info in them as he specializes in Arid regions.

sorry to disappoint

[obtuse]

Hi JumpedAngel.

Thanks for the response, and sorry for taking so long to say thanks, i've only just logged on for the first time in about 6 months.

I was given a copy of that book "Australian Medicinal Plants" but still haven't had a chance to get to read it properly yet. but now i must.

Yeah im sure information is very fragmented. which is so unfortunate as im sure there are lots of uses for a lot of tasmanian plants. Do you think there is much room for ongoing research in this area?? I am thinking about going back to uni and this is one area i wouldnt mind spending some time on.

I recently came across "wild food in australia" by A.B. & J.W. Cribb, and it looks like a good read too. Again I havent had an opportunity to have a really good look through it.

Thanks for the list of books. I will see if i can source any copies.

I would be interested in reading your paper. Sounds quite interesting.

Anyway, Thanks for the info.

Cheers, obtuse.

[JumpedAngel]

I guess it must be said that our understanding of Tasmanian Aborigenes is really poor, most of the material that was gathered (prior to their virtual extermination) was gathered by the French of the D'Entreecasteaux expedition who spent an entire five days among them.

The books mentioned so far are all written by white people and although I have a fair bit of respect for some, I view others as purely accademic and at times dangerous through their ignorance of any practical application to the knowledge.

The Tasmanian Museum (and Art Gallery) published a book by Julia Clark in 1983 called The Aboriginal People of Tasmania which lists a sum total of only 14 plants known to have been used as food by Aboriginal people (none appear to be medicinal), in it they admit that although they know that Tasmanian Aboriginal people had fire and used it, they, to this day have not identified the method used for making it.

Aboriginal medicinal concepts in general are hard to understand, I have recently re-read the books that you mentioned as well as others, another book you may wish to track down to try to understand these concepts is published by IAD press in Alice Springs called Arrernte Traditional Healing by Veronica Perrurle Dobson, Its difficult to make sense of some of it but might be worth your while.

[IAN ST GEORGE]

Ive just found a manuscript by RC Gunn on Tasmanian medicinal plants and their properties. Does anyone know anything about it? I can find no reference to it in the litrerature....

[island1]

Was this a published manuscript? It sounds very interesting and like something that needs to be scanned and made available on a broad base, as many people are interested in Tasmanian plants and there isn't a great deal of info out there!

[Justly Dirge]

First post....Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't Tasmanian Aboriginal people have used grass tree spikes as the ones in other areas of Australia did??

Justly

[Justly Dirge]

To make fire that is....

Justly