Deakin University
Browse

Duboisia Pituri: A Natural History

journal contribution
posted on 2011-12-01, 00:00 authored by Luke KeoghLuke Keogh
In the 1870s, an intense quest revealed to scientists that pituri, an important Aboriginal commodity, was sourced from the plant Duboisia hopwoodii?a shrub named after a well-known colonist. But it was Aboriginal people and white explorer-pastoralists from the Mulligan River region in far western Queensland who provided the samples and alerted scientists to the important chemical properties of pituri. Subsequently, there was a proposal to change the name of the plant to Duboisia pituri. Whom should the plant have been named after, the colonist or the Aborigine?

History

Journal

HISTORICAL RECORDS OF AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE

Volume

22

Pagination

199-214

ISSN

0727-3061

eISSN

1448-5508

Language

English

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

2

Publisher

CSIRO PUBLISHING