Pictured above: Janet and Ian McConachie at the book launch late last year in Australia.
While most Australians think macadamias originated in Hawaii, the nut’s most ardent admirer and advocate, Ian McConachie, has authored a detailed and extensive history aimed at setting the record straight.
Australia is a continent of unique biodiversity found nowhere else in the world: from pouched marsupials to the egg-laying platypus, the wombat and some of the most poisonous snakes on the planet, it is also the original home of the macadamia nut.
Fossilised pollen shows that the ancestors of today’s commercially grown macadamia trees were already established 65 million years ago in eastern Australia and New Zealand. And as the plant evolved alongside massive environmental changes such as droughts, fires, storms and floods, scientists believe the nuts were carried on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current after a massive flood before they washed up and took root on the shores of South Africa and South America.
The fascinating story of the development of this unique crop, from the rain forests of northeastern Australia to the commercial orchards of today, is now in print, thanks to Australia’s top macadamia scholar and academic, Ian McConachie.
Australian macadamia expert Ian McConachie’s book The Macadamia: Australia’s gift to the world, is a comprehensive and in-depth account of the growth and development of that country’s macadamia industry.
Australia’s gift to the world, the book is available to order on https://scholarly.info/book/the-macadamia-australias-gift-to-the-world/
An E-book is available on Google books and Amazon.
All of the proceeds from the book will be used to protect the few remaining wild macadamias and their Australian habitat.
As a child in the late 1930s and 1940s, McConachie, who describes himself as scrawny and painfully shy, dreamt of becoming a great scientist. Born in the coastal city of Brisbane, he said macadamias grew in everyone’s backyards and in a small strip of rainforest where he and his friends would play after school. Today, only two of the wild trees remain in that narrow-forested strip.
With little in the way of funding for tertiary education, McConachie landed a job as laboratory assistant at Barnes Milling Ltd – a flour and stockfeed producer – with a plan to become a qualified industrial chemist. He attended night classes at the former Brisbane Technical College, with an interruption caused by military service, before he qualified seven years later. This was followed by a business management course, which he said opened opportunities for him as a food technologist.
With various twists and turns in his professional career, the scientist finally returned to his love of the macadamia tree first instilled by his Aunt Madge. Aunt Madge had four large seedling macadamia trees in her garden in the foothills of Mount Coot-Tha in Brisbane’s western suburbs. “She enthused about each tree’s characteristics, the potential of the macadamia and their importance as a native crop.”
McConachie said a favourite memory from those days was cracking the nuts with a hammer or vice before roasting them in butter. The texture and taste, he said, was unparalleled.
With a growing love for the land, McConachie said it began to dawn on him how European settlement in Australia had decimated the indigenous fauna and flora, and ridden roughshod over the delicate natural balances and historical and spiritual significance of the macadamia nut for the indigenous Aboriginal people.
For thousands of years, he writes, Aboriginal people would have “known, studied, treasured, traded and eaten the macadamia”. But with increased colonisation, these ancient people were dispossessed of their land, their population declined, and their language and culture were diluted and damaged.
As with all colonised countries, the discovery of fauna and flora is usually attributed to an esteemed botanist or scientist, despite the existing indigenous knowledge reaching back millions of years. But a mystery surrounds which European explorer and botanist was the first to name and document Australia’s macadamia nut.
This, McConachie says, is because of the confusion around the naming of the nut. English botanist Allan Cunningham, who is believed to have been the first to document the nut in 1828, described it as tasting similar to a Spanish chestnut. In those early days it was mistakenly called the Moreton Bay Chestnut or Black Bean.
German-born botanist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt is believed to have collected a specimen of the true Macadamia ternifolia in 1843. The tree was allegedly officially named in 1857, and in 1867, the first official report came out stating that the nuts from the tree were edible.
Walter Hill, however, is deemed the father of Australia’s commercial macadamia industry after he planted the first domesticated tree in 1858. The tree still stands in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. What seems almost unbelievable is that Hill only discovered nine years later that the nuts were edible!
The development and growth of Australia’s commercial macadamia industry has as many twists and turns as the macadamia’s early discovery by European colonisers. Before its potential was fully realised, the trees were cut down in numbers to make way for timber and sugarcane plantations.
What was the world’s first commercial orchard of 213 seedlings was planted in the 1880s near Lismore in New South Wales.
In fact it was the Hawaiians who were the first to truly commercialise and develop the crop and they remained the leading producers until well into the 1990s. “Australians may have enthused about ‘our nut’ and accused the Hawaiians of ‘stealing’ it but neither local farmers and businessmen nor state governments were prepared to lead a commercial industry,” McConachie writes.
But now, under the auspices of the 50-year-old Australian Macadamia Association, the industry has set out a global vision for growth and development, even though South Africa remains the biggest exporter of the crop, followed by China.
According to McConachie, only time will tell whether projections of global production for 700 000 tons nut-in-shell in 2030 is achievable, but he is certain production will increase. “Macadamias are endemic to Australia and thus the responsibility for maintaining genetic diversity of the crop’s wild relatives falls to Australia,” McConachie says.
The Macadamia Conservation Trust was formed in 2024 with the full support of the Australian Macadamia Association, the aim being to promote research and development and habitat restoration in a bid to protect the wild macadamias and the habitats that sustain them, the book says.
Executive Officer of the Macadamia Conservation Trust Denise Bond said McConachie’s book was not only an important record but would hopefully set the record straight among Australians, of whom nine out of 10 think the nut comes from Hawaii.
“This book is Ian’s gift to all of those who love macadamias as much as he does, and he has ensured that all proceeds from the book will go to protecting this unique and wonderful species through our work at the Trust.”
From a measly 40 tons’ production
50 years ago to 60 000 tons today, the industry has come a long way, and McConachie’s book calls for pioneers and visionaries to take it to its full potential – which he describes as a destiny “still in the future”.
