Kathy Stewart

I have the "Prepper" fantasy that some day I'm going to have to survive in the wild as the last human survivor and knowing what plants I can eat and what will poison me might be a big help. In actual fact, of course, If I ever had to survive in the wild, I'd be like the Australian army guys that I met in the jungle in Penang who were on a survival course. "We just stave for three days unless we can steal a water melon or something.......Oh! you can eat ants". But they didn't seem to be lining up any ants for themselves at that time. Anyway, this book tells me that there are 15 species of Dianella found across Australia. My understanding was that you could eat the fruit but then I red somewhere that it was poisonous. But pretty sure that i ate some when on a bush tucker foods excursion at a nature reserve. This books tells me that it's ok to eat the purple fruit and the black seeds ....so that's encouraging. I've also been wondering about the fruits of the Lilly Pilly ....and apparently they, too, are ok to eat. (Even the one that's planted on the streets that has blue fruit). Actually, this is a pretty good book. It's a bit deceptive because it's so short and doesn't try to cover all the plants of NSW but just covers off a few;.....I counted 30 and that's a reasonable collection. And the drawings are good enough to use for identification purposes.
I noticed my old University friend....Surrey Jacobs was acknowledged and a couple of his photographs were included. Alas....Surry was one of the first of my Uni friends to die. He always wanted to be a botanist. And he was the one who was able to identify Araucaria cunninghamii in the Botany 1 exam, as the wood being used in match sticks. (I think it probably helped that his dad was something like the Manager of the match stick factory!!). Basically, this is a pretty good book and I'm happy to give it 4.5 stars.… (meer)