The Curious Ethnobotany of Alice Duncan-Kemp

Abstract

Where rapid and violent colonization disrupted ancient lifeways, ethnographic sources can be used to reconstruct aspects of traditional life including ethnobotany. Such reconstructions can help connect people with their ancestral homelands and cultures and inform emerging native food and medicine ventures. Alice Duncan-Kemp sits within a small canon of white women writers who lived among Aboriginal people on the Australian pastoral frontier. Young Alice was cared for and taught by Mithaka and Karuwali people and recorded detailed ethnographic information. Her record is singular and intriguing but unscientific, difficult to verify and in some parts plagued by unacknowledged borrowing from other sources. Here I collate Alice Duncan-Kemp’s ethnobotanical writings from published and unpublished sources and attempt to identify taxa referenced through comparison with ethnobotanical sources from neighbouring areas and extensive field work. Alice Duncan-Kemp’s 885 ethnobotanical observations can be matched to 218 taxa or groups of taxa. They contain novel ethnobotanical information for over half of these plants and previously unrecorded names for around 150. Plants used for food and materials are broadly similar to other areas of the Australian arid zone; however, Alice Duncan-Kemp’s writings contain extensive novel and place-specific information on medicinal, indicator and ceremonial or mythological aspects of ethnobotany. A small portion of her writings, particularly in her later books, appears to have been borrowed from other sources and a couple of plants described do not occur in south-west Queensland. However, most of her ethnobotanical record appears to be a unique, detailed, and accurate account of human-plant relations in the Channel Country and contributes greatly to Mithaka ethnobotanical reconstructions and Australian ethnobotany more broadly.