Facinating Pitjuri

There's some more recent history for this fascinating plant  that I'll research and do a follow up post on.

Duboisia hopwoodii - Solanaceae

Pituri, Pitchiri, Bedgery, pedgery, Emu plant, camel poison, poison bush

A plant with a history

The pituri plant had enormous economic value to the Aborigines. Pituri roads existed with extensive trade networks that extended from northern to southern desert areas, which permitted Aborigines to trade the plant. Most of the Aboriginal weaving and written communications systems including nets, dilly bags and marker sticks, were used to carry the pituri plant or identify the trader in hostile territory. The pituri roads crossed rivers and high mountain ranges where natives would trade the plant over hundreds of miles. They were used as a token of friendship toward strangers, as a stimulant and social comforter to foster feelings of amity. The plant was used to trap emus, parrots and kangaroos in water holes. Elders who acted as seers to obtain power and riches would ingest the plant. Interestingly, it was used not only as payment to elders who circumcised and subincised1 youth, but Johnston and McClelland (1933) document that the plant was taken by youths in native operations (such as circumcision and subincision.) By the 1950s, pituri use had disappeared, pushed out by Lutheran usurpation of the plant harvest (Hart, interview, November, 1983). This had the effect of bringing tribal members to mission settlements. Commercial tobacco was also introduced into Australia at the time of European contact and became popular among Aborigines, despite the availability of different species of native tobacco that grew wild and was chewed as a wad.
Eliade (1958) described Bora rites in eastern Aboriginal society where young men were removed from the women's area, isolated in the bush, given religious teaching and floggings, and were circumcised and subincised. The boys remained in the bush for one year and were subjected to hypervigilant austerities - including sleep deprivation and fasting. They were kept in silence and darkness. The symbology of death and rebirth - the death of childhood and the rebirth of the individual into a new adult status - was prominently figured here. The initiates did not report negative experiences such as fear and anxiety, but rather revelations which allowed them to view the world and themselves as sacred. No doubt, the use of pituri in these genital operations in highly septic environments provided an amnesic experience, much as the alkaloid, scopolamine, played a popular role in obstetrics in the 1940s and 1950s, when "twilight sleep" was the predominant childbirth anaesthesia.