GRASSTREES ON THE ADELAIDE 
PLAINS 
By H. A. LINDSAY 
Early paintings of scenes on the Adelaide 
Plains show that the grasstree (Xanthorr- 
hoea ) once grew along the foothills from 
Magill to Mitcham. As no living specimens 
of the grasstree can now be found in those 
areas, nor any signs of their existence in the 
shape of decayed trunks and roots, it has 
been thought that the artists merely included 
them in the background in order to give a 
touch of typically Australian local colour, 
without the existence of actual plants to serve 
as models, thus ignoring the fact that these 
plants grew only on the crests of the hills 
at a much higher altitude. 
Evidence has now been gathered to prove 
that the artists portrayed what they actually 
saw, and that the grasstree did grow in 
several places on these plains. The writer’s 
first evidence is a childhood memory. One 
Sunday afternoon my father, the late George 
Lindsay, took me for a walk and we called 
to see the late John Godden, of Hawthorn, 
who worked a sand and gravel pit on the 
banks of Brownhill Creek. A discussion be- 
gan concerning what that portion of the 
Adelaide Plains had looked like in the early 
days, and I have a clear memory of Godden 
saying. “All those old blackboy trees have 
gone now — there used to be a big clump of 
them up at Mitcham.” 
On its own, that could be regarded as very 
indirect and untrustworthy evidence, but in 
1920 the writer saw several stumps of grass- 
trees uncovered when a sandhill at Findon 
was being levelled for the building of a 
house. Even this is open to doubt; the 
stumps could have been carted there with a 
load of firewood, but the thing which settles 
all arguments is the fact that grasstrees are 
still growing on the plains and can be seen 
by anyone who visits the locality where they 
are found. 
Lying to the north-west of Gawler, midway 
between Rose worthy and Two Wells, is an 
area of sand dunes which appears to be a 
scientifically interesting survival area. Mem- 
bers of my club, Adelaide Bush Walkers, 
visited these sandhills on several occasions 
three years ago; we were searching for 
aboriginal campsites at the time and we 
found many of them where erosion had laid 
bare the limestone bedrock. Several hundred- 
weights of artifacts, including over sixty 
Pirri points, were gathered and taken to the 
South Australian Museum. A goanna nearly 
three feet in length — it could not be secured 
for identification as it escaped down a rabbit 
burrow — was seen, together with the tracks 
of some small marsupial of the rat kangaroo 
type. 
Where erosion and rabbits have not de- 
nuded the dunes of vegetation, many species 
of plants not seen elsewhere on the plains, 
as far as the writer’s knowledge goes, are 
found in this area, including at least one 
clump of Xanthorrhoea. No other grass- 
trees can now be found nearer than the 
summits of the hills to the southward of 
Sandy Creek. 
Speaking from an admittedly scanty know- 
ledge of botany, but with the assurance of a 
bushman who does his best to be an accurate 
observer, the writer states that this area of 
sand dunes, apparently unknown to our 
botanists, offers a promising field for study 
and perhaps a chance to secure one portion 
of them, which would merely drift away if 
cleared, for a flora reserve. No good land 
would be kept out of production if this was 
done; if surrounded by a rabbit-proof fence 
and, the most important point of all, if that 
fence was kept in order, we could preserve 
there a collection of the original flora of the 
sandhill country of the Adelaide Plains. 
Page Twenty -three 
