Page:Australia, from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.djvu/253

 alluvial land, often flooded, is also eaten. The leaves and stalk of the conjeboi are full of a burning acrid juice, which blisters the lips if applied to the mouth. The root also contains this sap, but by pounding it between flat stones, and thereby expressing all the juice by continued beatings, (much in the same way in which the poisonous Manioc root is rendered fit for food in the West Indies,) it at last becomes an insipid farinaceous mass, which is then cooked and eaten. The swamps also furnish another edible root, resembling a parsnip in taste. The Coryphæ of New South Wales, such as the Cabbage palm and the Bangolo palm, yield an edible substance in the heart of the unexpanded leaves of their tufted heads.

The Cabbage palm is very similar in appearance to the Talipot palm of the island of Ceylon, (Corypha umbraculifera,) from the heart of which sago is made. The solid substance in the heart of the Cabbage palm, is of a white and rather spongy texture, which possesses the sweet taste of the Spanish chesnut, and is often eaten by the whites as well as by the Aborigines. The Bangolo palm contains a similar substance, whilst to the northward of Moreton Bay, the Bunya-bunya produces a fruit, sufficiently nourishing to suffice in itself to form the main food of the blacks in that region. The fruit of the tree popularly called the Australian Indian-rubber tree, and a great variety of other fruits and berries are also occasionally eaten by the blacks whilst in season.