Santalaceae
Santalum spicatum
Australian sandalwood · Uilarac
- Part used
- woodoilseed
- Native range
- Semi-arid Western Australia and South Australia
- Morphology
- A small hemiparasitic tree to six metres with drooping grey-green leaves. It taps the roots of host plants for water and nutrients and cannot be grown without them.
What is in it
Evidence
Little controlled evidence. Some laboratory work on alpha-santalol. Used commercially in fragrance rather than medicine.
Safety
Contact dermatitis from the oil is reported. Not established for internal use.
Regulatory: Harvest is licensed and regulated in Western Australia, with quotas on wild-cut wood.
Historical use
Nuts eaten and wood used by Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia. Commercial cutting for export to Asia began in the 1840s and was for a period Western Australia’s largest export after wool.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Sandalwood is the clearest illustration in this collection of why a hemiparasitic tree cannot be farmed like a crop. Santalum species cannot obtain water and nutrients alone; they attach to the roots of host plants, and a plantation therefore has to be a designed community of species rather than rows of one.
Indian sandalwood, Santalum album, was cut so heavily that it is now classed as vulnerable and its harvest is state-controlled. Australian sandalwood was the West Australian colony's great export after wool, cut from wild stands for a century and a half, and is now under quota with plantation supply slowly replacing wild-cut wood.
The pattern is identical to cinchona, to Pacific yew and to goldenseal: a slow-growing plant, a part that cannot be taken without killing it, and a market that arrived long before anyone counted what was left.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.