Combretaceae
Terminalia ferdinandiana
Kakadu plum · Gubinge · Billygoat plum
- Part used
- fruit
- Native range
- Tropical woodland of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland
- Morphology
- A slender deciduous tree to fourteen metres with pale peeling bark and large leaves, bearing small pale yellow-green fruit about two centimetres long with a single stone.
What is in it
Evidence
No controlled clinical trials. Its very high ascorbic acid content is well established analytically, and it is used commercially as a natural preservative and antioxidant.
Safety
A food, eaten as one for a very long time. High oxalate content is relevant to kidney stone formers.
Regulatory: Permitted as a food. Wild harvest on Aboriginal land is governed by land council and community arrangements.
Historical use
A food and medicine of Aboriginal peoples across northern Australia, with the fruit eaten and the bark and sap used for a range of purposes. Names and uses vary between language groups; gubinge is the Bardi name and is used commercially in the Kimberley.
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
Kakadu plum has the highest recorded vitamin C content of any fruit measured — on the order of a hundred times an orange by weight, and that figure, unusually, holds up analytically rather than being an artefact of the assay.
It is also the Australian test case for whether benefit-sharing can be made to work. Harvest is substantially by Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley, and Aboriginal-owned enterprises supply a cosmetics and food industry that has grown quickly. There have been patent disputes over extracts, and the Nagoya Protocol and Northern Territory biodiscovery arrangements now govern access.
Whether that adds up to genuine benefit-sharing or to a better-documented version of the same extraction is argued about by the people involved, which is where this site leaves it.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.