More about poison in Western Australia

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My father’s diary from 1937 mentions that the farm he’d just bought, and I quote, “Farm contains 807 acres of which 140 is not cleared. This has also got poison in it.” Some readers were confused by the reference to ‘poison’. Our Australian bush has a great variety of vegetation species and some of these are poisonous to livestock. The two most common in my father’s region were known as York Road poison and box poison. York Road poison ((Gastrolobium calycinum) gets its name because, in the early days of settlement, farmers would drive their stock along the road from Perth to York, and losses from poison were common. Many of the Gastrolobium species accumulate monofluoroacetate. This is the key ingredient in what is commonly known here as 1080 (also called sodum fluoroacetate). 1080 causes deaths in introduced and non-native animals and is used in baits to control feral dogs, cats and rabbits. Our native wildlife has a natural resistance to the toxin. Box poison (Oxylobium parviflorum) is widely distributed throughout the agricultural areas of Western Australia and in one of the most toxic of the poison species. When we rode our horses through the bush, we knew not to let them eat any of the vegetation on the verges. One of these plants we also knew as ‘eggs-and-bacon’ but at the moment I can’t remember which one. It was named this as the flower looked somewhat like eggs and bacon. There are a number of flowering plants called this. Before a farmer could let stock loose in an area, he had to ensure all the poison plants had been removed. It was common for someone to say a paddock had a 'lot of poison' or whatever but they would be referring to vegetation. The photo shows the flower that I know as ‘eggs-and-bacon’.