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Kingia is a genus consisting of a single species, Kingia australis, and belongs to the plant family Dasypogonaceae. The Aboriginal name bullanock is used as a common name for the plant. It has a thick pseudo-trunk consisting of accumulated leaf-bases, with a cluster of long, slender leaves on top. The trunk is usually unbranched, but can branch if the growing tip is damaged. Flowers occur in egg-shaped clusters on the ends of up to 100 long curved stems. Kingia grows extremely slowly, the trunk increasing in height by about 1½ centimetres per year. It can live for centuries, however, so can attain a substantial height; 400-year-old plants with a height of six metres are not unusual.
Kingia australis is confined to the southern half of Western Australia.
The tree was identified by the state's conservator of forests, Charles Lane Poole, as being high in cellulose and exploited for a fibre industry. These fibres were used to make brooms and brushes, either coarse and long wearing street brooms or for more delicate purposes; Poole notes that these fibres were preferred by those employed as streetsweepers in Perth and Melbourne. The fibres were crudely processed from a layer of the material found throughout the trunk of the plant. This was separated from the soft core, dried to loosen the adhesion between them, and mechanically split and guillotined to lengths that were baled up for export.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Kingia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
