common names: pituri, pitchiri, pitcheri and many variants, emu plant, poison bush
habit: Perrennial shrub to 3m, sometimes as small tree with brown to purplish bark on the young stems and corky older bark.
foliage: Leaves narrow long alternate to 15cm, with recurved point and straight margins.
flowers: Open clusters of white (with purple striped tube) flowers at the end of the branches.
fruit: Black berry to 6mm, containing 1 to 2 seeds in a dark pulp.
seeds:
distribution: Found in the more arid areas of the Nth half of Australia, W NSW, Qld, central Australia to the Kimberly area of WA.
notes: Pituri, mostly prepared from this species and some Nicotiana species, was the mostly widely known and reportedly used 'narcotic' amongst Australian Aborigenes when Europeans first arrived. Pituri was considered above all other power plants the most important in traditional Aboriginal society and culture.
The drug is used in the form of the leaves, whch are generally dried, powdered and then mixed with ash made from species such as Acacia, Cassia or Eucalyptus. Rolled up into balls or quids and then chewed. The mixing of the alkaline ash with the plant material would have rendered the alkaloids more available when chewed or ingested. When not being chewed it was quite commonly kept behind the ear much as people did with chewing gum for later chewing, it may also have been shared, given to others to chew similar to sharing a pipe.
The cheif constituent of Duboisia hopwoodii was found to be nicotine and nor-nicotine, with a content reportedly up to 25% of the dried weight of the plant material.
Pituri is still used by some people of the central Australia area, though was formerly esteemed and widely used.
It appears that there may be variation not only in the content, but the type of alkaloids present in this species, other species of Duboisia exhibit huge variations in their alkaloid content qualitatively and quantitatively, and Aborigenes chose Nicotiana and other nicotine containing species for the preparation of 'pituri' in some areas where D. hopwoodii also grew. This suggests that they were aware that the particular local species were devoid of useful amounts of alkaloids or contained different and possibly more toxic alkaloids. Study of traditional Aboriginal plant knowledge would suggest that they were aware of these sorts of environmental, genetic or geographic variations within the Australian flora.