28 May 2025
She and her field assistant were documenting the location and ages of minnarityi trees (Acacia cyperophylla) in the ‘Corner Country’ where the borders of Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales meet. For the past two weeks, temperatures had been over 40 degrees and the skies clear. With their work finished for the day, Mirritya and her assistant headed back to their base at Innamincka.
Mobile coverage was limited and Mirritya was busy. She did not know that the northern reaches of the Thompson–Barcoo–Cooper catchment – the largest river basin in Queensland – had received more rainfall in those past two weeks than the area receives in most years. An abundance of water was now making its way along Cooper Creek to the floodplains around Innamincka.
Floodwaters make their way down the Cooper Creek floodplains. Photo: Adobe Stock.
On Tuesday morning Mirritya took a call from the Innamincka Trading Post: if she wanted to get out, she had to get out now. They drove 90 kilometres out of town before having to turn back.
‘It was quite a significant shock to me how quickly it happened,’ Mirritya says. ‘Overnight it literally went from bone dry to being impassable.
The roads around town were likely to be closed for months. Her field season came to an abrupt end. But a chance conversation at the Innamincka pub led to new possibilities for understanding the little-studied minnarityi.
Mirritya is a proud Paakantyi/Wangkumarra woman. After completing a Masters in Aboriginal Language Education focussed on Paakantyi revitalisation – her grandmother’s language – she wanted to honour her Wangkumarra heritage through her grandfather.
Mirritya Ebsworth stands next to a minnarityi tree (Acacia cyperophylla) at one of her field sites. Photo: Jessica Douglass.
Minnarityi (also called red mulga) is widespread in Wangkumarra Country in the Cooper Creek Basin in the far south-west of Queensland. Wangkumarra traditionally use minnarityi for tools, weapons and ceremony. The seeds are eaten and the timber used for spears. It is a distinctive and attractive tree, with bronze-coloured bark that flakes away from the trunk and branches in curling strips that look like wood shavings.
Ecologically, minnarityi is a somewhat of a goldilocks species, growing along dry creeklines but not along permanent waterholes.
‘It’s very finicky. It doesn’t like wet feet, and grows to only about 30 metres from the centre of a creekline,’ Mirritya says.
Her PhD research, undertaken at Western Sydney University and supported by the NESP Resilient Landscapes Hub, aims to understand the cultural and environmental importance of minnarityi, using both contemporary ecological methods and the knowledge held in Wangkumurra language and culture.
She will document where the tree grows, the ages of individual trees, the types of soils it grows in and how it is affected by pastoral and mining activities.
Despite the remoteness of the Cooper Creek Basin, the landscape is not pristine: pastoralism began in the 1870s and recent decades have seen the rapid industrialisation of the basin for oil and gas exploration and production. More than 800 oil wells are located on the Cooper Creek floodplains.
The distinctive bark of minnarityi. Photo: Jessica Douglass.
Many of the out-of-towners trapped by the rising floodwaters congregated each night at Innamincka’s only pub.
Mirritya met several workers who had been commissioned to either protect or salvage mining wells and surrounding infrastructure, and she discovered they had access to big equipment that could handle the flooded plains.
‘I got them all really excited about minnarityi,’ she says.
Mirritya asked them to take photos and GPS locations of any minnarityi they saw, so that she could continue to map where the tree occurred.
As the text messages started to come in, one of her newly recruited citizen scientists told her that minnarityi had started to flower.
‘I know this tree only flowers after rain – or in this case flood – but I know now the time when it does flower after rain is about five days. It’s really fast,’ she says.
With the roads out of Innamincka closed indefinitely, Western Sydney University arranged for the Royal Flying Doctor Service to airlift Mirritya and her field assistant to safety.
‘I’m disappointed that I’m not out there just running around chasing trees,’ Mirritya says, but she is buoyed by the interest in her research and the new opportunities the flooding has brought.
‘It might become a project more around pre- and post-flood impact, because this flood is so extreme.’
Meanwhile, Mirritya will turn to the knowledge of her Elders, and ask what they know of extreme events and what questions they want to see answered by her research.
‘What’s important to the old people for the new people?’
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