Kwongan

As with so many other aspects of the southwest flora, colonial botanist James Drummond was the first to record Bibbelmun usage of the term in an 1839 letter to Kew's Director Sir William Hooker, where guangan was described as the Noongar name for sand, but I mean by it the open sandy desert which commences 80 miles E.N.E.

An article in the Perth Gazette (1 June 1847) by "Ketoun" reported on "A trip to the Wongan Hills", where on 27 April 1844 his party "...crossed an immense 'gwongan', these gwongans are open undulating patches of scrubby country, ... of a quartz formation."

Beard and Pate (1984) preferred to apply kwongan strictly to vegetation, defining it technically as: ... any community of sclerophyll shrubland in south-western Australia which has a stratum + 1 m tall or less of leptophyllous and nanophyllous shrubs.

However, a focus on both vegetation and on sandy soils and sand plain will undoubtedly remain important components of kwongan studies, whichever nuance of definition and meaning is favoured.

Kwongan is extensive, occupying about a quarter of the Southwest Australian Floristic Region, and contains 70% of the 8000+ native plant species known from this global biodiversity hotspot (Beard and Pate 1984; Hopper and Gioia 2004).

This makes kwongan vegetation one of the most significant natural heritage assets in a temperate climatic region, deserving the increasing national and international attention it so richly merits.

Kwongan contains an array of plants, animals, micro-organisms and life histories that are both poorly studied and exceptionally diverse, affording opportunities for novel biological discovery (Pate and Beard 1984).

Bibbelmun people developed and have profound understanding of aspects of kwongan useful to human lifeways (e.g. von Brandenstein 1988) that will become increasingly important in a rapidly changing world.