Pituri

Pituri, also known as mingkulpa,[1] is a mixture of leaves and wood ash traditionally chewed as a stimulant (or, after extended use, a depressant) by Aboriginal Australians widely across the continent.

What sort of plant it was, we had not an opportunity of learning, as we never saw anything but the chaws which they took from their mouths to show us..."Edmund Kennedy, in his 1847 record of a journey beyond the Barcoo River, described a leaf, tasting strong and hot with the aroma and flavour of tobacco, being chewed by the Aboriginal people.

The doctor reported that extract of pituri is toxic to frogs, rats, cats and dogs, with a very small dose diluted in water and injected under the skin causing death after respiratory arrest in some cases.

Bancroft received more specimens in 1877, collected on an expedition to north-west Queensland by the explorer William Hodgkinson and identified by Ferdinand von Mueller as the broken leaves and twigs of the shrub Duboisia hopwoodii.

Bancroft took Hodgkinson's samples to Britain and France where English researchers concluded the plant "is more closely allied to tobacco" and a Parisian chemist identified the active constituent as nicotine.

This surprised Bancroft who had compared his extract from the first batch of pituri to nicotine and found the pituri extract to be much more toxic than nicotine, a finding confirmed in 1880 in experiments performed by Liversidge in Sydney on some new Duboisia hopwoodii specimens, and supported by an 1882 report that described Aboriginal hunters in central Australia steeping the leaves of Duboisia hopwoodii in waterholes to stupefy prey that drink the water, and other reports describing cattle, sheep and camels which ate it dying.

"[2][13] Then, in 1933 Johnston and Cleland reported that the plant Europeans usually associate with pituri, Duboisia hopwoodii, is not chewed across most of central Australia – native tobacco is; and two years later Hicks and Le Messurier found in a 300-mile radius around the south-west, north-west and north of Alice Springs people "chewed, under the name of 'pituri' the leaves of at least two varieties of Nicotiana ... they wished to indicate that [Duboisia hopwoodii] was 'pituri', but only used when real pituri, i.e. Nicotiana, was unobtainable.

[2] In a small area west of the Mulligan River in south-western Queensland, a distinct population of Duboisia hopwoodii, low in nornicotine, has been traditionally used and traded widely.

After sustained use, though, the body's ability to maintain heightened levels of these chemicals is temporarily exhausted and nicotine begins to act as a depressant and in high doses may induce stupor or trance.

For trade, they mixed the dried and ground leaves and twigs with ash and packed the mixture into unique D-shaped woven bags made from vegetable fibre and human hair twine.