Kwongan

Kwongan is an ecoregion found in south-western Western Australia. The name is a Bibbelmun (Noongar) Aboriginal term of wide geographical use defined by Beard (1976) as a ‘type of country ...[that is] sandy and is open without timber-sized trees but with a scrubby vegetation. It consists of plains in an Australian sense of open country rather than in a strict sense of flat country. ... there are two principal plant formations in the kwongan, scrub heath and broombush thicket ... both ... are sclerophyll shrublands and possess a certain unity when contrasted with woodland and forest or steppe and succulent steppe communities.’ Kwongan has replaced other terms applied by European botanists such as sand-heide (Diels 1906) or sand heath (Gardner 1942), giving priority to the language of people who have lived continuously in the southwest for more than 50,000 years.

Thus, kwongan has come again into common usage for the Southwest Australian Floristic Region’s shrubland vegetation and associated countryside, equivalent to South Africa’s fynbos, California’s chaparral, France's maquis and Chile’s matorral as seen in these other regions of the world experiencing a Mediterranean climate.

To reflect contemporary orthographies, linguists strictly spell kwongan as ‘kwongkan’ (Douglas 1976, Dench 1994), or ‘quarngqqaan’ (von Brandenstein 1988). 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. of Fremantle and is known to continue in the same direction for 200 miles ... Fresh water is scarce ...even in our rainy season. It is undulating country, the hills generally small and low, the soil on them is strong clay ... the valleys between these hills are generally extensive and sandy, covered thinly with small shrubs.’ (Drummond 1839). An 1839 map of Toodyay Valley Land Grants and Locations has on it the term ‘Guangan’ two miles east of Bejoording townsite, south of Bolgart (reprinted in Erickson 1969: 32). Another collector Ludwig Preiss spelt the term as ‘quangen’ (Beard 1976). Moore (1842) gave the spelling ‘gongan’ for ‘a sandy district. The easiest road, or usual path, or mountain pass to a place’.

The town of Wongan Hills derives its name from kwongan. Drummond (3 October 1842, republished in Erickson (1969: 165) and in Hercock et al. 2011:313) reported the native name of Guangan Catta, which means hills above the kwongan, when he first saw the hills in the distance accompanied by Cabbinger and an unnamed Bibbelmun guide. 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.’ (reprinted in Hercock et al. 2011: 337).

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