Fungi Down Under

You see, it's winter in Australia right now, and they're picking mushrooms like crazy down under. I'm not sure exactly how this happened, but somehow I got on the SFSGI (SFSG Incorporated) mailing list, and I've been getting both emails and newsletters from them for the last several months. Last month I contacted Bill Allaway, newsletter editor and Chairperson for the SFSGI, to find out what mushroom hunting is like in Australia. His kind reply follows.

The Sydney Fungal Studies Group has been going since 1987, but as you will have seen, it just got itself incorporated this year. The fungus fructifying season here can start in January, with boletes and other such early species. We don't have forays in January or February because it's often too hot and dry and then we all go out and get sunburnt to no avail! The season continues till June although as you can imagine the crop is unreliable since we are on the driest continent on earth. However, this is a year of La Niña, so here it's cool and wet and we are hoping to find fungi for a long time.

Sydney Basin is almost entirely filled by greater Sydney, but there remain in it many areas of bush - e.g. the Lane Cove area, often referred to in our newsletters, and some of the other places we go for forays. The surrounding country is rugged sandstone-based hills with very poor soils, and as a result it was not usable by the early settlers for agriculture. It was therefore available to be made into national parks when that came into vogue, and Sydney is now very lucky to be ringed by extensive areas of national park within 1 to 2 hours drive of the city centre.

The rainfall in Sydney averages around 40 inches per year evenly spread throughout the year. However there are great fluctuations and some years have huge droughts and others are quite wet - much of this, we are now coming dimly to understand, is regulated by the El Niño - Southern Oscillation phenomenon.

Our group has around 50 members. It is an amateur group, with members ranging from mycophagists through photographers to a sprinkling of professional mycologists, medical and academic.

We had a glitch in our publication of species listings for our forays of last year, and as you can see these are trickling out in this year's newsletters as they appear. The first of this year's lists is under construction too - we hope to catch up soon.

We are revising our website. sorry about that, because we expect a blaze of publicity real soon over our group's involvement in the listing of the Lane Cove Bushland Hygrocybeae Community as an endangered one - the first instance in our State of a fungal community being so recognized! We hope to have the website polished up pretty quickly. I'm working on it....

I enjoyed your blessing "May your rains linger, and may your basket always be full". It's actually rather cold just now, with a snowy weekend just past in the Blue Mountains (the National Park area 80 miles to the west of Sydney). And it's not raining here unfortunately, still there's always hope!

Nice to hear from you,

Bill

W. G. Allaway MA, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences A12

The University of Sydney

NSW 2006, Australia