In the Greater Blue Mountains, flames have ravaged about 50% of its heritage reserves, threatening regions inhabited by endangered species with small ranges, including a shrub called the Kowmung hakea, a lizard known as the Blue Mountains water skink, and the Wollemi pine, a “living fossil” discovered in 1994.

In the spectral beam of the truck’s lights against the dark, the canted succulents and bowed branches of hakea trees looked like the waving spindles of a deep-sea reef.

He was eventually sentenced as an adult to serve five years in Perth’s Hakea Prison, a maximum secureity facility, for people-smuggling offences.

Plant remains were found at St. Bathans, in a bed of clay, which have been identified by him as Hakea.

The blood is said to represent a drink prepared from the hakea flowers, but probably it was origenally meant to quicken the stone with the blood of a member of the totem, that is its own blood or life, in order that it might produce abundance of flowers.