Take a look at an insightful blog by the State Library of Queensland’s – John Oxley blog on our namesake and endemic stinging plant! Scroll below for some more insights about our namesake tree.

Queensland’s Gympie-Gympie: the world’s most painful plant

The Gympie Times, 8 April 1890, page 3

Bob McFadden (local poet and artist in the 1920’s), experienced the Gimpi Gimpi tree and wrote the following verse:

Oh, Gympie Gympie, charming tree
Your shapely leaves appeal to me
Filling my artistic eye
With beauty as I pass you by
Touch me not, I felt you say
In time, Yes! I’ll keep away
You have the power to make me dance
Like bees and wasps and jumper ants
The joy! The pain, this truth I tell
A glimpse of Heaven, a touch of Hell

–Bob McFadden