In the first decade or two of a balga’s life, its grass like head is attached to the ground while the plant establishes its root system in a codependent underground relationship with mycorrhizal fungi to help it draw water and nutrients. Then, at the rate of a couple of centimeters a year, it begins to grow what appears to be a tree-like trunk, lifting its head higher and higher above the ground. The trunk is the caudex – the axis of the plant – encasing a core, which contains a fragile vascular system that connects roots to leaves. Each leaf, diamond-shaped in cross-section, is attached to the core by an individual blade-shaped stem. These stems are packed tightly together, radiating horizontally outward, glued together by a sweet-smelling red resin, or “gum,” which creates the protective caudex around the core.

Over time, each lower leaf dies, adding to the skirt that hangs below the head. When the skirt is burned, the fire resistant stems of the leaves remain as a solid protective case around the core. New leaves grow in a spiral from the crown, and every two or three years a dramatic flower spike emerges, rising two or more meters above the crown.

A balga can live more than 300 years and may exceed six meters in height, and some of Western Australia’s living balgas long predate the arrival of European settlers. Balga survive, indeed prosper, in landscapes and in bioregions that for millennia have been susceptible to periodic wildfires. The caudex confers on balga a high level of fire-resilience. The trunk is actually the fire-blackened remnant leaf stalks that have accumulated year after year, and which insulate the core.

This caudex, faintly reptilian in its crusty, patterned texture, seems to help assert balga as the denizen of a lost world.

When fire strikes, the skirt burns intensely in a matter of mere seconds, ensuring the caudex is not subjected to prolonged flames. After a fire, the plant grows a new head of leaves and is likely to sprout a new flower spike to attract pollinators and reproduce. Damage to the core can cause the plant to develop multiple heads over time, each of which can form its own flower spike – some balga carry more than twenty heads.

Balga speciated over 24–35 million years, in biological isolation throughout the greater austral continent (Sahul) after it was separated from India and Antarctica. Balga was around at a time when Sahul was home to immense rain forests, long before the continent became dry and fire prone. This longevity has given rise to scientific speculation that balga adapted to quickly resprout not because of the ravages of fires – which came later – but because of vulnerability as a mouth-size meal for the giant marsupial herbivores that long ago died out.

For 60,000 years, Wadandi people have lived alongside the grass tree in coastal southwestern Australia. It’s they who conferred on it the name balga. The endemic range of Xanthorrhea preissii maps cross Wadandi Boodja. In Noongar, the term Boodja refers to traditional land, or “country.” But “Boodja” translates poorly into English because there’s no equivalent concept in English tradition. Boodja is a complex, cohesive, interconnected whole. All of Boodja is alive – not just its animals and plants, but every stone and river, the ocean, the soil, the sky.

Boodja is populated by the spirits of dead ancestors who return to inhabit and move within the timeless, living, rhythmic cycles of Boodja. These spirits help enforce accountabilities to protect and safeguard this precious place. Capable of revealing themselves and causing mayhem or worse, the spirits need to be reassured, satisfied – an integral part of vast Boodja, whose forms and rules are explained within the origin stories of Muditch Boongurang, the “Great Trembling,” and the creation of every part of Boodja.

Deep spiritual significance is imbued in Boodja – a totemic, intergenerational identity with every aspect of the natural world.

Wadandi people recognize balga as the most important of all plants. It features in nearly every aspect of their lore and life.

It plays a promintent role through every step in the traditional food-making process, for example: A sharp flint is fastened to the end of a spear with kangaroo sinew and an adhesive made from the tempered gum of balga. The resin is heated and mixed with charcoal and kangaroo faeces to form a powerful adhesive (“byrign” or “bigo”). When a roast is removed from the fire, it is carved with a ‘kodge,” a cutting device made from a stone fastened with balga gum to a wooden haft. A sweet drink is made by steeping the flowers of balga in water from a container that is waterproofed with balga gum. The sweet, white inner ends of balga leaves are chewed for sugar. The seeds are ground for flour. Gum from the flower heads can be used to make cakes. The pulped core of balga is judged to taste a little like pineapple or coconut. Balga’s dry skirt provides important shade and shelter for birds, lizards, and small marsupials, such as the tiny mardo, all sources of food. The leaf stems of a dead balga make ideal habitat for the prized Bardi grub, the tasty larvae of a moth, rich in essential minerals. Balga resin is used to dye plant material for weaving baskets and bags, and animal skins for ceremonial dress.

Balga provides important medicines too. Its gum is chewed to alleviate diarrhea or constipation. Its pulp helps cure an upset stomach. The smoke of the burning transparent gum nodules from the flower stem treats sinusitis. At night, Wadandi sleep under a small shelter, or mia, constructed from bent sticks covered with the needle leaves of balga in a loose thatch – save only when flat sheets of paperbar are available at a campsite near swampy land.

It’s therefore scarcely surprising that balga is revered, with profound and lasting totemic significance to the Wadandi people. Traditionally, damage to a balga flower brings bad luck. For all that, though, the grass tree has been even more critical to the life of Wadandi people – for balga was the sole source from which they obtained the gift of fire.