Could the macadamias hidden in Queensland’s rainforests be the key to saving ‘the world’s finest nut’?

While grown in huge numbers commercially, macadamias are a vulnerable crop. A group of wild Australian nut hunters is seeking to change that

We are bouncing over a rough, steep gravel road on the hunt for macadamia trees in the wild. Here in the tangled rainforest at Mary’s Creek in Queensland is the macadamia’s main ancestral home.

Ian McConachie has always been partial to a macadamia nut. As a boy in Brisbane in the 1940s he used to climb fences to steal them from people’s backyards. “We’d put them in a little hole in the concrete under the house and hit them with a hammer.”