A cabbage palm hat for all Australians

The Panama Hat is from Panama (originally, but these days mostly Ecuador). The beret, from France (and Spain, and originally possibly Crete). The Cabbage Tree Hat? It's dinky die Ozzie.

An example of this Australian designed and made piece of head wear is held by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. They describe the hat as 'characteristic of Australian men's fashion in the nineteenth century'. There are indeed a number of references to it at that time, including on the respectable heads of squatters and police troopers.

Although, in an a news item on fashions for the 2015 Melbourne Cup, it was reported that the cabbage tree hat was worn by youths known as 'cabbage tree mobs'. The original larrikins this article says. These 'cabbageites' roamed around in gangs starting brawls and organising fighting matches between chickens, dogs and people (but not together, I don't think). They would even knock the tall black hats from from the heads of gentleman!

This hat of many wearers was made from the Cabbage Fan-palm (also sometimes called Cabbage Tree Palm), Livistonia australis. This palm grows in eastern Victoria, where it is our State's only native palm, and up into New South Wales and Queensland. In Victoria it is rare, only growing naturally in three stream-side pockets near Orbost. The stand at Lilly Pilly Gully in Wilsons Promontory is assumed to be planted.

It's a plant of many uses, including ripping out the young shoot (the cabbage) to eat, raw or cooked. This, as the online Flora of Victoria (VicFlora) puts it, 'is lethal to the palm'. The trunk (main stem) of the palm was split to build crude shelters during the early European settlement of Australia.

The leaves are used by the First Peoples of Australia for thatching, and for making baskets, bags and nets. The more recent arrivals decided they could be turned into a fine Australian hat. The Powerhouse Museum describes their object as "finely woven natural straw-coloured hat; high tapering domed crown, wide flat brim; applied layered hat band of coarser plaiting with zig-zag border edges". It was made in Cambewarra, on the Shoalhaven River south of Sydney, sometime between 1875 and 1885.

The leaves of the palm are boiled, dried and then bleached before shredding into straw-like strands which can then be woven into a hat.

There is another use for the plant. The species features strongly in William Guilfoyle's stunning botanical landscape here at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. There are 242 individual specimens of the Cabbage Fan-palm in Melbourne Gardens, and another 14 now planted at Cranbourne Gardens. 

It's not the only palm of course. There are over 1000 plantings in Melbourne Gardens, representing 68 different kinds. At the time Guilfoyle was creating his masterpiece, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, palms and other plants evocative of the subtropics were definitely in vogue. Even before that, Ferdinand Mueller, our Gardens' first director, used Cabbage Fan-palms in his garden designs and no doubt encouraged their use in Australia and elsewhere.

The distinctive foliage and form of the palm make it exotic, even when it grows in nature nearby. The genus Livistonia is one of the fan-palms - with fronds like a fan rather than a feather. 

Today the hat is not so much in demand and the palm plant tends to find favour in holiday resorts and small tubs on balconies. Here in Melbourne Gardens though, we continue to enjoy the Cabbage Fan-palm, along with Moreton Bay Figs and araucarias, as signature plantings that will never go out of fashion. 

Image: Historian Marcus Clarke wearing the apparel in 1886. Image in the Public Domain, available on Wikimedia, from State Library of Victoria. The Portuguese-language label on a Cabbage Fan-palm (Cabbage-palm) is from the Lisbon (University) Botanic Garden, photographed last year. The close-up of the frond is from VicFlora, courtesy of Rodger Elliot who took the photo at Smok(e)y Bay, near South West Rocks, New Wales. All other pictures are by me, from Melbourne Gardens in February 2019.