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Pepper native to Australia

saugapepper

saugapepper

Are there any peppers native to Australia? I've searched and found nothing. Hard to believe, having visited Oz, that in that bloody heat there are no peppers native to Australia.
 
I think we are too far away from any other land mass to have native chillis. If i were to look for them i would head North, from the tip of Australia you can pretty much island hop to the rest of the world which means it would have been easier for birds to bring them into the country.
 
As far as I have learned all pepper species ( talking Capsicum ) are from the new world (north and south america) and all the varieties coming from the rest of the world are from seed brought from the new world originally.
 
Depends on what you mean by "native". If you're talking chiles in general, I suppose you can argue that there are none native anywhere in the world except the Western Hemisphere from about Peru northward to the American Southwest (TX, NM, AZ). But if you're talking "created" varieties, I believe the Broome Chili is thought to have originated in Oz.
 
Theoretically any strain that has been isolated long enough to have developed new, noticeable traits in the wild can be considered a new native strain. Good examples include the bhut jolokia (native to India but believed to be brought over mid 19th century from Trinidad) and the fatalii (native to Africa, origins unknown). Of course I am not currently aware of a native Australian chili.
 
mrz1988 said:
Theoretically any strain that has been isolated long enough to have developed new, noticeable traits in the wild can be considered a new native strain. Good examples include the bhut jolokia (native to India but believed to be brought over mid 19th century from Trinidad) and the fatalii (native to Africa, origins unknown). Of course I am not currently aware of a native Australian chili.
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I think that we might differ in the denotative use of "wild" here. I don't think the VAST majority of chile strains are what I would consider wild. I could be horribly misguided, but I suspect that the bhut jolokia, as well as the vast majority of cultivated chiles would last very little time in the "real" wild in most global locations. And I think those that did survive, much like non-isolated dog gene pools, would revert quickly to morphology that resembled the prototypes of the species. e.g. Tepins or wild dogs.

But conceptualized, hand-selected, bred and stabilized? Yes.

And in that case, it appears the Broome is to Australia as the Bhut Jolokia is to NE India/Bangladesh.

Just my $.02
 
Native is a weird term I suppose. I suppose to try to nail down the terminology in a better light, native would have to describe a pepper whos genetics originated in X location and was grown exclusively by the native peoples there for many generations OR a new chili located in the wild of that location. Now that the world has gotten so much smaller with the internet and all I'd say any new strains created can't be called native because they will be sent all over the world before they become ingrained in the culture. I'm not sure of the history behind the Broome, but if it was bred for more recently I would say it was 'developed in Australia' instead of being 'native to Australia'. I don't know does that make sense?
 
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