Where In The World Is Evan?

On a recent trip out of Melbourne with two friends, J and M, I spent a day bushwalking down on the peninsula. Ostensibly we were there to escape the city and get some much needed exercise. Instead our trip soon changed into a mushroom hunting expedition.

Being the height of autumn, mushrooms of hundreds of different varieties abound. We set off looking for Copelandia cyanescens (blue meanies), which are the most common magic mushroom in Victoria. Unfortunately after a whole day of searching we couldn’t find a single one. We did, however, discover an area abundant with Amanita muscaria (left). J and I had both seen photos of these fairy mushrooms before, but were convinced of their extreme toxicity.

After moving house, a couple of weeks later, I mentioned this discovery to my new housemate who’d apparently experimented with Amanitas before. After investigating the multitude of contradictory literature available on this exotic mushroom species—many sources report it as being highly poisonous, whilst others offer gourmet recipes—I decided to give it a go. The following weekend we returned to the location where we’d seen them previously, and within 45 minutes had collected about 6 kilos of mushroom caps. This quantity—three full shopping bags—proved quite a bit of work to process. By the next day, however, we had reduced it all to a small jar of what looked like ground coffee.
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