Australian towns in mango 'war'

It's not the war of the roses, but the war of the mango in tropical northern Australia, with two Queensland towns contesting which grew the fleshy golden fruit first.

Bowen has traditionally been considered the birthplace of Australia's mango industry, but 450 kilometres (280 miles) to the south, Rockhampton has now made a claim, saying French settler Anthelme Thozet was the pioneering gardener.

Local researcher Susan Cunningham said Thozet, a botanist who ran an experimental farm in Rockhampton, likely brought mango seeds to the town in the 1860s before the plants were grown in Bowen.

"He imported plants to Rockhampton and he had a large range of plants here, he tested a lot of them," she told AFP on Friday.

"One of the things he did, he was one of the people who had the first mangoes in Australia."

Cunningham, who owns a part of the former Thozet family property and edits a website dedicated to the botanist's work, said Thozet likely got his hands on the seed of the mango, a native of India, when the Queensland acclimatisation society bought a crop of mango plants in 1866.

But Bowen has long claimed the title of Australia's mango home, and has even erected a 10-metre high fibreglass mango to commemorate the 1890 planting of their first seedling.

"Bowen Special (a brand of the fruit sold in Australia) is the first mango, that's where it come from," town mayor Mike Brunker told the ABC.

"So we have got the biggest mango in the world here in Bowen. That's why we built the thing."

Cunningham played down the row, saying whichever town had the first mango was "not going to change anything".

"They have still got the industry up there," she said. "We're not worried about taking their mango statue off them... If they want to be the capital of the mango, they can be the capital of the mango in Australia."