Gumnuts

What do you choose to snap when you're away for a few days down the coast in a region renowned for premium vineyards, wine and foodie restaurants? Well, a bunch of gumnuts on a eucalyptus tree, of course.
Sure, the local grape vines are absolutely dense with big green photosynthesising leaves, planted in precise parallel rows stretching into the distance over the undulating landscape. And sure, the olive groves and almond trees and niche, gourmet native food crops are all going gangbusters.
But as is so often the case in a popular tourist region, there is a wide range of stalwart unsung botanical heroes lurking in the background, quietly getting on with getting on. Among them, of course, is the ubiquitous (to the point of national symbol) gum tree.
With well over 700 species of them in the umbrella Myrtle family (Myrtaceae), common eucalyptus forms range from large-ish shrubs, through mid-sized mallees, to some really tall, massive - and very long-in-the-tooth - flowering trees.
The fruit of the eucalyptus is a hard, woody capsule commonly known as a gumnut, with sizes ranging from that of a black peppercorn to a golfball, or maybe a billiard ball. This species has gumnuts more or less in the middle range of the size spectrum. 
It seems quite familiar from teenage days spent gouging out the insides of the dried, kettle-shaped gumnut with a rusty, well-worn pocket-knife, gouging a small hole in the bottom side, and whacking in a length of thin plastic, steel or even glass tubing, to use as a jerry-built tobacco pipe.
Not sure this style of pipe was widely emulated to any great extent at the time, but that's probably a good thing for just about everybody. You could screw up your lungs far more easily, and not that much more expensively, by getting one of the older lads to buy you a 10- or 12-pack of cheap, ready-made filter cigarettes from the local deli. Peter Stuyvesant, anyone? Or Rothmans, perhaps?