Mango Mayhem

Back in September, it was quite exciting walking through the caravan park admiring all the small, green but potentially delicious mangoes hanging from every fruit tree.  The previous year had been much anticipated for a mango feast but was bitterly disappointing with very little fruit actually setting and developing into our favourite tropical delight.  This year however, was looking to be an extravaganza as Kensington Pride (our favourite), Calypso and R2E2 varieties dripped from every available branch weighing them down so heavily that they almost touched the ground underneath.  Kununurra's great rains earlier in the year had contributed to this.  It's quite exciting to realise that soon we'll be able to pick mangoes for 'free' rather than paying up to four dollars per fruit.
By late October little dabs of orange amongst the green were being picked by eager caravan park residents and the managers were feverishly trying to retrieve as many fruits as possible before they dropped to the ground.  I was picking many mangoes off the ground within our site because we were lucky enough to have a KP tree all to ourselves.  Unfortunately despite the fact they looked fine when I picked them up, they were badly bruised where they had hit the ground and so were not nice to cut up.  More like a smoothy within the skin instead of nice cheeks or slices.
The irony about the mango season in Kununurra this year was that despite the bumper crop in the caravan park, some mango farms had less prolific fruiting trees this year.  Several people that we knew in town who had uncultivated mango trees on their properties were being asked by commercial growers if they could pick their crops at a reduced price.  This was because they had not been so lovingly tended to during the year like the cultivated trees and so quality would be slightly reduced.   However, the demand was obviously there for the necessity to pick uncultivated crops in town.
Everyone had ideas about what they would do with their mangoes.  Some people dried them, others mashed them and froze the puree while many people just cut the cheeks off and popped an icecream stick into them to make awesome frozen mango iceblocks....yum!  Smoothies were the most popular treat made from mangoes.  We felt like we had enjoyed a nice number of mangoes by the time we left to go to Adelaide for a holiday.  When we returned two weeks later however, the atmosphere in the caravan park was another story.
It had changed from a leafy, shady space with delicious fruit gems hanging everywhere to an untidy stinking mess with rotting fruit all over the ground.
Everywhere we stepped on our caravan site, there were half eaten mangoes splatted on the ground with green ants swarming all over them.  The flying foxes had been feasting on the mangoes in the trees at night whether the fruit was ripe or not.  Their raucous arguments over what was left hanging in the trees kept everyone awake late into the night.  Whenever Steve or I walked to the bins or down to the toilet dump point, the trees rustled with small communities of flying foxes vying for the left-overs.  They are surprisingly silent when not arguing amongst themselves.   Often all we would hear was leaves rustling before the gentle wing beats of a bat taking off into the night.  Given their nature for clustering in close knit communities however, the arguments were a regularity.
Then cases of an annual condition in Kununurra started to surface - mango burn or rash.  Children and adults alike were seen around town with rashes brought about by exposure to mangoes in large amounts.   The rash is caused by contact with mango tree sap or the skin or sometimes even the flesh of the mango.  There is never any definitive cause for a reaction and different people are affected differently by the same source.  I have talked to people in town who went from having no reaction to mangoes to having an almost anaphylactic reaction to them over a number of years of constant exposure.   Becca even came out with a nasty burn on her nose which was diagnosed by a GP and the local pharmacist as being mango burn.  The weird thing was that she hadn't even touched a mango but I was told that people can have a reaction via an object that someone else has touched with mango on their hands.  After anti-histamine treatment and antiseptic cream application, it still took several weeks to completely disappear and spread over a small area of her face around her nose.  Steve was convinced it was BS and a convenient diagnosis given half the town was thought to have it.  Becca's condition, whatever it was, disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. 
The fruit left rotting on the ground gave off a really pungent smell which was overwhelming on those humid 'build up' days in the lead up to the wet season starting  .It took the first wet season rains to start breaking down the fruit and dispersing the smell.  Now, here we are several months down the track and the ground is littered with mango stones.  Despite the rain, these last remnants of a bumper mango season do not go unnoticed on the gravel roads around the caravan park.  My love of mangoes and the excitement when they first appeared in the supermarkets of Adelaide has not waned but my enthusiasm to gorge myself on them and include them in everything I eat has been reined in after living in an area where we've been surrounded by them for months.