Tribe Macadamieae (91 spp., 16 genera; Proteaceae) is widespread across the southern hemisphere on all major fragments of Gondwana except New Zealand and India. Macadamia is cultivated outside its natural range as a "nut" crop (notably in Hawaii, where it is the principal orchard crop). We sampled seven DNA regions and 53 morphological characters from the tribe to infer its phylogeny and address the common assumption that the distribution of the extant diversity of the tribe arose by the rafting of ancestors on Gondwanan fragments. Macadamia proves to be paraphyletic with respect to the African genus Brabejum, the South American genus Panopsis, and the Australian species Orites megacarpus. We erect two new generic names, Nothorites and Lasjia, to produce monophyly at that rank. The earliest disjunctions in the tribe are inferred to be the result of long-distance dispersal out of Australia (with one possible exception), rather than vicariance. Evolution of tardy fruit dehiscence is correlated with these dispersals, and the onset of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) precedes them. We suggest that the ancestors of extant diversity arrived on their respective continents via the ACC, and we recognize that this is a mechanism precluded, rather than facilitated, by Gondwana's terrestrial continuity.

Our study demonstrates that Hakea is an exception to the more commonly described shift from insect to bird pollination. However, we note that only one previous phylogenetic study involved Australian plants and their honeyeater pollinators and that our finding might prove to be more common on that continent.

We demonstrate that the paraphyly of Grevillea considerably enlarges the number of Australian descendants from its most recent common ancestor but has also misled investigators who considered a single operational taxonomic unit as adequate to represent the genus for inferences of diversification rate and timing. Our time-calibrated phylogeny can form the basis of future evolutionary, comparative ecology, and biogeography studies involving this large Australian plant radiation, as well as nomenclatural changes.

Banksia (80 spp.; Proteaceae) has undergone extensive speciation and adaptive radiation on the island continent of Australia. Its members range from prostrate shrubs in the dry, infertile sandplains to 25 m tall trees in the loams of river margins, and they display striking variation in their fire survival strategies and floral and foliar morphologies. We examine the weight of both previously published (most trnL intron, trnL/F spacer, and rpl16 intron data) and new (matK, atpB, and waxy data, as well as most ITS data) DNA sequence evidence for the paraphyly of Banksia with respect to a monophyletic Dryandra (93 spp.). The nuclear waxy gene appears to be at two loci in the Proteaceae, and sequences presumably from the same locus resolve Banksia as paraphyletic with respect to Dryandra. The waxy and combined chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) data reject the monophyly of Banksia at a threshold of P = 0.05 using the winning sites and Kishino–Hasegawa tests. We consider this result and the repeated placement of Dryandra in the same clade (/Cryptostomata) of Banksia with each separate analysis of the DNA datasets (cpDNA, ITS, and waxy), to be strong molecular support for the paraphyly of Banksia with respect to Dryandra. The morphological synapomorphy of beaked follicles for /Cryptostomata (including Dryandra) reinforces this conclusion. We argue that realignment of taxa to produce one or more monophyletic genera is best attained by moving the taxa of Dryandra to Banksia. This would produce an easily recognised genus Banksia with four morphological synapomorphies. It would also probably confer some of the research attention garnered by the adaptive radiation of Banksia to the under-studied taxa of Dryandra, for Dryandra makes the radiation of Banksia even more remarkable.