Open mike, my apologies - I've converted you into a car instead of a person. (In Oz there is a car called a Moke, which is like a flashier version of an open top jeep, so my brain must have been having a little nerve spasm when I mistyped your name as "open moke").

The mimosa has lots of little leaves attached to each long little stem. The plant I had had the more usual arrangement of leaves - I don't think they were alternate but probably opposite i.e. where there are two leaves at each juncture along the stem.

Neat video Amos, but it puts me in mind of cruelty to animals, waving a candle near the leaves. Did you read about a plant which was in an experiment to "witness" a "crime" (another plant being hacked around) and then put on a type of polygraph to see if it reacted when the perpetrator entered the room? I don't know if it was in the New Scientist mag recently. Apparently it would have made a good witness because it did react.

Sorcha,
It's definitely not like the red/purple oxalis in your link. I don't know if it was an oxalis. It didn't have those shaped leaves like the ones in your image.

I just found a neat
World Wide Flowering Plant Family Identification page where you tick the relevant boxes and submit the form and it narrows down your search, but, like the eyewitness to a crime committed decades before, I can't be sure I remember the look of the plant in any great detail. Only that it had delicate little leaves which were a uniform deep maroon colour and the plant was only about 1 foot high at the most.

Bill D, I don't even know if it was an Australian plant or if it originated somewhere else.

I'm trying to think of another plant which looks similar so that you know what I am talking about.

Thanks for the help.

Helen