Yes the maple certainly has some nice feature and a lot of people like the slabs for furniture. I think it would look good with a bit of stain to darken it a little. I've helped slab enough logs to know that Maple is a softer and lighter wood than the Black Wattle and termites will climb over a pile of Black Wattle to get to a stick of Maple. Based on this I'm not sure how it would hold up under heavier recoil?

Here are a couple of pic's of Black Wattle, rough cut, to show some of the features that attracted me to it. I've seen pic's of Holland DR's which I liked with similar feature. Sorry about the quality as they are screen cap's from a video.

First a bit of marble, it doesn't take much imagination to see how this would come up.

This one is fairly straught grained

but wetted down shows up some subtle fiddleback, similar to the Holland on the cover of Graeme Wright's good book.

These slabs aren't from the base / buttress area of the tree but give an idea of what can show up.