Sunday, October 10, 2010

To think about: Productivity for whom?

Botany Bay and the Kurnell Peninsula are areas of natural abundance. Fish, oysters, mullet, snapper and rays, possum and wallaby, berries, ochre, timber and roots, saltwater and freshwater can all be found there. The area provided a diverse and reliable source of bush foods, medicines and materials that sustained the physical and spiritual life of the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay for thousands of years.

The population supported by these food sources was significant, with Governor Arthur Phillip writing in 1788 that “These natives are far more numerous than expected, I reckon from fourteen to sixteen hundred in this Harbour, Broken Bay and Botany Bay”. 

With the commencement of settlement of the peninsula in 1815, land was cleared for farming and grazing, and industries such as oyster farming, seaweed harvesting and later sandmining developed with the aim of extracting resources to feed the Sydney’s growing demands for food and building materials. Les Bursill argues that “the degradation of the industrial sites means (the land) would be useless for traditional purposes now. The water is polluted, the native species have been taken out. It is just scrubland, it’s pretty but it’s just a place. It’s not productive land any more.”

Such statements raise questions about the nature of ‘productivity’. Although Kurnell is one of Sydney’s most productive industrial areas, with the Caltex oil refinery processing and manufacturing 130,000 barrels (20,670,000 litres) of oil per day and sandmining companies extracting millions of tones of sand annually, an understanding of the natural abundance that once existed on the peninsula raises the questions “productivity for whom, for what purpose and at what cost?”

Today the La Perouse Aboriginal community and Dharawal peoples living around Southern Sydney are working to restore the natural integrity of bushland at Kurnell and around Botany Bay, however large areas of land are now privately owned and irreversibly changed. The following two pages were put together by the Guriwal Aboriginal Corporation for a bush tucker track at La Perouse on the north side of the Bay. They show just some of the many fruits, berries and useful materials that still grow around Botany Bay.



Source
Guriwal Aboriginal Corporation, 2009, Guriwal Bush Tucker Track: Carving our culture, planting our future, Sydney: Guriwal Aboriginal Corporation 

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