Notes from a Small Valley A Natural History of Wolli Creek II Vivid and Beautiful

By Justin Cahill

This is the second part of my short introduction to the natural history of the Wolli Creek Valley in Sydney, Australia. The Valley contains the last substantial remnants of the natural environment in Sydney’s inner south-west. Even though it is quite small it contains a variety of habitats, ranging from tidal mudflats, saltmarsh and mangroves to reed-lands, open woodland and even fragments of rainforest. They, in turn, provide refuge for an impressive range of native wildlife, especially birds and reptiles.

Part I, Prehistory, published in 2014, gave an overview of the Valley’s geology and what local fossil and archaeological records tell us of its ancient past. This part, Vivid and Beautiful, describes how the Valley may have appeared to a visitor in the early 1790s - shortly after the First Fleet brought the Europeans to Sydney in 1788 but before they settled along Wolli Creek from 1804.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Cahill
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370387595

Justin Cahill

Welcome to my Smashwords profile. I am a New Zealand-born writer, based in Sydney. My main interests are nature and history. My thesis was on the negotiations between the British and Chinese governments over the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. It was used as a source in Dr John Wong's Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, the standard work on that conflict. I wrote a column on the natural history of the Wolli Creek Valley for the Earlwood News (sadly, now defunct) between 1992 and 1998. My short biography of the leading Australian ornithologist, Alfred North (1855-1917), was published in 1998. I write regular reviews on books about history for my blog,' Justin Cahill Reviews' and Booktopia. I'm also a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald's 'Heckler' column. My current projects include completing the first history of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand told from the perspective of ordinary people and a study of the extinction of Sydney's native birds. After much thought, I decided to make my work available on Smashwords. Australia and New Zealand both have reasonably healthy print publishing industries. But, like it or not, the future lies with digital publishing. So I'm grateful to Mark Coker for having the vision to establish Smashwords and for the opportunity to distribute my work on it.

Book preview

Notes from a Small Valley

A Natural History of Wolli Creek

II

Vivid and Beautiful

Justin Cahill

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Justin Cahill

All rights reserved. The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This ebook may not be reproduced by any means in any form without the copyright holder’s written consent.

All inquiries to Justin Cahill at

PO Box 108, Lindfield, 2070

New South Wales, Australia

or e-mail to [e-mail]

To Gavin and Lee,

this part is respectfully dedicated.

Cover: Photograph of the eucalypt and angophora forest at Girrahween Park, Earlwood.

Contents

Preface

III. After the ice

IV. Kooma and first contact

V. Richard Atkins’ walk

VI. Fragments

VII. Fatal impacts and the Old Ironbark

Notes

Preface

This is the second part of Notes from a Small Valley, a short introduction to the natural history of the Wolli Creek Valley in Sydney, Australia. Part I, Prehistory, published in 2014, gave an overview of the Valley’s geology and what local fossil and archaeological records tell us of its ancient past. This part describes how the Valley may have appeared to a visitor in the early 1790s - shortly after the First Fleet brought the Europeans to Sydney in 1788 but before they settled along Wolli Creek from 1804. Part III, Survival and Recovery, will detail the Europeans’ impact on the Valley, the native species still found there, the efforts to restore its original ecosystems and the threats they continue to face.

To help show how the Valley may have looked at this point, I have provided a guide - Richard Atkins (1745-1820). Richard arrived in Sydney in 1792. A keen amateur naturalist, he often went on long walks to relieve his hang-overs and occasional bouts of melancholy. Despite an alarming lack of qualifications, Richard became the Colony’s deputy judge advocate - its chief judicial officer. In that capacity he was caught up in many of the social and political controversies that plagued the Colony until his departure in 1810. He, for example, presided over the trial of John Macarthur which sparked the infamous ‘Rum Rebellion’ against Governor Bligh in 1808.

I’ve used the device of a historic figure undertaking imaginary travels as the material for this work was fragmentary and I hoped to avoid the ‘scissors and paste’ effect that bedevilled my earlier attempts at describing the Valley’s natural history. When I saw how Steven Mithen used this approach in his After The Ice, a history of the post-Ice Age world, I thought it would help give these fragments some coherence.

This is not the first attempt to show how the Wolli Creek Valley looked before 1788. Eminent writers, including Doug Benson and Jocelyn Howell, have already published detailed accounts of the original flora of the Cooks River, Wolli Creek and Bardwell Valleys. There have been three such reconstructions. The first was included in the far-sighted report on these districts funded by the Regional Economic Development Scheme and published by the Total Environment Centre in 1976. The second, covering all of Sydney, was Benson and Howell’s Taken for Granted, published in 1990 and easily still one of the most important works on Sydney’s natural history available. The third was the study by Benson and others on the Cooks River, Wolli Creek and Bardwell Valleys, Missing jigsaw pieces, published in 1999.

My approach differs from these earlier works as it is not limited to botany. Instead I try, as far as possible, to populate the landscape with wildlife by reconstructing the original ecosystems found in the Wolli and Bardwell Valleys. In doing so, I have relied on several sources not used by earlier writers. Further, I want to show how reconstructions like this are put together and so have raised the curtains to show you the material I had to work with. Occasionally, I have had to take an artisan-like attitude to these sources: if I have not been able to make a table from them, I have been happy to get a chair, or even a toy. But enough material survives to provide a glimpse of the Wolli Valley before the Europeans wrought their devastation. It truly was a vivid and beautiful place - and, of course, still is.

Sadly, even as I write this, development continues to destroy or threaten parts of the district’s remaining natural heritage. The WestConnex motorway contractors repeatedly told the public that "Wolli Creek bushland will not be impacted" by their work. Then, in September 2016, they completely destroyed the unique shale-based paperbark and wattle scrubland at Beverly Hills for storage space. Once again, an irreplaceable remnant of Sydney’s native vegetation was sacrificed for the promise of a faster car trip - even though international and local experience indicates the WestConnex will become just as clogged as the M5 East is now. The tragedy at Beverly Hills may be just the beginning. The Arncliffe wetlands, already damaged by construction of the M5 East, are threatened by the relocation of Kogarah golf course. Further, the Scarborough Park wetlands, which lie in the road reservation for F6 motorway, may be destroyed if the SouthConnex motorway is built.

There has been some good news. The original plans for the WestConnex involved clearing much of the bushland east of Bexley Road (now known as the ‘Western Gateway bushland’) which includes an extremely rare stand of Sydney gallery rainforest. In December 2016 the Roads and Maritime Service advised it had changed its plans for the motorway and no longer required this land. It is now being transferring it to the Department of Planning and Environment to eventually be incorporated into the Wolli Valley Regional Park.

Even so, there must be some point where we stop destroying the natural world for our own, unsustainable convenience. But we have not reached it yet. Frankly, it’s extraordinary just how much political power the environment movement has lost in the last twenty years. The momentum it gained in the early 1980s is now almost spent. While conservative opponents retreated in the face of mass public protests, such as those to save Gordon River, they regrouped as progressives began to dissipate their energy and resources on less fundamental issues. History will be unkind to us - the generations that let it happen.

As previously confessed, I am not qualified to write the formal academic treatise the Valley deserves. But I have provided detailed references to help anyone planning to do so in the ‘Notes’ section below. My work has benefitted greatly from the researches of the late Dr Lesley Muir and the late Brian Madden. Their Bibliography of historical references relating to the Wolli Creek Valley is now freely available online. Perhaps one day we will have a publication along the lines of Virginia Bear’s beautifully arranged and illustrated account of the ecosystems found at the Kurnell Peninsula. The material for a similar work is available, but meeting the costs is difficult for small volunteer groups such as the Wolli Creek Preservation Society.

During my research for this part, I found some new material on the pre-history of the Aborigines of the Cooks River and Wolli Creek Valleys and their early contact with the Europeans. While I covered that topic in Part I, I have re-visited it below. To avoid cluttering up the text I have listed the scientific names of the species mentioned in an appendix to part III (although I have left them in where they were included in material I have quoted from). The opinions I express and all the errors are my own.

Justin Cahill

Lindfield, 2017

III

After the ice

i

It may strike you as odd, given our current preoccupation with global warming, to find that we are living during a lengthy ice age. It began about 2.6 million years ago, at the beginning of what geologists call ‘the Pleistocene Epoch’, and has been marked by alternating periods of global cooling and warming. These changes caused the waxing and waning of the Earth’s glaciers - huge sheets of ice which, at various times, covered Earth wholly or in part. That process, in turn, altered the depths of the oceans as the glaciers alternatively drew water into their existing mass or melted.

We know something about the local landscape during this cooler period thanks to geological investigations in and around Botany Bay during the 1970s. About 2 million years ago, there was a ridge stretching from the Airport to the northern tip of Kurnell Peninsula. This ridge divided two river systems that flowed over what is now Botany Bay. The first, known to geologists as ‘Botany River’, arose near Paddington and Centennial Park and flowed into what became the northern part of the Bay. The second, larger system was associated with the present day Cooks and Georges Rivers and flowed into