2002-02-20

I haven't written for awhile...just haven't. Been really quite busy with 'stuff', and I didn't mean to leave that really negative entry up for so long.

A week and a half a go, I met a pretty persistant lady. Through the Octapod, we had organised a tour of the Stockton Bite, on which we would be shown important parts of that area by a local woman, Carol Ridgeway-Bisset. Her people are the original inhabitants of the area and she has dedicated much of her life to the fight to conserve the area. Carol takes a lot of people on tours of the area, so we can all see how special the nature all around us is.

On the day, we had to meet at the Octapod at 5am, cuz its best to see the Bight area early. Three carloads of us went to Nelson Bay to Carol's house to get her. Once we got there, she let us know that the recent heavy rain had made the Bight difficult to reach along the track she used, but she would take us around the Port Stephens area a bit and show us some things.

The paces we did go to were still quite urban - small reserves and pockets of scrub still able to survive the push of developers. The Port Stephens area is one of those burgeoning tourist areas, where people say things like 'ecotourism' and rarely mean it. Every little parcel of land is grabbed at by developers for units or tarty little resorts. Ugh.

We were shown scars on trees, that are the marks left by the indigenous people carving out canoes. Once we had been shown these trees, we all remarked how you see quite a bit of these and would never really know what they were.

Next we were taken to a lookout so Carol could point out certain areas to us. She had tales about pretty much every morsel of the land we could see. Not lovely mythical tales of the land carried down through the generations, but rather nasty stories of developers and government departments. Stories of how this bit of land was developed despite the presents of countless native species, many native to the area only. Stories of degredation of the lake and river system cuz poultry producers want to dump millions of dead chickens in to the lake. And they do. It was a beautiful lookout, and I could gaze out to the morning sea, and I was amazed by the rocky little mountains that are right next to the ocean. Acroos, in the bay are a few islands. In her childhood, Carol and her borther and sister, and their cousins were told never to go and climb one of the mountains. One day some of her cousins defied the rules and climbed it, not knowing it was one of the most sacred pieces of land in the area. Her cousins copped it when they got home.

Next we went to a small piece of bushland outside of the town, which looked fairly uninteresting from the road. But within moments, Carol ws telling us what every bastard plant could do. I was in awe of her knowledge (which, by the way was not passed down to her. She has had to learn it in her adulthood from scratch, such is this woman's dedication) and felt acutely whitey-whitey-stupid. How dare we impose our knowledge when the existing knowledge was sufficient! And further, how dare we destroy these plants of perfectly great medicinal qulities then expend huge amounts of energy to produce synthetic chemicals to do the same!! Apopular favourite was the native parsnip, which Carol dug out of the ground and passed around so everyone could gnaw on one. Just like carrot apparently...

The bushland soon gave way to a beautiful wetland, and many of us remarked how "you would never know it was even there!" Hidden, but not untouched, the area was obviously a dumping ground for people's crap. The area was fucking beautiful, but I had to look at all this crap people had taken the trouble to come way out and dump. Bastards...But we all had a ball watching the ducks swim around, and gasping at the black swans we saw. This area is virtually next to suburbia, but like so many wetland areas, may well be filled in and 'reclaimed'. Many low lying areas of new subdivision are reclaimed land. Check it out in your town - there are sure to be areas of reclaimed land, where wetlands are filled in and built on top of. However, now that this practice has been underway for several decades we are now starting to see the results: houses eventually start to sink. The land rejects the reclamation and is trying to operate as it has for millions of years. Thrity years of housing is not going to stop that. Sucked. In.

Around at soldiers point are a series of caves into the side of the headland, which were very deep and used as shelter in ages passed. However, during the roaring fourites, when war hysteria was at its hieght, the local navy decided to demolsih them. Much of the cliff and rock faces was exploded out, so that now the caves are more like little rocky overhangs, not really caves to speak of. Tops.

It was in this area we also saw a midden, which is an area where things like oyster shells would be left after a meal. In much of the historical literature they are seen as the rubbish tips of the indigenous people, but that to me seems to imply some abandon. The people were very careful not to be wasteful. It was here we also saw the fishing trap, which was constructed out of rocks and would herd the fish into a corner of the bay where they could more easily be caught.

I came away from our time with Carol just thinking about how we were really stuffing things up. And about how dilligent we must be to actually fight development. And I though how the developers will win, cuz it is so hard to be diligent and survive ourselves, let alone the land.