Cape Banks

Clarence Slockee

CLARENCE SLOCKEE:

Waddo, g'day in Thurawal. We're here in Thurawal country - we pay our respects to the Thurawal, Kameygal and the Dharag.

Now to give you some idea of where we are, just behind me that's the entrance to Botany Bay. Now we're on the North side here we're not far from Cape Banks - this beautiful bushland you see behind me all this dense scrub it's known as Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub.

Now it was about 240 years ago that Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks landed not far from here and Banks in particular he fell in love with this place because there were plants he'd never seen before, things like the wattles and the eucalypts, the Xanthorreas and of course the Banksia.

The soil around here is known as the Last of the Deep Sands - and deposited over 100 thousand years ago the wind, the rain has leached the soil of a lot of the nutrients - only the toughest species survive in these conditions and to grow well in this soil you need to be adapted to it.

Now there's no better example of that than the Banksias. Now one of the local species is the Coast Banksia. Now Aboriginal people in the area, they used to take the nectar from the flowers, make a sweet drink. You can even use the cones because they burn for a long time; so if you want to carry fire from one place to another you can do that. Also the timber is a really nice grain, so you can actually make really nice artefacts, you know things like clap sticks, woomeras boomerangs even and around here they were often known as Wadangari.

This one's Banksia Ericifolia also known as the Heath Banksia - the girls found a really important use for this one - they used this one as a hair brush.

OK this is what I've been looking for - the unmistakable green and gold of one of our wattles. This is the Sydney Golden Wattle. And there are over 1000 different acacias or wattles -the seed can be ground up into flour and used to make flat bread or damper. And some of the sap even can be used as a medicine or even a sweet lolly.

Now here's a gorgeous little flower I want to show you. This is a native fuchsia. Now a lot of people are growing these in their gardens now and they're dead easy to grow - an absolutely gorgeous flower.

Now around 1770 this unique community of plants covered the coast all the way around Port Jackson - there was about 5,300 hectares of land and now with only 1% remaining it's listed as endangered.

One of the more spectacular plants in the Banksia scrub are the Xanthorreas or the Grass Trees. This particular species is Xanthorrea resinifera it might give you some idea of what was actually used on this plant.

So the sap of the Xanthorreas is just like a resin; you can take it out soft, extract it from the trunks and then you can mold it and it will set hard just like resin so you can use it for fixing holes in canoes, fixing spear heads attaching tips to woomeras. But it also bleeds out of the flower spike after rain, very easy to take from there.

Here we've got the flower head and it's just starting to bud, so there'll be hundreds of individual flowers. They'll secrete a really sweet nectar, you can run your hand up there - a really sweet drink can be had.

Now I can't emphasise enough the diversity and the richness of plants here. Now as well as the Xanthorreas and the Banksias, you've got things like Isopogon, you've got lots of different hakeas. You can find grevilleas, styphelias and this one here -this is a type of Allocasuarina and it has a beautiful little flower, very delicate and you don't often see them.

Now although we've only looked at a small portion of some of the plants here in the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub, with only 1% remaining, it's a really important area that needs to be looked after. If you get a chance, get out and have a look for yourself in one of the true native gardens.