26
06
2010
Environmentally Speaking Issue 24
Posted by: admin in Environmentally Speaking Newsletter
Environmentally Speaking Winter 2010 Issue 24
Contents: Peter Garrett’s Kingsford Smith - the Forgotten Bay and its Forgotten People; Booralee - Sydney’s First Fishing Village in Botany where Fishing is now Banned; The Greatest Moral Challenge of Our Time; Death by Flying Fox; End of An Era - Cann Snake Show; Whale at Bare Island 1965; The Truck Numbers Don’t Add Up.
Entries (RSS)
July 7th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
yeah i looked at his website and here he is telling people that la perouse is a stone throw away from kurnell, what tripe and he wont talk about botany bay he talks about cane toads in north queensland we got more destructive cane toads here his labour mates in the nsw government
this is from his website -
Parliament: Statements by Members - La Perouse Public School
Mr GARRETT (Kingsford Smith) (9.36 a.m.)—I want to place on record my admiration for the terrific efforts that teachers, kids and their extended families at La Perouse Public School put in for my visit to the school on the first day of spring last week. La Perouse Public School is a small public school located only a stone’s throw from the Captain Cook landing site at Botany Bay. It is a school which has a high proportion of Indigenous students. The challenges that students, teachers and families face as a consequence of the history of dispossession and dislocation are still great. There are kids at this school who experience the loss of family members on a more frequent basis than is the norm in our society. Yet they presented two highly creative and very well executed dance performances to me.
Watching students from different backgrounds perform Aboriginal dances from North Queensland showed me reconciliation in action. Subsequently, in discussion with me as federal member, the students at La Perouse showed a very keen interest in the work of the parliament and political issues generally. I had spoken out previously on the huge risk to the biodiversity and living culture of North Australia as a result of the ravenous spread of cane toads across the landscape. The students at La Perouse had clearly taken an interest in this particular topic, both from my web site and the parliamentary record. They asked many thoughtful questions about cane toads and made some very useful suggestions as to how they might be stopped.
The teaching staff, students and families made me feel very welcome and I was pleased to see first-hand the enthusiasm and dedication that all involved with La Perouse Public School displayed. In discussion at the school, I discovered that one of the residual matters on the minds of both students and teachers at La Perouse is what prospects there are for a renewed and invigorated effort at advancing reconciliation. Labor remains profoundly committed to the reconciliation task—I assured them of that—in this parliament and in the community. But it is in the classrooms of schools like La Perouse Public School that authentic reconciliation is happening every day. I salute those efforts and offer my encouragement to the school community, who showed me in my visit that, notwithstanding the hurt and suffering their families have experienced, there is hope, and it can be clearly seen at La Perouse Public School.
July 7th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
I did a check of Hansard and found his first speech and have extracted 2 paragraphs which refer to Botany Bay. Same problem regarding the reference to Cook’s landing. Note also, Banks was a naturalist not a botanist and financed his participation and that of botanical artists and others including the botanist Daniel Solander. Solander was a famous pupil of Linneaus. The first fishing village was on north Botany Bay and Nancy Hillier talks of cows in the area when she came to live. Too convenient of Garrett to paint it as Australia’s first industrial area. It supplied the colony with fresh water in the late 1800s and there were market gardens.
GARRETT - Hansard ‘Maiden Speech’ 2004 “Kingsford Smith includes `Botany Bay’—and those two words carry much historical resonance for Australians. The bay was so named on account of the huge diversity of vegetation discovered by botanist Joseph Banks when the Endeavour lowered its anchor and the English came ashore. Later, workers cottages sprung up around what became Australia’s first industrial area. Some remain, as does a community of Aboriginal people living in the suburb of La Perouse near to Captain Cook’s first landing site in 1770.
Early history records the sobering fact that, within a very short time after first contact, the local tribes were wiped out by smallpox or driven off by the new settlers. In the present, the truly appalling statistics of Aboriginal health show how much is still to be done to break free of this aspect of our past. And there are significant environment issues here too. Past industrial development has left a legacy of toxic chemical blight which now threatens the marine environment of Botany Bay. There is real concern about planned development on the shores of the bay and also on much-loved Malabar Headland, owned by the Commonwealth. It is our position on this side of the House that this precious parcel of land, listed on the Register of the National Estate, should be returned to the people of New South Wales to become national park and public open space. I commit to pursuing this issue in the current parliament.”
July 9th, 2010 at 12:37 am
I cannot believe that PG has made the same error twice in confusing Capt. Cook with Capt. Phillip. Perhaps we should send him a copy of the recently published history of Randwick!!
July 9th, 2010 at 12:39 am
I also can’t believe that he spoke about cane toads instead of the issues of the Port Botany expansion and how it’s effecting we residents!