Fire and the bush

North Head was cared for and maintained for possibly more than 40,000 years, and definitely for the 10,000 years or so since the coast was reshaped as the last Ice Age ended, and the seas moved in onto what was previously land. The Australians who were here before 1788 managed the land well, keeping the land young, clear and productive.

The white invaders interpreted what we now call firestick farming as "Native carelessness" or "Native aggression", thinking the Indigenous people wanted to chase the invaders away, and perhaps there was a bit of that in it, but anybody knowing a bit about ecology can see what was going on.

b Kunzea ambigua 010134 (136K) b leptospermum 7057 (86K) If you visit the Third Cemetery, compare the senescent growth outside the fence, dominated by the two palnts on the right, ti-tree and Kunzea ambigua, which are removed from the managed growth inside. The Indigenous form of land management has been used, right across Australia for something like 50,000 years, and the plants of the bush have been selected to favour those able to recover from burning.

In the 1960s, scientists began to understand the nature of firestick farming, which involves careful burning in a mosaic pattern that we often call control burning these days. There are two plots on North Head that have been burned in this way in the past two years.

There is more about the science of fire here.

A quarantine station

Ocean currents push water past most parts of any coast, and they can be warm or cold. The East Australian Current, which became famous in the film Finding Nemo, brings warm water and tropical species into Sydney Harbour, where the best hunting place for you to see them is the small beach in front of the Quarantine Station, but the Q station wasn't created as an aquarium.

In 1839, Louisa Ann Meredith wrote "Near the North Head is the quarantine-ground, off which one unlucky vessel was moored when we passed; and on the brow of the cliff a few tombstones indicate the burial-place of those unhappy exiles who die during the time of ordeal, and those whose golden dreams of the far-sought land of promise lead but to a lone and desolate grave on its storm-beaten shore.

More to come...

A defence base

There are a few mysteries that only army people can unravel, like the row of houses in St Barbara's Avenue, easily explained if you know that gunners have a patron saint, St Barbara. Equally, the sanctuary buildings all bear numbers like "R of A 20". Perhaps the letters refer to a "Regiment of Artillery"? the true answer is more prosaic: "Register of Assets".

More to come

I'm busy, OK? When the rain stops, work on this stops.

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The page was first created on 11 January 2019, and updated 1 August 2020.