10th
Guriwal
Guriwal is the Aboriginal name for the area known as La Perouse, and is situated on the North Head of Gamay/Botany Bay. I’ve been recording at the site for some weeks now, walking places that range from the Aboriginal community established before and maintained throughout European contact at Yarra Bay, to golf courses, military fortifications at Bare Island Fort and the Banks Battery, industrial complexes, a shipwreck, an isolation hospital and cemeteries encompassed by the National Park.
Tanker and sand trap at the New South Wales Golf Club.
The wreck of the “Minmi”, a collier lost at Cape Banks in 1937.
Banks Battery gun emplacement, filled in with Gothic style architectural elements. Two gun emplacements remain at the site high in the dunes, with a network of air shafts, magazines, and range-finding facilities.
Graffiti, Banks Battery site.
Cemetery at Little Bay, known also as the Coast Hospital Cemetery. Over 2000 people were interred here, though few markers remain. The graves of Chinese immigrants were marked with a wooden peg, and all were removed in the 1980s in a site “clean up.” Only a single example of a peg marker now remains at the site.
IDA MAY HORN
AGED 5 YEARS & 6 MONTHS
“Whiter than snow”
A red bellied black snake was sunning itself when I photographed it at the entrance to the Coast Hospital Cemetery. This venomous snake is still found throughout the parkland at Botany Bay. John Cann, of the famous Cann Family, presenters of a live snake and reptile show at La Perouse since the 1920s, advises that all bush walkers should carry a pressure bandage in the event of snake bite. If I was unlucky that day, I would have to improvise with a t-shirt and hope that my cell phone could find a signal.
