Megan Cope calls it the “first mining boom”, one that drove Australia’s oyster reefs to near extinction. First, British colonists raided the enormous piles of shells and animal bones Indigenous people had gathered after feasting and ceremony, mixing these middens with water into a lime slurry for building the new colony.
Then, once these “Aboriginal architectural forms” – sites of carbon-dated evidence of traditional life – were exhausted, the colonisers began demanding live oysters to eat. They sent fishers to deploy harmful extractive processes on the reefs. “Within 15 to 20 years of the British arriving, the landscape changed so incredibly,” says Cope. “Our ancestors were witness to that, but powerless, of course.”
