[Text on screen reads, ‘NSW Department of Education. Midden site.’]

[Text on screen reads: 'We recognise the Ongoing Custodians of the lands and waterways where we work and live. We pay respects to Elders past and present as ongoing teachers of knowledge, songlines and stories. We strive to ensure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learner in NSW achieves their potential through education.']

[A river landscape. Text on screen reads: ' Djiringanj & Tharwa Country']

Nathan Lygon, Yui, Dharawal and Wolgalu man, Knowledge holder

We are on the edge of the Pambula River here, and much of this saltwater section of the river is essentially one great big cultural site. It's a place where we're very fortunate to be able to get quite close to some of the shell mounds here, which dot the banks of this river and also can be found up in the hills and the surrounding forests.

This is a really important place historically for the people that lived here for thousands of years. Being Saltwater people belonging to the Saltwater Country, and most of the sustenance for these people coming from the river here, it's a really important place to camp seasonally and supported people throughout the year.

The river itself sort of acts as a natural divisionary space. So, to the north we have always kind of like a shared country, and then to the south, so we've got another tribal group and another distinct language, where we've got Tharwa down here to the south. That's shared country and then Djiringanj country and language groupings to the north.

So, this is a really abundant resource-rich strip of river, historically even more abundant. And that abundancy provided for the people living on either sides of that tribal boundary here. The shell middens or shell deposit sites are these important cultural spaces, are an excellent window into the past.

They give us insight into the diets and also the lifestyles of the people that inhabited this part of country. They tell us immediately what's on the menu, what we can find in and around the waterways here. Through some excavation and archaeological digs, they determined there are over 30 different species of shellfish that were found in the sites along here.

And what's wonderful too is that we don't just see shellfish. We find fish remains. We find remains of reptiles, marsupials, birds. So, essentially, they are a record of what people were eating and the lifestyle and the patterns of movement associated with those food sources. It's not uncommon also that people were buried in and around these places.

You can imagine living in such a beautiful place, some of your best childhood memories, perhaps, being in and around this river. Your family knowing how important it is to you, that maybe you might wish to be buried in and around here. You know, your spirit can remain in this place. Your family for generations to come can visit you. You can look after them.

And so, all that as well, we find flakes, artifacts tools in and around the site. So, people sitting along the banks here, they're enjoying food, telling story, working with stone, shaping timber. So, we get this whole broad look at people's lives in the past. We might find fishhooks. That's one of the wonderful properties of the shells is they create an excellent environment to preserve things like that.

The sites in and around the beach, here, were dated in and around three to 3,500 years. That's a long history of relationship with people interacting with the saltwater environment here. But, you know, if we look deeper into the past, there's a freshwater history here during the last ice age, and so we would have to look for different evidence about how people interacted and lived in this landscape.

One of the beautiful things about these places is we get a wonderful window into the past and the ways of life of the old people, but we are part of a living culture living stories.

And so we can bring our young people down here. We can show them in the same way that the old people did what's on the menu. Looking at what's on top, what are the people that came here before us? What have they eaten? Okay. Because that might tell us that we might want to leave that alone, and we might target something else to ensure sustainability. 'Cause we don't get 3,500 years of shell deposit and people living off the land here without a sense of conservation and sustainability.

The oysters I hold in my hand here, we know it today as angasi, and they're called an angasi oyster. They're a local endemic oyster. So unlike the Sydney rock oyster that grows intertidal, these ones here that are found predominantly in the shell sites along the river here, they live in the ground or under the water, in the sand, in these bedded communities. And so we can see from the evidence here as we look at the site, this was a major food source for the local people.

In the last, you know, couple of hundred years, we've had a different management system that's come to this country, and through that system we've seen massive degradation of the food systems that are here on the river.

We see now smaller oysters. There's been massive disturbance to this local oyster that I'm holding in my hand. And that's just through bad practice and misunderstanding the nature of these things. Really destructive practices like dredging have had a huge impact on what was once an abundant food source here.

We're here in the, one of the northern parts of the national park here, what is today known as Beowa National Park. And the word Beowa, comes from a local Tharwa word for killer whale. The old people in and around Twofold Bay, Eden, had a spiritual relationship with the orcas. And there are some pretty incredible cultural practices that came through that relationship the old people had with the orcas.

In the past, the national park was known as Ben Boyd National Park. But Mr Boyd was involved in some questionable practices, and so community had been rallying and got together over a number of years pressuring for a name change. The culmination of that consultation process was the changing of the name removing his name from the national park, not from history, and instead now honoring some local language something that happened in and around our local area with this, the old people of this tribe.

So, protecting these places is really important. And we're actually really fortunate here along the river that, you know, this is a national park, and so the sites in here fall under their cultural heritage management plans and their protections. So, something that has happened in the past that's really unfortunate, these sites and the shells in them were essentially seen as a resource for the lime, the calcium and the qualities inside the shells.

They were actively mined, cooked and used to create mortar for the building of colonial projects. You know, I think about Sydney Harbor, for an example, and the amount of shell deposits that would've been around the harbor and the destruction that happened to build colonial Sydney. So, we're very fortunate this hasn't happened here.

The sites from studies done in the '80s and then into the early 2000s show little to no change. However, we still are facing challenges with erosion. You know, that's our biggest threat to these sites currently. People aren't coming down here in the way that they used to and engaging with the food sources that are here and continuing the deposit of shells on the scale that the old people were doing.

So, they are slowly in, in some areas washing away. There's been a lot of consultation with community and with National Parks in this particular site around what to do moving forward. In the past, community and parks trialed the use of sandbags as a way to mitigate and slow the effects of erosion.

Yeah, this place is a, it's a culturally significant area. So, we don't just have the shell mounds here. Along the river there are stone arrangements, there are fish traps. Scar trees dotting the ridge lines. This is a place that is so rich in history, and it's a place worth knowing about and worth protecting.

[End of transcript.]