Title: Midden, 2019 Medium: Hand formed and burnished white clay with glaze. Size: 40cm x 40cm
Did you know that Botany Bay was home to a unique mud oyster? And that western colonisation and consumption brought the mud oyster to extinction by 1896?
Did you know that the shores of Botany Bay and the Georges River were once littered with aboriginal middens? And that these middens were created by 1000’s of generations of indigenous Australians? Did you know the burning of oyster shells, in lime kilns dotted along Botany Bay and the Cooks River, produced lime for building colonial architecture? And the mining of the shell middens erased the physical traces of past indigenous lives, experiences and histories?