Caring for mangroves

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised that this video contains images and voices of people who have died.
Shannon Foster is a D'harawal Saltwater Knowledge Keeper, educator and artist who works as an Indigenous Education Officer at Sydney Olympic Park, at the western end of Sydney Harbour. She shows us the Badu Mangroves at Bicentennial Park, and talks about this unique environment and shares some of the stories that are from this area, including one about Garrigan, who turned into a blue-tongue lizard.
The area was visited within 10 days of the First Fleet’s landing at Botany Bay. The colonists found this beautiful estuarine area they named ‘The Flats’, 12km west of the harbour. The area was settled by Europeans in 1793 and by the 1970s it had become one of Sydney’s most polluted industrial areas. Throughout the 1980s it was remediated and the 380,000-square meter mangrove forest on the edges of the Parramatta river is now one of the very few metropolitan wetlands left. In 1988 Bicentennial Park was named and opened, with a boardwalk providing access through the mangrove eco system.
Approximately 30,000 students a year visit and learn about this unique environment. For anyone who loves seafood, mangroves are vital because they are a unique nursery environment for aquatic life, with fish breeding in the water and other crustaceans and molluscs feeding in the leaf litter. The Grey Mangroves (Avicennia marina) here form a closed forest, with some specimens estimated to be 200 years old. They have special roots called pneumatophores that allow the plant to access air in flooded areas; this enables the trees to survive in these hostile environments, where they are submerged in salty water.
“These mangroves are really important to me”, explains Shannon. “My great grandfather walked these wetlands and harvested wood here.” Shannon’s great grandfather Tom Foster was an activist, performer and an artist. The boomerangs he would make would be sold at La Perouse as part of the tourist trade there. They often featured a kangaroo and emu facing backwards. “It’s a representation of the idea that we need to look backwards, look to our past to know and understand our future,” Shannon explains. The mangrove forest speaks of resilience and survival, despite every effort to destroy it. “Today our culture is alive and well and we make sure that we protect this wetland just as we’ve protected our culture for all these generations.”
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[@ajablue651]

This was very educational and I enjoyed it very much.
Thank you. 😊

[@jadesadventure4150]

Very Cool to see the history of those mangroves. It's good to see that nature can regenerate a whole eco system in a relatively short amount of time. Gives hope to the bushland affected by the recent fires

[@greenbox5714]

Hi, can i please use just a few nature-footages in my track's clip, that i made for Mangroves?

[@water7830]

Nice