Dive\u00a0into the\u00a0awe-inspiring history of the Australian continent and its people \u2014 a story 65,000 years in the making.<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old manages the Gamay Rangers program, which is responsible for natural and cultural resource management in the area.<\/p>\n
He says those elders would once “look out across the bay from our mission, our Aboriginal reserve, and it would look really dark because it was so thick with seagrass, it was so healthy”.<\/p>\n
But now, they say the bay looks bare.<\/p>\n
Mr Liddell says the rapid decline of the marine ecosystem has also had cultural impacts.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had a loss in the culturally significant food species \u2026 which means we’ve lost practices such as cultural fishing.”<\/p>\n
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Bryce Liddell prepares for a monitoring dive near Kurnell. (ABC: Tanya Dendrinos)<\/p>\n
Seagrass home to hundreds of species<\/p>\n
Determined to make a difference, Mr Liddell represents a generation at the intersection of traditional knowledge sharing and modern science.<\/p>\n
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“We’re finding now that we really can’t care for our land and sea country the way that we traditionally would have and we need to incorporate modern-day ways of doing things,” he says.<\/p>\n
The Gamay Rangers are collaborating with researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), led by Adriana Verg\u00e9s, a professor in marine ecology.<\/p>\n
Each dot marks 250 years \u2014 together they reveal Australia’s ancient story<\/a><\/p>\n How First Nations people outlived giant animals, survived an ice age and thrived amid massive landscape change.<\/p>\n She explains the significance of the bay’s seagrass population, in particular a species known as Posidonia australis.<\/p>\n “Seagrass here is what we call a foundation species. It provides home and shelter for hundreds of other species. It also protects shorelines from erosion,” Professor Verg\u00e9s says.<\/p>\n “It’s very productive, it captures large amounts of carbon and a lot of that carbon is sequestered in that ecosystem for hundreds of thousands of years.”<\/p>\n But in recent decades Gamay, Botany Bay has become increasingly industrialised. It is home to the runways of Sydney Airport as well as one of the busiest ports in the country, Port Botany.<\/p>\n “It’s a bay that has been very, very impacted by humans, and as a consequence we’ve lost probably about 50 per cent of the seagrass habitat that would have been here,” Professor Verg\u00e9s says.<\/p>\n “We are kind of heading towards localised extinction unless we do something about it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Biochar could help replanted seagrassFind stories of ancient Australia near you<\/a><\/p>\n There are ways to see into the deep past all around the country.<\/p>\n The Gamay Rangers and UNSW research teams are on a restoration mission, collecting and replanting washed-up seagrass fragments.<\/p>\n They are experimenting with using biochar, the charcoal-like substance left over after burning, on the replanted seagrass in a section of the bay.<\/p>\n The team is hopeful biochar will improve the long-term survival and growth of transplanted seagrass.<\/p>\n “Biochar has been used for a long time. It has been used in agriculture to improve crop yields,” UNSW PhD student Ann Flemming Nielsen says.<\/p>\n Bryce Liddell and Adriana Verg\u00e9s inspect a seagrass restoration site near Kurnell. (ABC: Tanya Dendrinos)<\/p>\n “If you want to remove pollutants from an area, it can do that as well.”<\/p>\n Ms Nielsen says the experiment is also an example of using Indigenous knowledge, as “burning has been very deeply connected to Indigenous culture for a very long time”.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n