🔵 What oysters teach us about climate change

HEARD THIS WEEK👂

🦪 “A nightmare”: Inside the harsh world of oyster farming

The oyster inspector would arrive in the Hawkesbury on a Friday, ready to sample the goodies set for market.

“If the inspector was alive on Monday, they could sell them,” oyster farmer James Brown tells the Lorikeet, passing on a morsel of local lore about how things were 100 years ago.

Quality assurance and biosecurity have evolved over the decades. Automation and advancements in seeding, technology and AI have, and will continue, to see the industry adapt and change.

But that is not all. A warming climate is also impacting oyster farmers. In some areas it’s the waters getting hotter, and in others - such as the Hawkesbury - it’s the increase in the ferocity and regularity of severe storm events.

All estuaries where oysters are harvested are monitored for water quality, and if salinity or water temperatures are not up to the standard, harvesting is stopped.

But for farmers, detection systems can only do so much. When floods, heavy rain, algae and disease hit estuaries, they will often incur massive losses.

Read the full story below.

✍️ Push to protect the North Shore cave where poet Henry Lawson used to dry out

By the time famed Australian bush poet Henry Lawson came to be living at 58 Market Street in Naremburn and hanging out in a nearby cave, he was 40 years old and his life was a shambles.

Lawson had “lived a troubled and unstable” existence, according to a Willoughby Council document that charts Lawson’s time on the lower North Shore.

“From an early age he suffered major hearing loss and mental illness, and by the time Lawson moved to Naremburn in 1906, his creative and personal life was in decline … with the writer suffering from the compounded effects of poverty, depression, and alcoholism.”

According to local historian Eric Wilksch, Lawson would frequent the Crows Nest Hotel — where he would exchange verse for drink.

“[He] was apparently not received into the community with any great enthusiasm owing to his sorry reputation for alcoholic addiction and related inability to maintain his financial obligations,” Wilksch wrote in The Naremburn Story. 

“His first stay was from June 1906 to January 1907 when he was able to maintain the sympathetic concern of Mrs Isabel Byers who occupied an iron-roofed cottage with a tall poplar tree at one end, at 58 Market Street.”

The Flat Rock Creek cave in Naremburn, which was used by Lawson about 120 years ago as a place to retreat from society and dry out, is now the subject of a push by Willoughby Council for Heritage protection.

Read the full story here.

🧧 Finding balance in Lunar Harmony

The Lunar New Year, a vibrant celebration with roots stretching back thousands of years across Asia, is a time to honour the past while envisioning the future. It’s a moment where tradition meets reflection, and memory dances with possibility.

This month at the Lane Cove Gallery, eight Chinese-Australian women artists come together in a striking exhibition that explores identity, culture and memory through their unique perspectives.

Read Solomiya Siwak’s review of the exhibition below.

LOOKING NATIONALLY 👀

🔥 How much fossil fuel money did political parties take last year?

Fossil fuel companies shelled out the big bucks in the last financial year, spending millions of dollars on not just political parties, but organisations and lobby groups as well.

Just one example: Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting gave $895,000 to right-wing lobby group Advance Australia.

The National Account’s Archie Milligan has the rundown👇