Botany Bay and Catchment Alliance

When Bernie Clarke stepped forward at the official function at Government House in Sydney in June, 1989, to receive his Order of Australia Medal for services to the environment and conservation, the Governor, Rear Admiral Sir David Martin, shook his hand earnestly and said: ‘I hear you’re the Guardian of Botany Bay. Look after it for me, will you, it’s my favourite Bay.’

Indeed, Bernie Clarke has been doing just that on behalf of all Australians for almost 50 years.

His message is simple and deliberately shocking. He wants us to think and then act. ‘Botany Bay is the birthplace of our nation. It has a very special south-east corner called Towra Point which is rich in rainforest, mangroves, saltmarshes and seagrasses.’ It is incredible that this primordial remnant survives within the Sydney area.

His evidence is compelling enough. The lagoon where Captain Cook drew his drinking water for the Endeavour in 1770 – a source of freshwater for more than 7000 years – has been saline, as good as dead, for the past 15 years. Ancient banksia forests along Towra Point are dying and slipping into Botany Bay as the beach erodes. Over a lifetime, he’s witnessed the drastic changes to fish and birdlife resulting from the loss of more than half the Bay’s natural beaches and seagrass beds and the constant dredging for the 800 large ships which berth at Port Botany every year. ‘I’ve never been one for the concrete jungle. I like exploring. I’ve lived here for 76 years. I’ve observed these things’, he says matter of factly. ‘Captain Cook called this place Stingray Bay. You could fish for a week now and not catch a single stingray.’

More remarkable than this bleak picture is the determination and hope that Bernie Clarke brings to turning it around and saving what’s left. ‘We’ve got a mess,’ he says. Let’s do something about it’.

Bernie Clarke is certainly a doer. He campaigns for political change and action, yet at the same time he squishes around in the mud with school children re-planting mangroves. There isn’t a politician or a bureaucrat who has had anything to do with Botany Bay in recent decades who wouldn’t remember Bernie Clarke. He’s trodden on toes, he’s won respect and he’s refused to be fobbed off. ‘My philosophy is that if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you haven’t done anything.’

With his wife Belle operating quietly behind the scenes, he has demonstrated and popularised a practical model for coastal wetlands regeneration which could be used around much of Australia. Since the early 1990s, he’s planted more than 7500 mangroves to restore degraded areas in Botany Bay and some of its major rivers and creeks. He has adapted techniques for transplanting juvenile mangroves and growing mangroves from seed. Every year, he works with hundreds of children from the southern suburbs of Botany Bay, either taking them on environmental tours or directly involving them with his wetland restoration projects.

‘I have tremendous confidence in youth. They give me hope. They are a heck of a lot more ecologically aware than we were at their age.’

And in an inspiring example of what a ‘retired’ couple can do, once their own seven children left home, Bernie and Belle Clarke recreated a slice of Australian bush on their heavily sloping Oyster Bay waterfront block. Sandstone and angophoras line the ridge top. Down the bottom is a carefully revegetated inter-tidal wetland. Bernie Clarke must be the only man in Australia with 135 transplanted mangroves and half a dozen different species of saltmarsh flora including the glasswort Salicornia sp. in his back yard. ‘You can regenerate saltmarsh,’ he says. You know it is the voice of experience speaking.

In 1952, Bernie Clarke fought a campaign to stop the building of the Caltex oil refinery at Kurnell. They were the days when ‘development’ rather than ‘conservation’ was the national catchcry, and Bernie Clarke was considered almost un-Australian for even querying the multinational project. Of course, he lost.

Just over a decade later, he started another battle nearby. This time it was against a proposal to build an airport at Towra point. One day he got a telephone call from the well-known amateur ornithologist Arnold McGill who for several decades had been doing bird counts and surveys of Botany Bay.

‘Do you know about these migratory waders which visit every year?’ McGill asked. Clarke had no idea. He was absolutely amazed to find out that birds were flying up to 20,000 kilometres to Botany Bay from their northern hemisphere breeding grounds in Siberia, Alaska, Asia and the Arctic Circle.

Until then, he had been fighting for the protection of Kurnell and Towra Point on sentimental grounds as much as anything else. Certainly, he knew about and promoted the historical symbolism of Captain Cook’s first Australian landfall. But more than that, he remembered Kurnell and Towra as special places from his youth. As a teenager, he used to camp and tramp through these areas on his way to a shack that he and a mate had built out of timber and shingles on the ocean at Boat Harbour where they would explore and fish on weekends.

His father was a professional fisherman. ‘I was still in nappies when Dad was regularly taking me out on the Bay, pulling in lines and nets’. He restored his first boat – a ticket to adventure – when he was 12 years old. As a result, the young Bernie Clarke knew Botany Bay, its many moods and myriad fish.

But he didn’t know much else about its fauna or flora. ‘I didn’t know the difference between a pigeon and a wading bird, or an angophora and a blackbutt tree. Back then, a bird was a bird and a tree was a tree’. But Clarke seized upon the remarkable information from McGill about the waders and used it in his campaign to protect Towra Point. ‘I thought it was a great lever’. In one of Australia’s early conservation victories, the battle was won in 1968 and the runway was never built.

Five years later, largely on the basis of its significance as wading bird habitat, Clarke helped to persuade the then Federal Government to protect Towra Point by purchasing the land. At 430 hectares, it is now the largest conservation-protected area in Botany Bay.

His battle to protect the ecological integrity of Towra Point over decades is a classic example of what it required for successful conservation. Merely placing a secure conservation tenure over an area is not enough. It then must be properly managed, primarily for its conservation purpose.

The development of Port Botany and Sydney airport in recent decades has but eliminated natural beaches and intertidal habitat for migratory waders in the northern half of Botany Bay. This has made the remaining undeveloped areas on the southern side of the Bay even more important for conservation purposes.

In a sense, time has caught up with Towra. The area that seemed so timeless to Bernie Clarke as a child is now under more threat than ever. It can no longer be left to look after herself.

In his best endeavours to be an environmental guardian doing his part in looking after his county, Mr. Clarke has made some wonderful friends. Perhaps none more so than pioneering ‘birdos’ like Arnold McGill and Keith Hindwood. ‘McGill was a magnificent man and a brilliant ornithologist. He had to work for a living and do his bird work in his spare time. And yet he did more than most of the professionals today’. Another ‘birdo’, John Waugh was later responsible for identifying and tallying up the 34 different species of migratory waders which have been recorded on Towra Point.

Why is Bernie Clarke still campaigning? He replies simply: ‘Those people who first identified Botany Bay as an important waterfowl habitat – I’d like to think I’m helping to preserve the last remnant for them’.

Asked how he wants to be remember, he says: ‘I don’t want any accolades. If someone comes along and says, “Bernie Clarke planted those mangroves”, that’s all the satisfaction I want. It would be nice to be remembered as somebody who left something behind.’