‘We’re still here’: La Perouse community retains strong connection to culture and Country

<span>‘This is our country’: Kodie Mason’s family have lived in the tight-knit La Perouse Indigenous community for seven generations.</span><span>Photograph: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian</span>
‘This is our country’: Kodie Mason’s family have lived in the tight-knit La Perouse Indigenous community for seven generations.Photograph: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian

Plucking the grass from a lomandra plant, Kodie Mason braids three strands of bright green flax. She breaks one off and splits it down the centre. Less than 30 seconds later she has a small coil, the makings of a basket. She’s been weaving since she was little, a skill passed down from her grandfather.

Mason has an intimate knowledge of plants: what to eat, which ones can be used to make soap or shampoo, which ones can be ground to make bread, the ones to stun fish.

She cups the seeds from one plant: “You cut it when it’s green, husk it, and then when it dries up, like that, all the seeds come out and you ground that down into a flour to make bread, cookies, stuff like that.”

The Dharawal, Ngarigo and Dunghutti woman grew up surrounded by her parents, aunties, uncles, cousins and siblings at La Perouse, in Sydney’s east, all under the watchful eye of her pop who told her stories.

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“He taught me so much. All about plants that you use, all about the bay, and he taught me weaving,” Mason says.

For seven generations, Mason’s family has lived on land that was formerly an Aboriginal reserve and mission. Five generations of Masons have lived in her current home, where freedom to roam the bush and to fish and swim in local waters was a given.

The homes here are on 99-year leases, granted by the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. It’s given the people here the security to thrive despite development, gentrification and rising house prices in an area just 14km from the CBD. “It’s really expensive here now, a lot of families wouldn’t be able to afford to live here if it weren’t for this community,” she says.

It’s not just the people who are feeling the impacts of a rapidly changing world. She points to one plant that used to be abundant – even a few decades ago kids would eat its juicy purple tendrils.

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“It doesn’t grow like that any more. We can only eat a certain amount of fish [because of] pollution, overfishing. Oysters, abalone – we used to eat so much. Our old women used to be able to walk along the rocks and pick off abalone with a digging stick. Now you have to practically kill yourself diving five metres to get anything,” she says.

Aboriginal families have an unbroken connection to La Perouse of more than 7,500 years, but they bore the brunt of the impact of settlers who were hungry for land. More Aboriginal people moved to the area from the late 1800s, settling close to the current homes of the community.

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Local Aboriginal families – salt water people – used their knowledge to catch and sell fish and seafood. But in the 1890s, the government threatened to withdraw rations if fishers continued to sell their wares.

Disease, violence and land development further reduced resources, including the once plentiful fish, abalone and bush foods, forcing many people to live under state control until the late 1960s. Children were removed from their families, traditional languages were prohibited, and basic freedoms were severely restricted.

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“We were the first ones hit by colonisation,” Mason says. “My family are Gweagal, so they were literally ‘first contact’ just across the bay here. I feel proud to have such a strong connection to my culture, such a strong connection to my family, my community.”

Her people have continued the fight for their culture and their rights. One of the longest disputes with the colonising powers was the community’s demand for the return of the Kamay spears, stolen by then Lt James Cook and his crew in 1770. About 40 spears were taken aboard the HMB Endeavour at the time of first contact. Many were lost or destroyed. Four remaining spears, cut down to fit the ship, were held for many years by Cambridge University. After decades of campaigning by local Gweagal people, they were returned to their traditional lands in 2024.

“It’s very sad to think of how much we have lost, but I think about how much our people have gone through,” she says.

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“We are able to say this is our country. We’re still here. We’re still practising our culture, still speaking language. I feel proud to come from La Pa. So it’s good.”

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La Perouse was named after an ill-fated French navigator, Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse, who was sent by Louise XVI to explore the South Pacific. After visiting Botany Bay in 1788, he and his crew disappeared at sea without a trace.

Standing at the point of first contact in Botany Bay, Theresa Ardler looks out to sea. Ardler often thinks about what the county looked like before Europeans arrived.

“In our language it means ‘beautiful bay’. Even though it’s very different now [compared with] … 1770.

“It’s a story of a view from the ship and a view from the shore. And I think that sort of story should be told all around Australia,” she says.

Ardler, a Gweagal and Yuin woman with family ties to the La Perouse community, creates possum cloaks and burns totems on them. Her skills were honed sitting at the feet of her elders.

“We didn’t have message sticks. We had our cloaks, and the cloaks would be made in two different ways. One would be a blanket stitch. The mother and the grandmother would start the cloak with the possum skins,” she says.

“When the children were about five or 10 years old, then they would learn the techniques of the different sewing between a blanket stitch and a herringbone stitch.”

Passing on traditional knowledge and its power as a source of resilience and pride and cultural responsibility is vital, says Peter Cooley, CEO of IndigiGrow, an Indigenous owned and operated plant nursery that began in 2018.

Born and raised on the La Perouse reserve, Cooley noticed many kids were growing up without knowing anything about the vegetation, its uses and how it thrived for generations. It was something he was keen to teach.

“Growing up Aboriginal, you have this cultural responsibility to Country and caring for Country. That’s been happening for hundreds, if not thousands of generations before us, but at present, we’re the generation that has that responsibility,” Cooley says.

More than 90% of the biological diversity of the eastern coastal plants endemic to this area have been decimated by colonisation, feral animals and invasive non-native plants, he says.

“It’s all out of balance now,” Cooley says. “Our history of sustainability and caring for this ancient landscape in this part of the country, to be on the verge of extinction, that’s a frightening thing for us – to think it could be gone one day is horrifying.”

He tells the story of the Five Corners bush food, or Styphelia viridis, an ecologically threatened species that – through colonisation, change and apathy – has been pushed to the brink of extinction. The plant is notorious for being impossible to grow.

“Everybody told me that you couldn’t grow it but they didn’t have that ancient connection,” Cooley says. He tried and failed 50 times. But with perseverance, careful propagation and nurturing, he eventually succeeded in getting one plant to flower and then harvested its fruit, which are known as “bush lollies”.

“I asked my mother when was the last time she ate them. She said 59 years. For me, it had been 50 years. I didn’t realise the significance until then: three generations eating that fruit together.

“I promised my mother that I would revive the Five Corners plant. It’s so important. That was the start of IndigiGrow,” he says. But the heart and soul of his plan is to pass on knowledge and skills to the next generation.

“I’ve got 12 full-time employees, all Aboriginal, all from the La Perouse local community … and they are loving it.”

Kodie Mason is also proud to continue a long Indigenous legacy of using native plants, in her case, using grasses to make baskets. “It’s everything to me, making my family and my pop proud.”