Clam collecting is in Lorraine Woolley’s blood. The Butchulla woman’s extraordinary granddad and granddad collected clams within the waters around Urangan and Burrum Heads in southeast Queensland.
“My granddad would go down and eat the shellfish off the rocks whereas us kids played,” she remembers.
“There was a part of clams, they weren’t indeed in beds, they would be joined to the mangroves in clusters.” Warning: Innate individuals are prompted there are pictures of middens in this story.
Lorraine’s individuals gathered clams well sometime recently her incredible granddad arrived from Ireland within the 1870s.
There are numerous hills of shells speckled all over her nation, says Ms. Woolley, who is the chairperson for the Butchulla Local Title Native Organization in Hervey Bay.
But there are now not any unique shellfish beds within the area. Ms. Woolley says the shellfish vanished since of malady and over-exploitation by European pioneers, who took the clam’s advance south to Moreton Cove within the late 1800s.
“My extraordinary granddad composed a letter and inquired them to halt doing it because he said they were ransacking the banks,” she said. “[Oyster beds] are like vegetable gardens. You have to replant a vegetable cultivate, and they fair kept taking them out.”
