ABSTRACT
This chapter began at the waterline on Dyarubbin, a flooded river valley on the east coast of the landmass that is now called Australia. These briny waters are a good place for oysters. I will trace ways that landscapes of value emerge and are destroyed in the sometimes caring but often violent interactions between Sydney rock oysters and Pacific oysters, their parasites, the Dharug, Darkinjung and Garigal peoples and settler colonists in Dyarubbin/the Hawkesbury River. I want to try to think about what oysters, as well as humans, worms, viruses, fish, invertebrates, seagrasses and other critters that flourish around these shellfish and in the habitats they create, might consider “heritage”. What might be the things that oysters and their kin might want to keep, or the things that they might want to pass on or inherit in this estuarine environment? Imagining oysters – molluscs farmed for food – as having a heritage is jolting. My aim in this chapter is to use this jolt – a bump against the presence of oysters in an unexpected place – to think through what the concept of multispecies heritage might have to offer.
