Qualla: Kamay Botany Bay National Park

Kamay Botany Bay National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E. Phillips Fox, Public domain. From the shore at Kurnell, the Gweagal saw something that did not belong to the world they knew. The oral memory passed down speaks of a great white bird, or a floating island, moving along the coast in the days before the 29th of April, 1770. Further south, the Yuin people understood it as Gurung-gubba, the pelican of their Dreaming. It was none of these. It was Lieutenant James Cook's Endeavour, and it was about to drop anchor in the bay the Gweagal called Kamay. What happened on that beach over the next eight days would be retold for centuries, claimed and contested, because it was here that two entirely separate human histories — one tens of thousands of years deep, one arriving on the tide — first looked each other in the eye.

Image: E. Phillips Fox | Public domain

Kamay Botany Bay National Park: Eight Days at Kamay

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cook's arrival broke every rule of the country he was entering. In Aboriginal law a visitor waits to be invited; instead the Endeavour anchored off a small village and Cook prepared to land uninvited on Gweagal ground. Two warriors met the boats, painted in ceremonial ochre, and ...

Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kamay Botany Bay National Park: The First Harvest of Specimens

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J Bar, CC BY-SA 3.0. While the encounter unfolded, two other men aboard were filling boxes with a different kind of cargo. The botanist Joseph Banks and the naturalist Daniel Solander walked the landing place and the wetlands now called Towra Point, collecting plants no European science had ever reco...

Image: J Bar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kamay Botany Bay National Park: The French at La Perouse

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J Bar, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eighteen years after Cook, the bay drew another set of sails. In January 1788 the French expedition of Jean-François de Lapérouse arrived on the northern shore — on the very day, the 26th, that the First Fleet was abandoning Botany Bay for the better harbour at Port Jackson. The ...

Image: J Bar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kamay Botany Bay National Park: Where Resistance Endures

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0. The story did not stop with the ships. White settlement spared this land at first but not its people; smallpox and other diseases tore through the area, and there are caves nearby where remains from those outbreaks are believed to have been found. Through the nineteenth and twent...

Image: Maksym Kozlenko | CC BY-SA 4.0