This week on 2SER breakfast with Tim Higgins we continued to explore some of the content from the Your Community Heritage Program: Cooks River Project. Today we explored the little traditional fishing village of Booralee, a small community on the northern shores of Botany Bay, where the Cooks River flows into the bay, that has all but disappeared. Booralee was the Aboriginal name for the area. The Kameygal people fished along a long beach of sand and mud flats that stretched far into the bay, and the shallow waters teemed with sea life. Middens dotted along the beach and banks of the Cooks River are tell-tale signs that this was a good fishing ground. By the 1820s Botany Bay mud oysters were taken to Sydney and fishermen had settled at the end of what is now Bay Street, Botany. Two of the early settlers were the Puckeridge borthers. William Puckeridge and his brother John Puckeridge were lime-burners and net fishermen in the Botany area from about 1830 to the 1880s, and was continued on by following generations. The family kept their boats on a wharf in the Cooks River, which became known as Puck's wharf. Another family closing connected with Booralee was the Cuthberts. The Cuthbert family fished at Booralee for four generations, leaving in 1979. In the 1930s there were about 200 inhabitants. There are some great photographs in the Dictionary showing the fishermen and their families at work and play around Booralee. Fish were abundant and the rich-pickings meant that for many years fishing practices did not consider sustainability of resources. Staked nets, sometimes a mile long, were set up on the mud flats inside the low water mark and when the tide fell the fish were trapped on the sand banks. Fishermen then just picked up the fish they wanted but left the rest to rot. Liming and dynamiting of fish in tidal waters also took place whereby the fish were poisoned or stunned for an easy catch. Fishing regulations in the 1880s and 1930s curtailed some of these practices, but hand netting continued into the twentieth century. The fishing town was a close-knit community that, to outsiders, seemed frozen in time with its traditional ways passed down through the generations. Booralee's demise in the 1960s and 1970s was caused by a mix of overfishing and industrial development. The major developments of Port Botany and Sydney Airport severed its close connection with the sea. Today the area has no direct access to Botany Bay or the Cooks River, the cornerstones of its livelihood. That's enough fishing through Sydney's history for this week. You can reel in the podcast and read more about this remarkable place in Joanne Sippel's fascinating article on Booralee fishing village. And don't forget to join us again next Wednesday at 8.20am on 2SER Breakfast 107.3FM as Tim and I haul in some more great stories about Sydney's past, courtesy of the Dictionary of Sydney.