TODAY IS ‘HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA’ DAY’

January 26th is known throughout the Land Down Under as ‘History of Australia Day’.  Here in New York, the significance of Sydney’s Botany Bay is celebrated from the shores of New York Harbor and Brooklyn’s Lower Bay.  The back-story of Australia’s colonization is a central theme of the traditional folk song lyrics of ‘Botany Bay’.

As the recording session evolved on the eve of History of Australia Day, American football fans watched two bay city teams compete in the playoffs for the upcoming Super Bowl.  The Green Bay Packers challenged the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Under the aura of modern day sport spectacles, these host cities should be recognized for their historical significance in the pantheon of coastal port centers.  In this light, New York Harbor’s Lower Bay offers a welcome to its distant equal across the planet.

New York and Sydney share a lot in common, especially in times of climate change and the pandemic.  We share the pain that has affected all countries as quarantines are mandatory for all professional sports, music, and social gatherings.  In advance of the Australian Open in nearby Melbourne, the players have all arrived in Australian two weeks before the start of the Grand Slam tennis tournament.  New York’s U.S. Open tournament will follow this August in our summer season.  The global health protocols in large venues will obviously remain the same.  Meanwhile, Climate Change has ravaged Australia recently.  Flora and fauna slowly returns from the devastating fires along the Australian East Coast in 2019.  Both port cities have architectural plans to battle the rising sea levels that threaten their infrastructures.

AUSTRALIA’S COLONIZATION HISTORY

Historically, both New York and Sydney have their modern origins thanks in large part to colonization of the eighteenth century.  Native American Indians and Australian Aborigines alike witnessed the sudden in-habitation of strange new cultures on their native lands.  Emigration from one region to another is a constant global movement.  There isn’t a single continent that hasn’t experienced mass relocation.  Cultural integration is planet Earth’s story.   The harmony sung by the Brooklyn Bards is nothing short of a historical celebration.  The song lyrics cry, ‘For to take a trip on an immigrant ship to the shores of Botany Bay’.

 

 

With the end of Britain’s colonization in North America at the hands of the American Revolution, Britain’s Colonization efforts shifted to lands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  Captain James Cook’s landed on the peninsula in 1770 that eventually became known as Sydney.  The HMS Endeavor carried the naturalist, Joseph Banks, who studied and catalogued flora and fauna.  So respected was Bank’s scientific discoveries, the waters were called ‘Botanist Bay’.  Eventually, the name changed to Botany Bay in the newly claimed colony of New South Wales.

Despite Banks’ report of poor soil and no reliable water source, more than a thousand settlers arrived on January 26th, 1788.  Included were 736 ‘convicts’ who were banished from England.  As criminals could no longer be shipped off to the American colonies with the victory in 1783, Australia had the distinct honor of becoming the British Isles new ‘penal colony’.  It was a sixty year practice by the British government to transport convicts to Botany Bay.  The six month ocean journey was marked by no less than a ten percent death rate of the passenger list, most of them chained in the cargo holds for the duration of the trip.

EMIGRATION FROM THE BRITISH ISLES

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1855 was Britain’s most devastating natural event causing the exodus of two million people.  780 thousand emigrated to America.   Many of the Irish became Longshoremen of America’s East Coast Port cities.  The 1849 California Gold Rush attracted miners and farmers who brought their pick-axes and shovels.  Sydney Australia welcomed a good portion of the rest.   Stories abound of Irish families that worked the soil or worked the seas taking up new residence in far-away lands.

The Botany Bay folk song offers the following lines as the good ship Ragamuffin sets sail from the British Isles.  The Bards harmonize, ‘When I reach Australia I’ll go and search for gold, There’s plenty there for digging up or so I have been told.  Or maybe I’ll go back to me trade, 800 bricks I’ll lay for an 8 hour shift and an 8 bob pay on the shores of Botany Bay.’

THE TUNE’S THEATER ORIGIN IN LONDON

‘Botany Bay‘ became popular as a show tune first heard in a London musical burlesque in 1885.  The British composer waited thirty years to honor, with great derring-do, the men and women who took the daring yet desperate journey to foreign countries as immigrants.  ‘Botany Bay’ was considered the ultimate romantic notion in the theatre circuit district of Piccadilly and West End.  Before the turn of the nineteenth century, it was fashionable in entertainment circles to popularize folk music and integrate it into theater spectacles.  Until this time, traditional Irish Folk Music could only be found in the British Isles port-side pubs and countryside taverns.

JOIN IN AND CELEBRATE THE HARD-WORKING LYRICS OF THE SONG

In the years before Covid-19, patrons of Irish pubs and taverns would sing along to the Bards, hoisting a pint, reveling in ‘The best years of our lives we spent working on the docks building mighty wharves and quays of earth and ballast rocks.’

But recently, the Sea Shanty craze on Tik-Tok caught fire.  Stephen Colbert’s nightly show occupied two consecutive monologues where he encouraged his followers to join the chorus.  Brooklyn’s answer to the Wellerman’s Irish Fair performance is also found on Tik-Tok.  We invite you to add your contributions at  LINK.

There you’ll hear….

‘Farewell to your bricks and mortar, farewell to your dirty lime,

Farewell to your gangways and gang planks and to hell with your overtime’.

 

THE RECORDING SESSION

Port-side pubs and countryside taverns are exactly the atmosphere Brooklyn Bard music breathes.   Listen to some choice takes from Botany Bay, one of the album tracks that will be available on social media music platforms later this month.  The Brooklyn Bard band members take a few minutes to express their feelings about performing the song, origins of their instruments, as well as offering their own histories.

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As the Maine lobster population migrates north into Canadian waters, an alarming five-foot long Lion’s Mane Jellyfish was discovered on a Maine beach earlier this month.   Since 2015, these giants of the Arctic have occasionally appeared along the Maine coastline; however, their dimension has never been as large as the monsters we are seeing today.

CITIZEN SCIENTISTS ON THE LOOKOUT

A researcher connected to the Gulf Of Maine Research Institute, Dr. Nick Record, began to log the unusual sightings during that summer of 2015.  He posted his request to recruit anyone who came upon the Lion manes to enter the data on his Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences weblog and send photographs for verification.  Citizen scientists were responsive to his call.

Fast-forward to 2020, Dr. Record was interviewed earlier this week by the local Boston television station to shed light on the dozens of sightings in Maine and around Massachusetts Bay this month.

Admittedly, Dr. Record and his associates cannot offer a valid reason for the unusual jellyfish migration behavior.  He states that there is no good historic data yet to develop predictive models.  Once again, this year, his group needs to track the species everyone is seeing as he builds a library of jellyfish sightings.  Even without data, New England beach-goers overwhelmingly say that climate change is real and it is here.

Craig Gilvarg, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs has also weighed in on the world’s largest species of jellyfish, named Cyanea capillata.   He corresponds on their Facebook page, “Their bell-shaped bodies alone can stretch as wide as 8 feet. If they live in plankton-rich waters their tentacles can grow to be as long as blue whales, which often span nearly 90 feet.”

Lion mane jellyfish are abundant and common to the North Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans.   They are related to coral and anemones, not fish.  Jellyfish are faring better than coral as the oceans become more acetic with climate change.  Lion mane bodies are 98 percent water.  Lion mane jellyfish use their tentacles to capture small fish although their main diet is zooplankton.  This species is thought to be at least 500 million years old that dates them back to dinosaurs.

Lion Mane Jellyfish should not be confused with the Lion Fish.  Lion Fish are not accustomed to cold water climates as they are most commonly found in Cuba and Florida.   Lion Fish are also poisonous with barbs.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) research vessel, Ocean Explorer, has recently conducted science data gathering of the Lion Mane Jellyfish.  In 2019, the crew descended into the deep underwater environs of Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.  Seafloor mapping and exploration will continue this summer.

THE JELLYFISH IMAGE THAT BLEW UP SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter handle UberFacts shared an image of a Lion mane approximately five times the size of a diver next to it on October 25th, 2015.  Within the hour, there were more than two thousand retweets.  The photo caption read, “In 1870, a Lion’s Mane Jellyfish washed up onto Massachusetts bay with tentacles measuring 120 feet (73 meters) making it larger than a blue whale.”  Naturally, it caught the attention of the marine biology community.  It wasn’t long before the Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Dr. Craig McClain, to write that he knew the picture had been doctored.  He found the same photo without the diver next to it.  Sensationalism won out as the Lion mane is now prominently in the public eye.

HOW DO JELLYFISH MOVE AND MIGRATE

Researchers are collecting data to determine if Jellyfish migration is purposeful or accidental.  The marine scientific community does not offer a genetic or learned mechanism as a reason for jellyfish to move over the ocean like salmon or whales who return to the same location annually to spawn.  Jellyfish commonly float in currents, but they do swim by contracting their bell-shaped body.

Jellyfish models have been the cornerstone of robotic propulsion.  Only recently, a study at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute discovered their propulsion to be extremely efficient as they experimented with jellyfish-inspired robots that could pulsate through the oceans to measure temperature and salinity with limited use of energy.

As of today’s post, only the New England coastline has reported sightings and encounters.  With the Covid-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on professional sports, the betting industry might be interested on taking odds on the chances the Lion mane bloom will be coming to New York and New Jersey beaches?

TREATING THE STING OF A LION MANE JELLYFISH

New York and New Jersey ocean enthusiasts have lived with a variety of stinging jellyfish over the past four decades.  Portuguese Man-o-War have visited our shores and thankfully, the Box Jellyfish has not made its appearance to date. “If a beach-goer encounters a lions mane jellyfish, they should move slowly up current and away from the animal to avoid tentacle exposure.” Craig Gilvarg offers. “If stung, flush the tentacles away from the affected area with clean seawater thoroughly and don’t rub the area until the tentacles are gone.”   A sting is extremely painful, but not life-threatening.  There are people who are allergic to the venom, so all should be vigilant.

REPORT YOUR SIGHTING OF A LION’S MANE JELLYFISH

We suggest beach-goers, fishermen, swimmers, boaters and all Citizen Scientists be vigilant and immediately report to your local administrations.  If you like, you can report your discovery of the Lion Mane to Jellyfish.org sighting page.  Sightings along the Gulf of Maine should be reported here to Dr. Record’s page.  You can also contact us here at New York Harbor Channel.

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