Forty Baskets Beach

Another fabulous inner Sydney Harbour picnic and safe swimming spot.

Another fabulous inner Sydney Harbour picnic and safe swimming spot.

Forty Baskets Beach is usually a secluded little beach in Balgowlah with a netted tidal pool in the middle, but on a hot Invasion Day morning it was far busier than usual. Before colonisation it was used by original custodians the Gai-marigal people and there is a midden deposit under the grassy area at the back of the beach. According to historic sources, this midden even yielded skeletons, the last of which were removed in the 1970s. I read that they ended up in museums. Typical. The name? It commemorates an epic fishing catch hauled in there in the late 19th Century, which was used to feed a group of soldiers who were detained in the nearby Quarantine Station after returning from the war in Sudan. The echoes of the history of British settler colonialism linger here in other forms too, from the trees that were poisoned by some of the residents to improve their view, to today’s land grabs of public space by rows of blue and white cool cabanas. Sydney’s obsession with real estate writ small. It’s a tough day to feel positive about anything much, but we could tell that on any other day we would have thought this was a pretty place with all the things: outdoor showers, change room BBQs and free parking on the adjacent streets. The crowd were mostly local white families, interspersed with Fijian and other Pasifikan First Nations families who were having great fun. Seeing the latter enjoying their day in and around the pool made us smile despite everything.