Following lines of oyster-shells: multispecies heritage in the shifting estuarine landscapes of Dyarubbin

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 places 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”. I will hold in tension two everyday understandings of “heritage” here: “the things we want to keep” and “the things we inherit” (Houston 2012 107). What might be the things that oysters and their kin might would 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.