“We have cordoned off the area to leave this creature in peace and safe from the attention of people,” Randwick Council mayor, Dr Clare Willington, told reporters.... beacuse it is a dead whale!
Willington said there were no plans to remove the whale and that staff were working with Gamay Rangers about a culturally and environmentally sensitive approach to take.
Well, I wouldn't suggest blowing it up, that usually doesn't go well…
But why the emphasis on cultural aspects, and why prioritise them over health and safety or hygiene concerns.
The Gamay Rangers are an Indigenous ranger team who undertake natural and cultural resource management activities like protection work, conservation, and threatened species management in the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council area.The whale is an important totem animal to the local Bidjigal people, and Gamay Rangers manager Robert Cooley said previous instances where beached animal carcasses were taken to landfill had distressed his community.
Ridiculous pandering to the ‘culture’ of primitive folk who never invented the wheel!
"primitive folk who never invented the wheel!"
ReplyDeleteNo, but they did invent a stick you can't throw away.
In a world where a museum withdraws Egyptian mummies from an exhibit because the deceased have not given informed consent for their remains to being put on show to the public, demanding that a dead whale be given ‘peace and safety’ seems par for the course.
ReplyDelete(Actually, tbf, the mummy thing does have a certain resonance for someone who read Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and August Derleth at an impressionable age…)
I wonder how the local tribe will feel about this sacred creature when the internal gasses as it rots, and the weight of it, causes it to explode? The Gamay Rangers may need to change their name to The Gammy Rangers.
ReplyDeletePenseivat
Odd that leaving it to rot, and presumably to be dismantled by scavengers, is more "culturally sensitive" than burying it.
ReplyDeleteThe authorities did miss a trick though by not re-defining the land fill site a a historic whale burial site and paying a local wise man a few dollars to bless it. Or something.
John Tee