Dirty Ecologies: the Black Marlin in Allens Creek

Abstract

The shaky video shows the arc of its tail scything through brown water as the Black Marlin swims through the creek, hunting bream and tailor. The phone camera pans around and the built structures of the Port Kembla steelworks frame the scene, heavy trucks rolling over a concrete bridge, smokestacks and factories crowding the landscape. The most polluted creek in the Illawarra region of south-east Australia, Allens Creek flows through the steelworks, its banks lined with concrete and weeds, its waters littered with plastic, broken glass and rusting steel. Recently steelworkers watched amazed as that Black Marlin hunted in the shallow waters inside the steelworks itself