Kurnell is a no-fuss, unpretentious place given that it’s supposed to be the cradle of the nation. Stretching along a promontory that looks like a witch’s finger pointing west from the southern shore of Botany Bay, opposite Sydney Airport, Kurnell is a hotchpotch sprawl of fibro modesty and glass-and-steel ambition, where trailered speedboats rest on the verges and Aussie flags snap on front-yard poles. Nestled in Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Kurnell overlooks a mass of water lacking the frenetic beauty of luminous sails and green and gold ferries, and of some of the international signature structures of modernity, that characterise that other vast nearby inlet that the colonists instead chose as the harbour for their penal settlement.

Its cross-bay vista, more Jeffrey Smart than Brett Whiteley, is of the big jets levitating over the ever-frantic north–south runways, the containers, cargo ships, breakwaters, piers and giant straddle cranes of Port Botany and, off to the right, the breakers foaming on the cliffs about La Perouse, home to two French naval ships for six weeks in 1788 and still Sydney’s most enduring Indigenous settlement. As you enter Kurnell along Captain Cook Drive you’ll pass the monolithic tanks of Sydney’s seawater desalination plant, exemplar of twenty-first- century engineering built in anticipation of Sydney’s now-extant twin perils of overpopulation and climate emergency, and, close by, the local community, sports and rec club with its Endeavour Chinese restaurant (a nearby café has the same name) offering Australian, Thai and Malay cuisine.