Meg wray cv 1. PastedGraphic-1. Cooks River - Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust - Sydney, Australia. Original vegetation communities in the Cooks River Valley. Cooks River runs into the northern side of Botany Bay. It is shown on Cook's map, evidence that he explored it for some distance, but it was not until the First Fleet's brief stay in 1788 that Governor Phillip and some of the officers explored the River at the NW side of the bay which we went up for about 6 miles, finding the Country low & boggy, & no appearance of fresh water ... An arm of the sea was the succinct description used by Lieutenant William Bradley of the Sirius when he charted the course of the river in December 1789.
The once-extensive estuary of the Cooks River, with its meandering channel and mudflats and mangroves, has now been totally obliterated by the runways of Sydney Airport. It is hard to visualise the original river but perhaps the most tangible evidence of the original vegetation patterns are some plans prepared in the 1880s for the Surveyor-General. Cooks River - species list. Cooks River/ Castlereagh Ironbark Forest. Atlas of Living Australia.