The various sorts of very visible harm being visited on my home town Sliema, on its people and the quality of their lives, on its unique architectural heritage, on its iconic townscape, are accurately described in a series of articles in The Sunday Times of Malta (August 7) as “barbaric”.
Mark Anthony Falzon’s article in the same edition about another less visible (but no less real) degradation of the environment and of our quality of life, ‘the sea’ in Sliema (and elsewhere), triggers off other thoughts about ‘barbarism’ which I will pursue not as an argument but as a narrative, a true one, not fictional.
When I was a lad living in Sliema in the 1960s and early 1970s I swam virtually everywhere in its sea; from the rocks beneath Piccolo Padre to Tigné Point, but mainly in St Julian’s Bay.
My base was that stretch of beach called ‘The Exiles’. I remember going to what was then a natural beach (which people had only interfered with minimally) which was cleaned daily, and entering a sea, which was clean except for the occasional oil slick from the tankers that made us swear, and rich in the luxuriant variety of seaweed and creatures that inhabited it; the crabs (agus), shrimps, small colourful fish that swirled around one’s feet.
Today my movement is restricted to narrow ‘swimming zones’ ostensibly created for my protection from boats of all descriptions
When I dived with my snorkel it was into clear blue waters teeming with this life; a variety of rock fish of all descriptions: wrasse, bass, rainbow fish, moray eels and groupers included, octopus, squid and cuttle fish, and by every variety, colour and size of sea urchins; green, rust, purple.
St Julian’s Bay and beyond were my domain as I swam and snorkelled from one side to the other, to Balluta, Qaliet, even across the sea to the Dragonara and Merkanti Reef, only concerned by the occasional sighting of a shark that wandered too close inland.
Today I still swim at The Exiles but I go to a beach that is invariably filthy with discarded objects and charcoal residues and resembles an ashtray – that obtains relief only when it rains and every sort of litter is dragged into the sea. Large parts of the rocky shore are filled in with concrete, ostensibly to make them more accessible for swimmers.
The beach size is reduced by the construction of a huge bar/restaurant area, ostensibly a waterpolo pitch, following on its even more massive predecessors on the other side of the bay and at Għar id-Dud, and that even more massive ‘development’ to St Julian’s Bay, the Portomaso area.
The collective irreversible damage of this development to the ecology of the bay has never, to my knowledge, been assessed properly or otherwise.
But we who know its shores know that the myriads of those hardy little creatures called rock lice (dud) that once teemed everywhere in the rocky crevices and pools and provided one with ready fishing bait have long disappeared – what could have destroyed them, the whole colony of them, one asks?
The luxuriant seaweed is also no more, replaced by short, stumpy, colourless non-descript patches. The indigenous crabs (agus) disappeared with the seaweed from their home, and the once plentiful winkles, whelks, crabs and limpets are fast going the same way.
The once glorious sea-urchins are today black, fragile shadows of their ancestors and sparse, also nearly extinct. And the same is true of the fish and the non-existent octopus, and so on; they are long gone without trace in what can only be described as an environmental disaster.
Today my movement is restricted to narrow ‘swimming zones’ ostensibly created for my protection from boats of all descriptions; a claustrophobic string of buoy markers – the rest is off-limits for me but freely enjoyed by the invading boaters. And my distinct impression this year is that the distance from the buoys to the shore has shortened, and that my freedom of movement and my rights to enjoy the sea have been further strangled.
Is there a parable at work here, a frightening anticipation of the ‘social zones’ of Sliema in the future?