Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Point Walter - then and now

Golly gosh, it's Friday already. I was thinking it was about Wednesday, but it can't be so. It was Wednesday that my wife and I parked the car near the Attadale shore of the Swan River and took Milly the Pup for a long walk to Point Walter.

Our minds must have been in old codgerland then as well, because we now realise that we must have walked past at least a half dozen "Dogs prohibited" signs. If a ranger had turned up we might have been slapped with a hundred dollar fine.

Point Walter has been a favourite river haunt of mine since I was a kid. It's changed a lot since the 1950s. It's been "developed." There's sealed roads, and alfresco cafe and a huge, ugly car and trailer park for stinkboat owners.

There are two main touristic focal-points for visitors. One is a long sandbar which extends westward into the river for about a kilometre. It's called the Point Walter Spit and is a sort of no-mans-land of drifting sand. It changes shape every season. At the moment much of it is submerged, so only the very adventurous folk walk out to the end. In fact I don't recall ever having seen so much of it submerged in the past as it was on Wednesday. In the picture you can see from the previous tideline that the water had been much higher in the previous 24 hours.

When I was a kid both sides of the spit were guarded by extensive beds of weed which was a haven for small fish such as cobblers (catfish) and schools of mullet. We kids would try to catch the mullet by throwing steel kylies amongst them.

Kylie is a regional word for boomerang. We made them from steel strapping purloined from building sites. They were simply bits of metal about an inch wide and a foot long,, then folded in the middle. Mullet were usually smarter than we were, plus kylies were quite easy to lose in the weed.

These days the water is crystal clear. There is no weed to be seen on either side of the spit, and no fish. The clear water has equated to aquatic sterility. Perhaps the lack of weed has also allowed the sand of the spit to move much more than in the past?

Adjacent to the start of the spit is the T shaped Point Walter Jetty. It used to be a very popular destination for daytripping ferries from Perth. It was a great place for swimming and I spent many summer afternoons there with my mates after school. There's a low landing with steps into the water on the shoreward side.

The jetty structure has undergone a few renovations since I was a kid, but is still fundamentally the same shape and size. In the fifties it hosted a great deal of fishing activity. In summers from dusk onwards fishermen and women occupied every possie and often had no problem in catching a feed of tailor, herring, garfish or crabs. (There were off times too.) The crabs were caught with baited dropnets which were flung twenty feet or so out to where the big'uns were supposed to be. There were few sights more anticipatory than watching a baited drop net being hauled back in every ten minutes or so.

The other thing I remember I used to do on the long section of the jetty was lean beneath the railing to catch cobblers with a gidgie as they swam into the dim light of a kerosene pressure lamp. Gidgie was another regional Aboriginal word, meaning fish spear.

Along the shoreline on summer nights one could see dozens of lamps belonging to prawning parties. A couple of men from each party would drag a prawn net back and forth on the sand banks. On return, the waiting women and children would sort the prawns from the jellyfish and weed, being ever careful not to be spiked by small cobblers in the process. The best prawn parties were when people actual caught some prawns and boiled them over an open fire. Fresh bread and butter and a few beers to accompany the prawns was essential for a successful beach party.

But now those sort of events no longer happen, like with dogs, beach fires are banned, and anyway there are no more prawns to catch. Nor are the waters teaming with any other types of fish.

Here is the link to a 180 degree panoramic image I made on Wednesday. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9788241 It shows the jetty and the shoreline where these simple pleasures were once pursued. The tranquil appearance is vastly different to fifty years ago. There are still some large introduced Morton Bay fig trees and larger Norfolk Island Pines visible, but most of the other vegetation, the buildings and other 'improvements' are more recent. There is some remnant native bushland on the hillside behind the shoreline, but this is being overtaken by South African weeds and feral olive trees.

As is usual with my panoramas, this one is best viewed when it's clicked to the maximum size. You never know what surprises you might find.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!