Current location:	Australia
Current music:	Song Of The Seas - Vangelis
Entry tags:	leslie rees, marine species exploitation, marine turtles, oral history methodology, turtle research

Marine turtle writings

I was recently sent a draft of an excellent research paper on the history of marine turtle exploitation in Western Australia. Exploitation meaning hunting, killing and butchering for commercial purposes. These graceful creatures were not always accorded the protection they are now. The paper was by Brooke Halkyard who has affiliations with the Wildlife Research Centre, Dept of Environment & Conservation.

I was pleased to see that my former effort, (Weaver P. 1998. An Oral History of Ningaloo Reef. Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia) was of some use to Brooke. Apart from collecting anecdotal data on marine exploitation I devised a focussed methodology specifically intended to assist future oral historians maintain a focussed approach. I’ve uploaded my original 1998 final report to my popular Scribd site with the title An Oral History of Ningaloo Reef - Weaver 1998.

Her working paper is titled Exploiting Green and Hawksbill Turtles in Western Australia. A Case Study of the Commercial Marine Turtle Fishery, 1869 – 1973 It’s now publicly available as WP 160 on Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre website.

I was interested to read in her study that the Point Peron turtle soup factory slightly south of Fremantle was established as early as 1903.  I recall my father pointing out the quite large wooden building when I was a boy in the early 1950s.  It was very close to the shoreline, which is logical considering that the live turtles brought down from the north used to be kept in adjacent pens to await their awful fate.

The area has a diverse heritage of maritime exploitation.  In the 1950s there used to be whale hunting vessels tied up at the nearby Palm Beach jetty.  The Point Peron area was also used by Sicilian fishermen from the 1880s. Exactly how and when they arrived is uncertain because they are not mentioned in official immigration records.  An Austrian registered ship Honor which called at nearby Rockingham to load timber in 1883 and 1885 is suspected of being their carrier. This ship also visited Spencer’s Gulf in South Australia on at least two occasions and is believed to have unlawfully landed Italian fishermen there. The push factor for these ‘boat people’ from the Mediterranean is thought to have been the collapse of the Sicilian tuna industry. 

There was a comment on p16 of Brooke's paper that there was little public sentiment for the fate of turtles in the past, but obviously this attitude as changed.  Like whales and dolphins, turtles have become anthropomorphised for many ppeople. I wonder if popular childrens’ literature such as by the Australian author leslie Rees played a role in reshaping post-WW2 public attitudes in Australia? For example his enormously popular 1947 work,  The Story of Sarli; The Barrier Reef Turtle which was beautifully illustrated by Walter Cunningham. Many of the Rees books encouraged in their whimsical way a greater awareness amongst ‘baby boomer’ children of Australian fauna, and of course those children grew to be much more environmentally aware adults.  Just a thought.


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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!