Shack life and crayfish defined four villages 220 kilometres north of Perth for more than five decades. But 2020 delivered a double whammy that nearly spelled the end.
For a long time, the coastline north of Perth was known only to more adventurous types.
The one bitumen road from the state capital — the Brand Highway — was 50 kilometres inland so keen fishermen and vacationers had to negotiate narrow tracks through sand and scrub, or create their own tracks, to reach the sea.
When they got there it was rich with snapper, dhufish and grouper, but in the post-WWII years Italian and Portuguese migrants joined Australian fishermen after another delicacy — the western rock lobster. Lobster was popular in the United States and Americans who served in army bases along the WA coast sent word back home of the plentiful supply Down Under.
Soon corrugated iron and fibro cement shacks began sprouting along the coast, creating four shambolic fishing villages — Wedge Island, Green Island (later renamed Grey), Cervantes and Jurien Bay.
Jetties were built and, in Cervantes and Jurien Bay, small factories opened to process and transport the catch of crustaceans to Fremantle and export to the US.
Jurien Bay, 220 kilometres north of Perth, was gazetted a town in 1956 but it remained an isolated tin and fibro frontier for another decade.
That's when Ian Boyd arrived, with wife Beryl and two young children.
"When we lobbed here in 1965, we were the first family to live here 12 months of the year to go fishing. When we came here there was no bitumen roads, no power, no water. There was just two rows of shacks," Boyd says, now 83 and long retired after more than four decades at sea.
"When I built my first house back in 1968," he says, "I invited the whole town over for a house-warming party and everybody turned up — the whole 13 of us.
"We didn't have tourists, we didn't have shops, we didn't have anything in those days."
Despite the challenges, the bays of the four fledgling villages were crowded with fishing boats. "One year — 1966, I think — we had 108 boats moored off Jurien Bay," Boyd says.
"It was dangerous in the early days because we didn't have radars and you'd go out in the dark and didn't know if there was a big swell or not.
"A lot of boats in the early days got tipped over and people got drowned. It was tough like that."
And nobody was getting rich. "We all thought we were making a living but we weren't. In 1965 we were getting seven shillings and thruppence a pound for crays. If you work that out" — 75 cents for 4.5 kilograms — "it wasn't really much but it was a way of life and we didn't know any different."
More than five decades later, the four fishing villages have somehow managed to survive a changing industry and a new highway and the subdivisions that came with it.
That was until a shock double blow in 2020 — COVID and the Chinese ban on Australian lobsters — threatened out-sized change once more.
But doing it tough is in the towns' DNA.
Life in the shacks
To see the embryos from which Cervantes and Jurien Bay grew, you don't have to go far.
The two former fishing villages of Wedge Island and Grey remain shantytowns. Their survival has been a struggle and their futures are tenuous.
Once local fisherman had all moved to better housing in Cervantes, Perth families started buying the shacks, much to the chagrin of the WA government's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) and the Dandaragan shire, who have been trying to remove them for decades.
Dandaragan shire president Leslee Holmes, herself a resident and former owner of the town's caravan park, does little to hide her disdain for them.
"When the Indian Ocean Drive went through, they were meant to be demolished … [but] each government hasn't had the guts to do that."
Despite restricting the sale of shacks once an owner passes away, the DBCA acknowledges the villages are a unique part of the region's history and in 2010 the National Trust recommended they be heritage listed. However, the government decided that "would be contrary to a government policy in relation to illegal occupation of crown land".
Holmes recognises the villages' historical value but says, "you don't need all the shacks to have the significance. You can just have one. As far as we're concerned, it's a difficult situation because the Perth ratepayers should be able to plonk their caravans there."
Since 1995, shack owners have had to pay leases that have risen sharply in recent years, a tactic described by Holmes as, "trying to get rid of people quietly, like a thumbscrew almost".
Ross Tapper bought his shack — Sinkatinny Downs — in Grey in 1980 for $4,000.
"It's my home for six months of the year," the resourceful Tapper says.
"Any simple thing that breaks [in Perth], you’d go five minutes down to the shop and replace it. Here it’ll take you a day or a week … you just learn to fix things."
For the 183 days of the year — the maximum permitted — that Tapper lives in his well-appointed shack in the Grey village, he pays a licence fee of $2,800 plus the compulsory $750 indemnity insurance. Rates are significantly less in most Perth suburbs.
Tapper remembers the fishermen's strong community bond, back when he bought his shack.
"There used to be a recreation area that had a pool table and tennis court," he said. "And they used to run mice races on a table with lanes and bet on them. There was no shortage of mice."
He laments how everyone once knew everyone, "but it's changed since shacks were sold and other people came in. I don't know half the people, here now."
The shack is his home all spring and summer (during autumn and winter Tapper lives in Vietnam) and he spends his time gold prospecting. When asked where, he reluctantly points eastward and says, "out there."
An industry under pressure
While things have changed on land, the changes at sea are even starker as the cray industry has ebbed and flowed.
In 2010, the WA government imposed catch limits on professional cray fishermen. Those hauling in some 200 kilograms of lobster per craypot per year were restricted to 71 kilograms per pot.
This inflated the price of craypot licences, says former fisherman Jeff Palmer.
"A licence used to cost $12,000. Then it went to quota and the price of pots went through the roof, to $87,000 just prior to the [2020] Chinese embargo."
Palmer retired several years ago and now makes a new style of craypot from his home in Cervantes.
"But each pot costs $136 to make and I sell them for $150, so what am I going to do?"
Dorothy Boys, a volunteer with the Cervantes Historical Society, says when she arrived in 1992, there were 54 fishing boats in town.
"Now there's about four. It's similar to farming — someone buys me out and they buy someone else out. In fishing it was bigger boats and more [craypot] licenses and less men."
Palmer said quotas made cray fishing less financially viable for the smaller operators and took a lot of people out of the industry, including Ian Boyd, who's scathing in his assessment of the government's decision.
"I had two sons, Ian and Peter, with three boats … and we then had no hope of existing in the industry at 71 kilos per pot."
Boyd claims businesses, sporting clubs, house prices and families all suffered as a result of the decision. "One of my sons is now driving buses up at Geraldton and the other one is a fly-in-fly-out worker at the Tom Price mine."
Bigger fishing businesses — like David "Dogga" Thompson's — were better able to absorb and adapt to the change.
From humble beginnings in a shack in the mid-1960s, David — and later his three sons Michael, Matthew and David — grew to become an industry on their own.
By the mid-1980s the family had a fleet of 13 boats and in 2008 they took over the local processing plant.
Two years later it was re-modelled as the Lobster Shack, complete with a restaurant and bar, and the business now offers accommodation and sea lion tours.
General manager Nikki Thompson, the wife of David Jnr, said, "We consolidated and had less boats running but more pots to increase each boat's catch," she said, adding, "Quotas were an extremely good thing for the industry. It meant that we could feed our market and supply our customers all year round whereas previously people couldn't get any crays for four months of the year because you could drop your market [stop fishing] and pick it back up again [when demand and price were higher]."
What the company's size couldn't protect them from was the dual horrors of 2020 — COVID and the Chinese embargo on Australian lobster.
China was the Thompson's biggest market for lobsters and tourists and when the borders shut and the embargo kicked in, business almost ground to a halt. But again, Thompson says the company adapted by targeting the domestic market.
Towns stuck in stasis
While the Lobster Shack in Cervantes has begun to grow again, the same can't be said of the town.
Its population of 480 has stagnated, compared to Jurien Bay's 1,600, and at the last census night 64 per cent of houses were unoccupied.
Yet locals seem happy with the quiet lifestyle, according to shire president Holmes. "If you talk to the residents most of them are happy not to be Jurien Bay."
Samantha Murdock, a real estate agent for 16 years, describes Cervantes as, "very much a holiday and retirement town."
Jeff Palmer, who lives in town, has a bleaker description: "This is a place where old people come to die."
Holmes says, "The biggest reason why people leave [here] is because they can't get the health services they need and we can't get the health services for them because we're not big enough."
Jurien Bay outgrew Cervantes, with a new highway and land releases reshaping the town, but it too has been experiencing a decline similar to what many rural towns experienced over the first 18 months of the pandemic.
The two new housing developments in Jurien Bay are quite distinct. One is full of storeyed mansions overlooking the marina, popular among "all the rich, retired cray fishermen and farmers," says Murdock, who calls it "Snob's Hill".
The other is the more affordable Beachridge estate that appeals to younger families, like Leon and Keeley Dalton and their three children.
The couple met growing up on Perth's outskirts and had been living in inner city until several months ago.
Keeley says they were drawn to Jurien Bay, "Because we wanted that freedom to be able to walk to the beach, go fishing and slow down, whereas in Perth the city is so busy and you always have to drive everywhere. We don't miss it at all."
But Murdock says the developments haven't attracted many permanent residents. "The shire says building approvals have grown massively but a lot of the building is for private holiday homes and investment properties and it's not necessarily people coming to live happily ever after in Jurien Bay."
Holmes says that the fishing industry is still vital to the prosperity of Jurien Bay and Cervantes, but tourism has become a bigger driver of growth. "It happens to all towns who go through a bit of metamorphosis."
Back in Jurien Bay, Ian Boyd sees that change another way.
"Where I am here, it's peaceful and quiet but the shopping centre, well, you've got to put up with the noise. I don't think anyone wants progress but you've got to have it," he says.
Years after retirement, he would still rather be "out there", meaning the ocean, just a few hundred metres from his home.
"I liked being out at sea more than on land," he sighs. "I'd be out there every day of the week now if I could walk properly."
Credits
Words and photographs: Ian Kenins
Production: Leigh Tonkin
