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.
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.
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.When lobster fishermen Ian Boyd arrived in Jurien Bay with his family in 1965 "there was no bitumen roads, no power, no water, there was just two rows of shacks".
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. Tin and fibro cement shacks, some of them dating back to the 1950s, created the Grey village in the scrub and sand dunes of WA’s mid-west coast.
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 in his home, Sinkatinny Downs."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.
The shack is his home all spring and summer and he spends his time gold prospecting. When asked where, he reluctantly points eastward and says, "out there."While things have changed on land, the changes at sea are even starker as the cray industry has ebbed and flowed. Ian Boyd aboard his fishing boat in 1986, when more boats with more crew were on the waters off Jurien Bay.
Bigger fishing businesses — like David "Dogga" Thompson's — were better able to absorb and adapt to the change. David Thompson Jnr, managing director of the Lobster Shack in Cervantes, with one of the Indian Ocean’s bounty that has helped his father’s business grow from a humble tin shed. Third-generation Jurien Bay fisherman Rhys Waters says the double-whammy of COVID and the Chinese embargo on Australian lobsters "pretty much halved" his family's income.While the Lobster Shack in Cervantes has begun to grow again, the same can't be said of the town.
Jeff Palmer, who lives in town, has a bleaker description: "This is a place where old people come to die." 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".
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