Friday, Mar 13, 2009 at 17:30
Couldn't agree more - we had one of the first beach houses in
lancelin when I was a kid 50 years ago.
You could see the dunes from the house and when us kids would act up - mum would send us over to the dunes with a cardboard box to slide down the dunes in - she could watch us from the Kitchen windows, to see we were safe!
Now days - any kid on a dune in a cardboard box would be run over and killed in 5 seconds bye a beach buggy, quad, or motorbike or 4wd!
I'm not saying their shouldn't or isn't room for those activities within the dunes complex at
Lancelin - just that its a shame the whole dunes complex has been given over to motor sport to the exclusion of people who might enjoy the simpler things in life!
As kids - we were Laurence of Arabia, playing in those dunes, because we had imagination, sadly something my own kids couldn't enjoy 30 years later for fear of being run down by some offroad vehicle.
I guess they were different times, even back then - one of the familys friends kids was killed driving a VW to Wedge, on the tracks - came over a
hill and hit a land river going the other way which just ran up over the bonnet of the VW and crushed the cab, killing the kid at the wheel...
That was the start of the red flags on old fiberglass fishing rods practice to try and avoid such head on
hill hazzards.
Lancelin was a great place - back in the day - we could get a feed of crays inside the bay with just a couple pots, or afeed of skippy in the hole behind
Lancelin island - (now a dive park site, no fishing), we could walk over to Edward Island on a low tide, etc. Sis & I would swim from the
north point near the pub (there was no endeavor tavern back in the day) across to Lanceln island - play there all day then swim back!
These days youd get hit by a cray boat or speed boat if you tried it - back then all the cray boats were bondwood 22 or 24 footers and travelled at displacement speed, or the old ex pearl luggers the dings owned which likewise travelled pretty slow.
It was probably 1963, when I recall Johnny Taylors boat went down with Johnny Taylor, & Pete Th' Pom on board south of
Lancelin - near the boomers, and only the Pom made it back to shore - Johnny was our next door neighbour (there was a vacant block twixt his and our place - since built on).
I notice these days that reef is now marked on the charts as "taylor reef" in remembrance.
I also remember that originally - the
bakery owned back then by Bill Catchpole, was located where the Endeavor tavern now stands.
It was demoilshed and the
Shell servo went in, and Bills
Bakery moved down to opposite us on bootoo road.
Bill lived behind us on the beach - he would walk past our bedroom window every morning about 4 am in summer on the way to work - lighting the wood ovens fired with mallet wood, whistelling as he went.
He was our early morning fishing alarm clock, & by the time we got back from pulling pots and catching a feed of herring etc - the fresh bread would be out - we'd go get hot bread rolls fresh outta the oven and juggle them all the way across the street back
home coz they were too hot to hold.
At Christmas - we'd give Bill a big containerof all the pizza toppings we could muster and he'd make us a the biggest pizza you ever saw - about a yard square - in the bread oven!
Lancelin was a far different place back then...
Ritchie & Doreen owned the Pub, and there was no
police station in town - the nearest was at
Gin Gin from memory, so the pub stayed open 24 hours a day, youd come in over the
4 mile hill and see the lights of the pub on at 4 am and roll right into town for a drink!
The road was a two wheeled sand track from
Yanchep national park onwards.
My ol dad was a builder and got the contract to build the first school at
lancelin, he bought a Chev maple leaf truck and transported all the materials up to
Lancelin on that ol truck.
It had holes in the radiator, so we kids would get fed sticks of chewing gum from the
Yanchep pub onwards - to chew and push into the radiator to keep her going thru the sand all the way to
Lancelin.
I recall, as a kid when we would get big hauls of skippy in the skippy hole behind
Lancelin Island, we couldn't store them all in the old kero Fridge - so sis & i would take a wheelbarrow down to the south end caravan park and
shop and sell them to the campers for threepence each, the
shop would take anything we didn't sell and keep them in their cold store fridge for other campers.
Sis & I would nick 6 pence outta the takings and buy musk sticks for the walk
home pushing the empty barrow.
These days selling those fish would be a crime!
They were much simpler days - no
police, no fisheries inspector, etc etc - heck we'd go down the Kailis and France cray processingworks and grab cray heads to crush & make berley for fishing.
There was no such thing as kite surfing, windsurfers, not even much in the way of surfies riding the waves down the south end. No beach buggies of off road motorbikes in the dunes.
Lancelin seems to have lost a LOT of its original charm.
Think my ol Grandpappy bought the original block (a 99 year lease) for somewhere around 112 pounds from memory - and dad the builder threw up a
shack on it from old demolition materials from projects in
Perth...
We sold it back in i think 1980 for about $32,000..
These days
the block and same ol
shack are valued somewhere over $500K, probably a lot more.
I remember in about 1977 scuba diving around the horseshoe reef, north of
Lancelin Island and finding a wrecked boat called the Grace Darling built in the late 1890's and used as a guano transport coastal cutter from the Abrolhos to
Fremantle,
Albany &
Esperance, which sank in a storm in 1916.
I see these days someone has salvaged one of the anchors and placed it out front of the endeavor tavern.
I don't miss
Lancelin much - went back for work a few years back and it's changed so much theres little left of it's original charm these days.
Camping was always popular north of laqncelin in the beach front dunes between
lancelin and Diedy bay & points further north.
Best a luck with it.
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