THE FOLKS FROM FOWLERS BAY
The 30 October is the official day for the release by
Austin Macauley Publishers. An interview on ABC Eyre Peninsula (abc.net.au) will take place from 720 AM. It will be
an exciting time ahead. The following Saturday (8 October), a book launch will
occur from 2 to 4 PM in the Port Lincoln Yacht Club, Port Lincoln, South
Australia.
People from overseas may not be familiar with the Eyre
Peninsula and Port Lincoln. Fowlers Bay may even be a more obscure location.
Port Lincoln is a city on the tip of the Eyre Peninsula with about 16K people.
It’s a magical place, a natural harbour protected from wind from all directions
and surrounded by national parks. Its people depend on fisheries. These are
tuna, king prawns, lobsters, abalone, etc. The fisheries are highly regulated,
and today the tuna quota is caught in the Great Australian Bight and towed to
Port Lincoln, where the fish are transferred to holding pens to be fed
pilchards for a desirable weight. They are then slaughtered, gutted and blast
frozen and transported to, primarily, the Japanese fish market, where they are
appreciated as sashimi.
The history of Port Lincoln is unsatisfactorily
described. It is as if it started when the first settlers arrived on 19 March
1839 aboard the ships Abeona, Porter and Dorset from Adelaide and mentioned that
whalers had visited the harbour earlier. Matthews Flinders, on the
Investigator, and Nicolas Baudin, on Le Geographé, visited the place in 1802.
Matthew Flinders named the port after his home county, Lincolnshire. This history
is seen with European eyes, ignoring that aboriginal people lived here for
centuries. The aboriginal name for Port Lincoln is Kallinyalla, translated to
“The Place of Sweet Water”. I cannot imagine a more romantic description.
The original name is the key to its history — the
presence of fresh water, a rare commodity for sailors. The natural harbour
would have provided not only fresh water but also food, game, and berries to
avoid scurvy. Whalers would get firewood for their thirsty boilers.
There is no doubt in my mind that many sailors visited
“The Place of Sweet Water” centuries back. In The Folks from Fowlers Bay, I try
to open up the history book just a bit to shed some light on the past of
Fowlers Bay, the offshore islands of the Eyre Peninsula and Port Lincoln.
Fowlers Bay is a magical place situated on the
Nullarbor, about 120 km west of Ceduna. The last town before the long trip to
Western Australia. Not many people live there now, but it has not always been
like that. For current information, check
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