Pela Behrendt – a life in Ewlyamartup

Polish lady, Pela Behrendt came to Ewlyamartup with her husband and young daughter in 1950 from the Northam Migrant camp when her husband got a two-year contract to work on the railway. Luckily for us Pela was interviewed about her experiences in the 1990s and that interview has been digitalized by SLWA¹ .

Pela found Australia in the 1950s to be a primitive place to live. Moving to Ewlyamartup, a siding on the Nyabing Katanning train line, probably reinforced that impression. The local farmers used to load their produce on the train at Ewlyamartup for transportation to Katanning and beyond.

Accommodation for Pela’s family and the other eastern European families living there consisted of tents with their own kitchen block. There was no electricity or refrigerators and drinking water was delivered once a week from Katanning. Kerosine lamps were used for lighting with heating provided by kerosine heaters.
Katanning was 11 miles away. If Pela needed to go into town, she caught a ride on the school bus that passed by. Her husband used to ride a push bike into town. One of things he did in Katanning was deposit their savings into the bank. Pela was a good manager of money. She was also very resourceful. As she had brought her
sewing machine from Europe, she bartered her sewing skills for fresh produce for her family. As a result, Pela rarely needed to buy milk, eggs, vegetables, or fruit and could give her husband £5 each Friday to bank, as she only needed £2 pounds, (out of his weekly salary of £7) to live on.

In 1951 Pela’s family moved away from Ewlyamartup to another railway siding, Elleker, which was closer to Albany. A few years later they were able to buy a parcel of land in Albany and and eventually built a house there. Their time in Ewlyamartup was a stepping stone for them to achieve their Australian dream.

Map of Ewlyamartup town site produced in 1895- https://archive.sro.wa.gov.au/index.php/ewlyamartup-sheet-1-tally-no-504238-0621

A note from the author, Josie Milwood:

After a recent trip to Lake Ewlyamartup, where I discovered that a railway settlement with a school had previously existed by the lake, I went searching to see what I could find out about Ewlyamartup. Ewlyamartup was one of the first settled districts out of Katanning with an ambitious town plan drawn up in the 1890s. Prior to that Ewlyamartup was a significant place for the local Indigenous people, a fact that has only been acknowledged in recent years when interpretive signage has been placed near the restored lake. As the Ewlyamartup area was settled by farmers there was a need for a school. The first school opened in 1905 but closed in 1908. It reopened in 1912 and remained open until the end of 1943².

Sources

State Library of Western Australia, 1996. Interview with Pelagia Behrendt. Sound Recording https://encore.slwa.wa.gov.au/iii/encore/record/C_Rb1756184_Sewlyamartup ↩︎
Lost Katanning, 2021. Ewlyamartup School. https://www.lostkatanning.com/ewlyamartup-school/. Accessed 30 Oct 2023 ↩︎

36 New Towns Added

Today I have added 36 new Towns to the alphabetical listing on the website. Over the next few days, I will also add them to the “By Region” and “By LGA” listings so that there’s complete functionality.

The towns include:

Candlelight
Emu Hill
Hester
Holleton
Kukerin
Mount Palmer
Toolibin,
…and lots more!

Check the list to see if your town is included!! Contact us if it is missing or if we have something wrong.

Our Pilot Communities

For a project of this complexity, it is important to get the processes correct right from the beginning. To do this, we need to test our tools and work flows on real examples. So the Project team have chosen four communities that represent different types of settlement, different industries, different population profiles, so that we can work out the bugs before the full teams start work.

Cossack, Goongarrie, Nugadong, Goodwood Timber Mill

Cossack

Before Broome, Cossack, at the mouth of the Harding River in the Pilbara, was the hub of the pearling industry in Western Australia. Originally named Tien Tsin in 1863, the name was changed to Cossack in 1871¹ and the townsite was officially declared in 1872. The area is also known by the traditional name Bajinhurrba.

Apart from the pearling industry, it was a major port for the Pastoral industry and, in the 1880s, hundreds of prospectors arrived there searching for gold in the Pilbara. The major buildings in area during this period included a stone wharf, the bonded store and customs house, a post and telegraph office, police barracks, court house, school, tramway and a selection of stores. Chinese, Malays, Japanese and Afghans all came to the area, and many of them, including prisoners, were involved in the construction of the Jarman Island Lighthouse². By the 1890s, Cossack was a thriving community. However, on 4 April 1898 a major cyclone destroyed much of the town³⁴. By 1900 the pearling fleet had moved north to Broome and by 1910 the municipality was dissolved.

That wasn’t the end of the story. In 1910, a site on Butcher’s Inlet was gazetted as a quarantine reserve for a leprosarium and this remained in operation until 1931 when the remaining fourteen patients were transferred to Darwin⁵.

People continued to live in Cossack in small numbers until after World War II, but by 1950 it had become a ghost town. The remaining buildings have now been restored, and Cossack has become something of a tourist destination in recent years.

Goongarrie

In 1893 a group of goldminers named Frost, Pickersgill, Bennett and Cahill discovered gold in an area⁶ about 84Km north of Kalgoorlie. Initially known as 90 Mile (the estimated distance to Coolgardie) or Roaring Gimlet (the sound of the wind blowing through the Gimlet trees)⁷, the town was gazetted in 1895. The town was located on the railway line that ran between Menzies and Kalgoorlie.

At its peak the town had a water supply, police presence, transport services (coach and later rail), post and telegraph, hotels and a boarding house, a miner’s institute including a library, and a full range of retail including two restaurants.

By 1903 the population was down to 66 while the 1921 postal directory contained only 25 entries⁸. Eventually the town site became first a pastoral station (also known as Goongarrie) and now part of the Goongarrie National Park.

Nugadong

The settlement at Nugadong grew up around a railway siding on the Wongan Hills to Mullewa Railway in 1913⁹. The Gregory brothers first explored the area in 1846 for agricultural and pastoral potential but no settlement took place for many year¹⁰s. In 1894 the Midland Railway, linking Perth and Geraldton, was completed and this brought settlers.

Our research into Nugadong hasn’t gone far yet, but we do know that, in 1922, Arthur Jenner and Tom Hodgson took up war service land there, as did Harry & Jesse Atkinson in 1948 who raised a family of six on a farm there¹¹.

Until the 1970s there was a race track called Nugadong in the area, and the Dalwallinu air field is located by the Nugadong Rail Siding.

The town of Dalwallinu was originally called South Nugadong¹².

Goodwood Timber Mill

The Goodwood Timber Mill was chosen as a pilot site to represented the many Timber communities in our list. It is proving to be extremely ghostly. What do we know (or think we know) so far – not a lot!

Most records refer to the settlement simply as “Goodwood”.
We have some births registered at Goodwood between 1885 and 1888
We have a drowning in 1886
On 11 March 1891, J. A. Evans advertised “All houses, buildings and fences at Goodwood Saw Mill” for immediate sale¹³.

That’s about it. But the search is ongoing. And, after all, we did want to know the sort of challenges we would face during the project, didn’t we!

Sources:

Aussie Towns. Cossack, WA. https://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/cossack-wa. Accessed 16 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Lighthouses of Australia Inc. Jarman Island Lighthouse. https://lighthouses.org.au/wa/jarman-island-lighthouse/. Accessed 16 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Aussie Towns. Cossack, WA. https://www.aussietowns.com.au/town/cossack-wa. Accessed 16 Sep 2023 ↩︎
The Daily News (Perth, WA). The Storm at Cossack. Terrible Disasters. Tue 5 Apr 1898 p.4. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/82072700# Accessed 16 Sep 2023 ↩︎
inHerit. Cossack Lazarette. http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/Public/Inventory/Details/6f71b8fa-05b3-49b8-8149-ae5045b50868. Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
WA Now and Then. Goongarrie. http://www.wanowandthen.com/Goongarrie.html. Accessed 16 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Wikipedia. Goongarrie, Western Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goongarrie,_Western_Australia. Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Outback Family History. Goongarrie – Western Australia : Goongarrie Postal Directory 1921. https://www.outbackfamilyhistory.com.au/records/record.php?record_id=165&town=Goongarrie/%2090%20Mile Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Morawa District Historical Society. The Ghost Towns and Wayside Inns of Western Australia https://morawamuseum.org.au/ghosttowns-intro.html. Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Kitchener 1978. Introduction to Buntine and Nugadong Reserves. p.9. ↩︎
Dalwallinu Shire. Pioneer & Past Family Directory. https://www.dalwallinu.wa.gov.au/explore/about-dalwallinu/pioneer-past-families.aspx. Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Wikipedia. Dalwallinu, Western Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalwallinu,_Western_Australia. Accessed 17 Sep 2023 ↩︎
Southern Times, Bunbury WA. Notice. Mon 30 Mar 1891 p.7. Advertising. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16485525. Accessed 14 Sep 2023 ↩︎

What is a Ghost Town?

One of the question we are frequently asked is “What is meant by the term “Ghost Town”? What follows is an attempt to answer that question.

A ghost town is a term used to describe a once-thriving or populated settlement or community that has been largely abandoned and has few or no permanent residents remaining. These towns typically experienced a decline in economic activity or some other significant change in circumstances that led to their abandonment. There are various reasons why a town may become a ghost town, including:

Economic downturn: Many ghost towns were originally established as mining towns or as centers of economic activity linked to industries like mining, timber, agriculture, or manufacturing. When these industries declined or collapsed, people left in search of better opportunities elsewhere.
Resource depletion: In cases where a town’s existence was tied to the extraction of a finite resource, such as coal or minerals, once those resources were exhausted, the town often declined and was abandoned.
Changes in transportation: The construction of new transportation routes, such as highways or railroads, can bypass existing towns, leading to their economic isolation and eventual decline.
Project completion: In Western Australia many of our ghost towns grew up to support the development of huge infrastructure projects, such as the Goldfields Pipeline, the Trans-Australian Railway, and the construction of water and power infrastructure. When the projects were completed, the people moved on to the next one.
Government actions: In some instances, government policies or decisions, such as the establishment of new national parks or the relocation of communities for various reasons, have resulted in towns being abandoned.

Ghost towns can vary in size and historical significance. Some have been well-preserved as historical landmarks, offering a glimpse into the past, while others have deteriorated or disappeared entirely. People may visit ghost towns for tourism, historical research, or as a way to experience a unique and often eerie atmosphere associated with these abandoned places.

Some ghost towns aren’t towns at all. They were communities that grew up organically for many different reasons, such as telegraph stations, rail sidings or timber mills. Some of these communities went on to become towns and even cities, while some just disappeared.

As we work through the project, we will be assessing every community on a case-by-case basis. You can help us. Tell us what you know about these places and help us to make the right decision.