… a story by Dom Serventy

Dr Dom Serventy (1904-1988) was a founding member of the WA Naturalists’ Club. The following article is a story by Dr Dom Serventy that first appeared in the Naturalist News, June 1974, for the 50th anniversary celebrations and titled “Field Trips 50 Years Ago”.

In the article, Dr Serventy recounts field trips he made to Yanchep in 1923 and 1924, and the pivotal instance that ‘sowed the seed’ for a naturalists’ club. In 1923 Dom Serventy was working as a reporter for United Press when the following paragraph appeared in the West Australian in May 1923…

“Mr. Sampson was particularly struck by the birdlife at Yanchep, the number and variety of birds to be seen being far greater than he had ever encountered elsewhere in the State”.

R.S. Sampson, M.L.A., the Colonial Secretary, had been interviewed by my employer, and [the article] prompted a fellow member of the office staff, Sydney Congdon, and myself to visit the place [Yanchep] during the Foundation Day holiday weekend in June of that year. In those days this was quite an enterprise.

June 1923…

We hired a horse and sulky from Mulchinaugh’s livery stables in James Street for 30 shillings, and with chaff for the horse, stores and rugs for ourselves (these were the days before sleeping bags) we set off on the Saturday morning. We passed the Native Dog Swamp (so called in my diary) by the good road which then flanked it and recorded the birds we met with in the bush verges along Charles Street and Wanneroo Road. At each well we came to we gave the horse a drink and once we unharnessed it to give it a sponge down. The lunch stop was at the 20 mile well on the Pinjar Road, where we first came on Dusky Miners, hitherto unfamiliar to me. Lake Pinjar was dry, a vast expanse of low rushes. The winter track skirted it along the Western shore while the summer track cut across its north-western portion. This is where we struck trouble. The limestone road ended where the tracks diverged and the sand began, and we lost our way in the lake. The sun was setting before we picked up the right track again and we trudged along on foot beside the sulky to give the horse a better chance of reaching the Cave house that night. Mile after mile we looked out for a brook that was supposed to mark the spot which would be near our destination. At one stage we were inclined to make camp “but not having any water we could not make tea,” so we pressed on. We paused however, to feed the horse and ate an orange each. When we set off I rode in the sulky and Syd, who preferred to walk, trudged ahead. He was somewhat older than me and in fine physical condition and had won the famed Beverley to Perth cycle race. In the dark the journey seemed endless. Then the moon rose and at 9 o’clock the stone building loomed into view. Some other people were camped in it, and they put on the billy for us whilst we attended to our horse and sulky. We slept that night on the floor opposite the fireplace.

Next day we inspected the caves under the guidance of Harry White, caretaker of the caves and the earliest settler at Yanchep. He had been there when A.W. Milligan and C.P. Conigrave made the trip in 1903 and published the first account of its birdlife in “The Emu”, it was an interesting day, and we were charmed by the beautiful views of the lake which was then quite unspoiled by development. On the Monday we returned home, after helping to bury a 25-year-old racehorse, San Toy, who belonged to one of the holidaying parties and had collapsed after a chase after brumbies. We got home much earlier, at 5.00pm but the weather changed, and we got soaked by the rain. Our diary comment on the horse: “Our horse could hardly have been called a pacer, yet he was consistent and jogged home at the same speed all the way, putting up a really good performance in doing the trips in one day each”. We learnt later that the rains had filled part of Lake Pinjar, and a motor was bogged in trying to get through on the summer track.

January 1924…

Next year in January 1924, we were more ambitious. A party of three of us spent a week at Yanchep. Besides myself there was Charles Frost, a clerk in the State Treasury Department, and Otto H. Lipfert, the museum taxidermist, whom the Museum Trustees permitted to come with us provided that his expenses did not exceed £2.10.0. The Museum Curator, Mr. Ludwig Glauert, provided a variety of collecting material. As before we hired horse transport from Mulchinaugh’s stables and set off at 6.30 in the morning. Everything went well for us, and we reached Yanchep just before 7 in the evening. The sand was particularly heavy going, “but our horse was solid and did a deal better than a party we met about four miles beyond Lake Pinjar, stranded by the wayside. They started yesterday, camped at the 20 mile well, could not find the 22 mile well and their horse gave in at the spot where we found them. The mare to be ridden to Yanchep to obtain a drink of water and then returned to the castaways at the very moment we appeared”. We called on Henry White, received the key to the house and ‘instructions” (the most important of which was that the “tariff” would be five shillings per man for the week we intended to stay here). Our diary: “After a tea of sausages, canned fruit and tea and lemon squash we felt great”.

It was a wonderful week. We made a respectable bird list, adding to Milligan and Conigrave’s records, but missing some birds they saw. We feasted on a Black Swan which was collected for the museum collections (cooked most deliciously in a camp oven by Otto Lipfert), collected numerous invertebrates including ants for John Clark [Dept of Agric, entomologist] (which, incidentally, led to the discussions for the formation of a naturalists’ club), bats from one of the caves, and made a trip to the ocean beach. Here we saw Bridled Terns at Wreck Point and inspected the wreck of an American schooner, the “Alex. T. Brown”, of Seattle, which had come ashore in 1917.

Later that same year I made a visit to Yanchep in a car. Instead of the day long journey by horse and cart, we took only 2 – 2 ½ hours. The most uncomfortable part of the car journey was not the sand but the bumpy section of the Wanneroo Road which was built of transverse sections of tree trunks, “cheese-blocks” they were called. I wrote an article at the time extolling the delights of Yanchep pointing out that “there is no settlement for some miles around the reserve, and the virgin bush has a haunting appeal, which, alas, must vanish with the years”. This has come true, and I am glad I knew Yanchep in its prime.

Sylvia Tetlow