Sunday Beside The Sea Part 2: Of Tickera, Port Broughton, and Fisherman Bay

After riding the beautiful Myponie Point Road, I met Roger in Tickera for coffee before we explored a little more of the Spencer Gulf coastline.  We had to bring our own thermos coffee because Tickera, boasting a population of 194 persons in the last census, did not boast such esoteric establishments as any kind of shop at all.  In fact, the District Council of Barunga West, in its Tickera Master Plan, plaintively stated that "the Tickera community want to retain their small-town values, scenic beauty, natural surroundings, and open space, yet they wish to see continual investment in their road network, amenities and boat launching facilities and the provision of essential council services..."  Which was to say that the Tickera residents wanted their cake but didn't want to share it.

Black swans drifted across the water, while a crab ship worked in the background.

Tickera had a post office and a council office all rolled into one in a big tin shed.  The sign on the front told Tickera residents, in no uncertain terms, that they risked losing their Post Office privileges unless they returned all their parcel locker keys at once.  And that meant ALL of them!  And you who have got them know who you are.

 

Having exhausted all the possibilities of Tickera in the space of an hour or so and not having found any homeless parcel locker keys, we took ourselves off to Port Broughton in the expectation of finding a slightly bigger fishing town and the possibility of a pub lunch, should we be lucky enough to find a pub open in Port Broughton on a Sunday.

We were pleasantly surprised.

Port Broughton boasted a stunning old pub with views out across the water, a bustling little main street with multiple cafes and dining options, and a beautiful green foreshore where families picnicked, played with their children, and paddled in the benign waters of Munderoo Bay.

We took our lunch to the foreshore.  After Wallaroo's scorched earth sidewalks and curated gravel foreshore, the green grass was both a novelty and a delight.

The Munderoo Lagoon on which Port Broughton sat was shallow, sheltered, and narrow: from the jetty I felt like I could reach out and touch the far bank with the slight problem of a deep channel being in the way.  Back in the day, Port Broughton was an important place for ships to shelter when the south-westerlies blew storms up the Spencer Gulf.  Back then getting cargo out to the ketches to market was a complicated matter of drays and luggers and ketches all under sail.  These days Port Broughton, like everywhere else, is quieter and relies for its business on local tourism and the small crab and prawn fleet that works out of Munderoo Bay.

I asked if they were catching anything.  The answer was no.  It's always no: there's not a fisherman out there catching what he wants.

Port Broughton from jetty's end.

A crab boat came in to port while we talked to fishermen and watched cormorants dive in crystal-clear waters.

Putting crabs on ice, bound for the Sydney Fish Market.

Not even 6km north of Port Broughton was Fisherman Bay.  We wandered up there for a quick sticky beak, expecting more of Port Broughton but no, Fisherman Bay had its own unique flavour of surprise for us and to fully understand Fisherman Bay you have to know a little bit about how it came to be. 

Fisherman Bay (the settlement) sat on the southern side of the entrance to Fisherman Bay (the bay).  It started in 1920 as a cluster of ramshackle shacks whose owners paid a 'casual licence' fee to the local land owners. All that changed in 1973 when the land owners sold the land to the Fisherman Bay Management Pty Ltd (aka The Company) comprised of ten of the shack owners, and the fees went up to $800pa and for a short while everyone was happy with that arrangement.

Town planning was not a significant consideration in the development of Fisherman Bay.

Road development and drainage?  What's that?

As time went by the residents of Fisherman Bay began to worry about pesky things like security of tenure and who was responsible for minor irritants such as water, sewerage, electricity, and the difficult matter of the sea inundating homes when tidal and climatic conditions aligned in the wrong way.  The District Council of Barunga West (no doubt already suffering from Tickera-induced headaches) eventually took responsibility for the foreshore and The Company manages the rest, and that is how Fisherman Bay is run today and why there was an ad-hoc program of storm water drainage and road upgrades which caused Roger to splutter and desperately chant excerpts from the relevant Australian Standards.

Fisherman Bay had a creative approach to... everything. Including sewage,

What you don't see is the row of dunnies off to the left.  Not sure if the shacks have upgraded to indoor plumbing or not: I didn't check.

...and building extensions.

Words fail me, they really do.  There's bird netting in there too, to stop the pigeons from roosting between the old and the new.

Excuse me while I attend to a road engineer who is having kittens.

From the Fisherman Bay boat ramp we looked out over Fisherman Bay (that gets quite confusing, doesn't it?) to the foothills of the Flinders Ranges where wind turbines were barely visible against the clear blue sky.

There was, unfortunately, a limit to the amount of time we could spend in Fisherman Bay before our resident engineer succumbed to apoplexy and outrage from the assault of poor town planning and substandard road networks, so home we went to the cats and the sunset.

It was a fitting end to a Sunday spent beside the sea.