Esperance

The coast around Esperance is Wudjari Noongar country, known as Kepa Kurl, and people have lived along it and on the islands, before rising seas cut them off, for many thousands of years. In 1792 two French ships, the Recherche and the Espérance, sheltered from a storm among the islands while searching for the missing expedition of La Pérouse. Both names stuck, to the bay and to the archipelago. Matthew Flinders charted the coast a decade later and named Lucky Bay after finding shelter there in 1802.

European settlement began with the Dempster brothers, who first settled at Esperance Bay in 1864 and ran sheep, cattle and horses on the sandplain. The town's first boom came with gold at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the 1890s, when Esperance became a landing place for prospectors and supplies; it faded when the railway from Perth captured the trade, and for decades the town stayed small. From the 1960s, superphosphate fertilisers carrying trace elements made the poor sandplain soils productive, large areas were cleared for wheat, barley and sheep, and an American syndicate developed farmland in partnership with the state government, drawing wide attention to the district.

The port was rebuilt to ship grain and inland ore, and tourism grew around the beaches and the parks. Two events reached far beyond the district. In 1979 fragments of the falling Skylab space station came down across the shire, and the local council fined the United States $400 for littering, a bill not settled until 2009. On 17 November 2015 bushfires in the farmland north of the town killed four people.

Esperance is a farming and shipping town that becomes a holiday town every summer. Families drive down from Kalgoorlie and Perth for the beaches, the caravan parks fill, and the population of the foreshore triples for a few weeks before the town returns to its own business of harvest, freight and football. The two lives sit side by side without much friction.

Life is lived outdoors and on the water. Boats stand on trailers in driveways, the bay and the islands are fished for whiting, salmon and squid, four-wheel drives head out to beaches down the coast, and surfers follow the swell along the ocean-facing bays. The wind is a fact of local life, exploited by kite surfers and by the wind farms on the headlands west of town. Country institutions hold the rest together — the agricultural show, sporting clubs, the volunteer fire brigades that turn out every summer, and the local shows of wildflowers in spring.

Wudjari Noongar people run ranger and land-management programmes along this coast, and the name Kepa Kurl is increasingly used alongside Esperance. Visitors are asked to treat rock shelters, middens and granite outcrops as the heritage sites they are. Manners are the standard country mixture of informality and courtesy, and long distances are taken for granted — a 400-kilometre drive for a football match or an appointment raises no comment.

About 12,000 people live in Esperance, about three-quarters of the population of a shire the size of a small country, which makes it the main service centre for a large stretch of the south coast. Broadacre farming pays for much of it, with wheat, barley, canola and sheep on cleared sandplain country, and the seasons of the district are the farming seasons — seeding in autumn, harvest from late spring into summer.

The port is the other pillar. Grain from the district and iron ore and nickel railed down from the interior are loaded at Esperance, along with fuel and fertiliser coming in. Fishing, government services, a hospital, schools and a growing tourism trade make up the rest of the local economy, and a wind and solar system supplies a large share of the town's electricity.

Daily life has the pattern of a remote regional centre. Freight arrives by road, so groceries cost a little more; specialist medical appointments mean a flight or a long drive to Perth; and school holidays and harvest set the rhythm of the year more than the calendar does. Housing has become expensive and hard to find, as it has across regional Australia. Dryland salinity and the loss of native vegetation from decades of clearing are long-running problems, and bushfire preparation is a normal part of summer.

Esperance eats from the farm and the bay. Rock lobster, abalone and sardines are taken commercially off this coast, while Australian salmon, herring, whiting, snapper and squid are caught from the beaches, the rocks and small boats; fish and chips on the foreshore is a local habit. Lamb and beef come from the district's own paddocks, and the wheat and barley grown around the town end up in bread and beer, including beer brewed locally from barley malted in the district.

The choice of places to eat is that of a country town of its size. Bakeries and cafés on the main streets serve pies, sausage rolls and coffee that would not embarrass Perth; the pubs do counter meals; and there are takeaways, a pizza shop or two and a small supermarket. In the summer holidays the foreshore stalls and caravan-park kiosks open, and everything is busier for six weeks.

Local produce turns up at markets and roadside honesty boxes — honey, eggs, olives, stone fruit and vegetables in season. Wine is not made here in any quantity; the lists lean on the Great Southern and Margaret River, several hundred kilometres west. Campers heading east into the parks buy everything in town first, since there are no shops beyond the edge of the farmland.