Stories of the Oldfield River A range of other recreational activities such as swimming, canoeing, picnics, duck shooting and walking have occurred on the rivers. Many of the informants have good memories of the times they have spent on the Oldfield especially with their families and friends.

"Prior to any of us living here we used to come from Ravensthorpe as a group in one of our old trucks, about eight or ten guys, and I was only probably thirteen or fourteen at that stage. [We'd] come out for weekends or for fishing trips or shooting trips. I remember one particular day we'd gone down the river just along the old track. My dad was a very keen duck shooter and Dad and one of his mates decided they would walk the next, I think it was about five mile, and they were going to walk down to the next camp in the hope of getting some ducks on the way down. They hopped on the truck and took off walking, those two. We had decided we'd have a cup of tea so Bill Dunn lit the fire and put the billy on. About ten minutes after they'd left walking Bill Dunn said, 'Just listen for a while'. Everyone got quiet, and all you could hear was a crow, and you could hear this crow, and Bill said, 'I'll bet you that you'll hear a shot in a minute, and they've shot a dingo'. And sure enough, about five minutes later, there was two shots from the shotgun, and we didn't see them 'til they got to the next camp that night, and that's what had happened. They'd walked in on one of the little [unclear] there, and this dingo was there, so they shot it. But Bill picked that up from just the crow. (laughs) Yeah, I'll always remember that. He just picked it up from the different tones as he said that the crow was making, the crow was actually just following the dingo along somewhere.

When we first moved out one of the problems we had was [that] it was a very popular shooting and fishing place. People from Esperance would come at weekends and I think for the first five or six Easters we were here there was more people on the river than you'd find anywhere else because we had made access and it was easy to get into. But that's slowly disappeared and in the last ten years there wouldn't have been anyone. I think that's probably the same right through the whole state. There's not those keen camper fishermen there used to be, or shooters, and I suppose with the gun laws a lot of the old guns are gone anyhow.

Some of the fishing stories down the river were a little bit hard to believe, although I was witness to most of them. One of these trips that we did, we got to the Estuary and the Estuary used to be alive with mullet, great big mullet. They would have been, oh, maybe two foot in length these mullet. But they'd got that cunning that you couldn't catch them. So we used to try and net them, you'd put a net across the river. We found some one day on the top of the estuary, and we'd run a net across behind them, and as soon as the mullet would see the net they'd jump over it. (laughter) Just jump straight over the top. So we had this idea of running another net behind, about six foot behind the first one. They were jumping the net and hitting the water and jumping the second one. And the guys that were on the bank holding the net even saw that the mullet would flick themselves out of the water onto the bank, and back [on] the other side of the net. And a lot won't believe it, but I saw it. Bunty King was another one that saw the same thing happen. But there was a lot of mullet there at that stage."
Ron Gibson

"Cherry's Well is a bit further round towards the [Oldfield River] bridge where the number one highway goes over. That was developed probably thirty to forty years ago and it's been a very reliable source of fresh water. Gibson's still use it to fill their dams and 'Dunromin' has used it in the past. And I believe back in the depression years in the thirties there was a group of people used to camp on the Oldfield River there. I believe they found the spring in those days. I don't know if they developed a well there or whether they didn't. You can still go there today and find old bottles lying in the riverbed and all coloured blue from the sun, so its obviously been there for a long while.

They [the school children] used to go to the swimming hole below 'Dunromin' in the early days, I'm not quite sure what years, but it was pre 1967 anyway when I first came here. There was a track that went down to the river and the bus used to take them down to this nice rock pool where they could dive in off the rocks. Very deep pool there and the kids used to go swimming there. And I believe prior to that there was a guy that was drowned there, he went swimming. Who he was or what he was I don't know but they found his boots and pants on the side of the waterhole and the police divers came and found his body halfway down in a very deep hole. They couldn't bottom it so it must have been very deep."
Richard Field

"We were swimming down in the pools there once and we could see this ripple coming through the water, when we got back up on the rock it was a tiger snake swimming across. And of course that poor thing got blasted. Kids up there with rocks, the poor thing never stood a chance. There was just about ten rocks every five seconds (laughs) at it but basically it didn't stand a chance, it must have drowned. We wouldn't swim in the water for a couple of days after that." Ron (Doc) Reynolds

"Well we found a very good spot once [where] the kids learned to swim. It was very safe, it was deep water, they found a very good spot there that they could jump off. As they got older on a hot day they would jump in the ute and take themselves down there in the heat of the day and come back again."
Ralph Silburn

"I used to do orienteering with the cubs, you know, with a compass. I used to do that over most of the [Munglinup] river valley. I used to just tie a few bits of cardboard onto trees and just give a heading and then they had to go from there to the next card. If it was a long way I'd put how many metres roughly so that they didn't overshoot. Then they just used to follow those and they were very effective actually. A lot of the children became quite confident in the bush. They'd walk just through rough bush and do quite well."
Don MacKenzie

"In the river at Jenkin's property that backed onto the Oldfield River, that was used for school swimming. Also Gibson's part of the river sometimes. They swam in the river pool behind Jenkins near the Oldfield River Bridge but not for long. There was these bachelors, Laurie and Malcolm Ferme and Doug Gillett, sitting up there with Charlie up in the sandhills. I'm keeping an [eye on the children] and oh we went to the river mouth and it was clean and lovely in those days, the sand was white. There was not all the cleared country and the dirt coming down and it was absolutely perfect for the kids to play there. And there's these men up there with the kid's tractors and toys and there's these kids playing down in the water (laughs), in the estuary and I took this photo of it, it was really hilarious.

Towards the coast, the river was quite good. We did a lot of tracks. When the kiddies went down to the river for [swimming] the Shire had gone in and just graded the roads. Didn't put any gravel but just graded the bush away and kind of made roads like that through. Originally in the early days there was a river road coming in from the Oldfield River Bridge on the highway. [It] wandered down along the river, crossed over the river and went down to the river mouth. And the fisherman all used to go down there and that was our main way of getting around really, a lot. Up in the main townsite up the main road the graders came in and did quite a bit of work there. But down closer to the coast we made our own roads, like getting on a tractor and a trailer and away you went across the bush. Both of the roads that are now down along Munglinup seashore Charlie made with his tractor and trailer and [we rode on the trailer] hemmed in with wheat bags on the back for going down fishing down there. We come back about a month later or a couple of weeks later and it was worn, you know, traffic had been on it! One of the greatest laughs was that we went up a hill, one of the roads went up a hill. We found it was impossible to do anything else but back again. So we backed back again and that was worn (laughter) into a highway going up and coming back again. A road that went nowhere (laughs). It was unbelievable...."
Elvie Scadding

"We had some friends and they had won a boat and they used to come down and we used to go down on the river towards the estuary and around the estuary. But you couldn't get into the estuary very well back in those days. If it was hot you couldn't because of the sand hills, and four-wheel drives weren't then what they are now."
Avril Lawrance

"Yes, [we have] permanent river pools back there. When the children were little we went quite a lot there and my nieces learned swimming down there in one of the pools. We went fishing there, so it has always been a part of our lives ever since we came here. We do have two special places. One is fairly close here, that's got a little, we call it a jetty. It's not much of a jetty but it's got a few wooden planks going in the water where the previous owner had used that part of the river for barbecues. They had something there like a pole in the water, they called it a grease pole, they had fights on it. So that was used there and I think the annual pony club Easter Rally was held down there at the river, that was some sort of entertainment they had. We never used that pole very much there but we used the spot there."
Brigitte Wallefeld "Our little spot down here that we've got, we've got a table and chairs and barbecue and a kayak and whatever, is pretty special. We spend lots of time down there. We've had also lots of times down at the pool a bit further along where the large Munji tree is, under Wilga Bank. I think it's just nice that we've got that there to live by, to use as a recreational place. It's important to me because there's so much interest down there. There's so many bits and pieces to look around and learn from. My children have enjoyed it. Everybody we have come and stay here goes down there and they think it's just fantastic, lovely peaceful place to go. Yes, I suppose its just part of our living here and it's nice to have something like that when you live in a reasonably isolated situation otherwise."
Sue Marshall

"We have explored most of the river. We motor- biked from Rockhole Road to West Point Road in one trip, just to see what there was. We saw lots of pools along the way, but no fresh water ones in that section. There's a big area of parkland about a kilometre downstream from West Point Road, and [it's] a haven for rabbits and that sort of thing. And then another trip we did from West Point Road going upstream for another ten or twenty kilometres.

[We] found a fresh water pool in one of the tributaries. We had gone offline of the main stream, and that was four kilometres upstream or something like that. That was the only fresh water we found the whole way along.

Well we did a canoe trip in '91, from the Oldfield River Bridge from the bitumen down to Coxall Road. About three canoes went down. Then again in the flood last year in January '99. Two of the girls and myself canoed from Rockhole Road down to the bitumen and encountered a couple of rapids, we spent about four hours or something like that. Yeah, we had a great time. Canoed over the top of where we usually have our barbecue and that sort of thing.

We used to go up the river on the southwest corner of our property, there's some rather pretty cliffs and there's an ochre type clay there. The children used to love going down there and collecting the stuff and making different things. Until, oh, about eight years ago we went down there in the middle of winter, it was pretty cool. We got down to about one hundred yards from the cliffs and we got attacked by a swarm of bees. So [we] dumped the eskies and everything and ran (laughs). We went back and picked them up a few days later, the esky and things, but we've never been back there since. So it must be a very vicious swarm of bees down there. And yet all the other years we've been down there we've never had any problems at all. The cliffs are probably sixty foot high I suppose, something like that, and there's numerous colours running through browns, creams and pinks and it's very pretty.

Our neighbours downstream from us [are] the Gibson's on 'Nairnup'. Ron called on the two-way to ask whether we had a boat up here, as he had some rams stuck on an island in the middle of the river and the water was rising. I said no but I'd go down and give them a hand. So I took a wetsuit and headed down there, and [took] some ropes, and swam across to this island. There were three or four others that were already there, and we tied a rope around the ram's horns and dragged one into the river, and got some to follow it and did the same with some more. And we got them all into safety. It was rather funny everyone that had raced there to begin with were wandering around in gumboots. If you can imagine swimming through six foot of water in gumboots, (laughter) it was somewhat tricky for them. They were all freezing cold and I kept pretty warm in my wetsuit (laughs)."
Tom Walker

"Well actually I was the back-up party for the canoe trip. Last year particularly when we went when Tom, Cindy and Jemma canoed from Rockhole Road down through to the Oldfield River Bridge across the highway. My job was to drive alongside the river, because there is a track alongside the river. It was too wet, it looked like I was going to get bogged so I had to go back and went round through the paddocks and down. It was amazing how noisy the river was. It was almost deafening as it ran over the rocks, probably even louder than the beach that you can have at night. That was one of the things I particularly noticed.

We go swimming in it quite a lot. We've taken the tops of eskies and we've taken a canoe and we've taken a rubber dinghy. One time we decided that we were really going to see whether or not it had fish in it so we went with the Norman's and the children. At that stage the children were all small enough to fit in one canoe and the other lot into a rubber dinghy, so the two families could fit into it. We actually canoed down past the beginning of the Dallinup Creek.

The hockey club, when it first started, used to have windups at the end of each year and we used to go down to the river on Coxall Road, to the left on Coxall Road. Everybody would bring their picnic lunch and we'd have barbecues and perhaps follow it up with a men's and women's hockey match, or a game of cricket or something like that. There were always little children, medium sized children and adults all down there. It was great, because it was a nice cleared area, and there was a bit of shade, and a good place to meet that was somewhere a bit different. That was probably about 1978 to about '81 that we had our wind-ups down there."
Jenne Walker

"We built a little jetty out into the pool and whenever it was warm enough we'd go down there with the family. It was a great recreational hole and we had district parties there at times and the kids had their annual Christmas party there. My wife had a lot to do with the pony club there and they often had picnics down there. When I say often they probably had at least one a year in that particular pool. And the horses would swim in it and ride round there. They'd have a barbecue and hungi's we'd have there, that sort of thing. It was a big part of their life I think, or our life I suppose."
Peter Standish