"We had an interesting visitor who used to come quite frequently. He was a doctor from here, a well known doctor from Albany, who, when he felt the pressure of work was getting too much for him he would get in his car and travel to Marra through the Chester Pass Road. On two wheels we always thought because he did it in record time. He would stay a night with us. He would arrive mid-afternoon on the Saturday and unload. He always brought us a parcel of meat regardless of the fact that there was no refrigeration. But it was a very kind thought and much appreciated from our usual diet and some of it we would pickle to keep it to have later on."
Peg Tyndale Powell

"We had lots of important people, business people, that came to enjoy the solitude and the quietness and the nature, it was a number one place. We had a judge that came with his son, who was a doctor and they came every year and built more or less a permanent camp up river. They had an arrangement with Dad that if he should come down with the family that he should fire a gun before he got there so they could put their clothes on. They were real back to nature people, those ones.

But then as I say one of the people was a great friend of the family's and he was very popular with us because every time he came each year, sometimes he came with the family and sometimes he came with men friends, he bought a square Peak Frean biscuit tin full of an assortment of bags of lollies. When you lived at Marra that was a thing, a real impressive gift, this tin of sweets.

At one stage he came down, there were four of them, businessmen. He was an accountant, one was a chemist, one was in real estate and anyhow they were all huge, they were very big men, I think the lightest was over 16 stone or something. They had a little canvas boat that would only take two at a time. They camped down at the estuary and two of them would row across the estuary to waterholes that were on the other side of the estuary. To get the water each day only two men could go in this boat at a time because otherwise it would sink under their weight.

Then there was this honeymoon couple who ran their battery flat and had to walk to Marra. She wouldn't stay on her own because she was a city girl and had never been in the bush before. She elected to walk in high heel shoes fifteen miles, by road, they went by road. When dad got home from work he found a collapsed bride on his doorstep. People like that they were interesting. Then there was the undertaker from Kalgoorlie and a married couple from Perth that were very great friends. They came down a couple of years. He taught me how to roll cigarettes, I reckon he needed another client.

With the fishing, the first year I was teaching in Pingelly, I went into the hotel to buy some cigarettes and Jim and the fishing crew had just come back from Margaret River where they used to go fishing. They had their fish box there, and coming off the Pallinup River I of course as I went past, I looked like this. There were a few fish in the bottom of the thing. I didn't know these blokes because I was a new schoolteacher, anyhow Jim said to me "What do you think of them"? And I said I thought there weren't very many there and proceeded to walk on my way because I just wasn't interested in the fact that they'd gone all that distance for those few fish! He said, "Did you catch more fish than that"? I said "We'd always catch more fish than that in our river", OUR river, because that was my thinking at that time. Anyhow a bit later on he came looking for me and he said "Where's this 'our river'"? And it led to he and a couple of his friends coming down and Nev and I going with them and staying at Bremer Bay.

One of the men rigged up a wool bale, that was to be a smokehouse sort of thing, and he had a very restless night keeping the fire going and the smoke going just so and putting the bream on sticks through the wool bale. He got them fixed and that was the only lot he ever got because after that he put them at Marra at the homestead in the old smokehouse and the cattle invariably went looking for something to eat and horned around this wool bale and let the flies in, so his effort wasn't successful there."
Betty Sewell

"At one stage there was a fishing industry down there. Now that was before our time and we don't know anything about it. But they had a smokehouse off the end of the beach. The camping area was there and then there was the bar and this beach ran along there. Just up from the end of the beach where it joined the rocks, which were very ordinary rocks, they weren't spectacular or anything they were just little pebbles as far as we were concerned. Back from there in the sandhills but still in our paddock there was this smokehouse. I can only remember it as a wreck, I sort of know about where it was.

Anyone staying any length of time had no way of keeping fish other than smoking them and this is how it all happened. Smokehouses of some description popped up everywhere if you were staying a week or a fortnight; some people stayed a month.

Some used to go down with their wagons, the Murrays used to go down with their wagons and some of the Gnowangerup families used to go down with their wagons. Marg House talks about going down there for a holiday. They'd set up permanent camps for that time, it was a lovely place really."
Betty Sewell and Brian Moir

I've seen a lot of people fish the Pallinup River by handline and a lot by netting, the old square hook as they call it. It draws fishermen from a huge area. From up in the Lakes district and so on and so forth and even years ago apparently there were even people out west of Beverley, out where I originally came from who used to take an annual trip down to the Pallinup River to go fishing. I think in those days they would salt the excess catch and take it back home to Beverley. So it's always been a great river for fishing for bream and mullet. I've caught a few nice bream down there myself."
Charlie Hick

"There were people I can remember that used to come every year from York, they used to camp just a little bit further up in the camping area than we did. I remember one year them catching a huge, or what seemed to me as a child, a huge shark and they dragged it in behind the vehicle up through the camping area and hoisted it up in a tree. The memory of that stuck with me forever; it just seemed so big I guess compared to the bream we'd been catching in the river, it was a big, big fish. And those people always had church services every Sunday and they always invited whoever was there to join them for their church service on Sunday. I believe one of them, his name was Tom Marwick from York."
Amelia Moir