Place:Esperance, Western Australia, Australia

Watchers


NameEsperance
TypeTown
Coordinates33.817°S 121.867°E
Located inWestern Australia, Australia
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Esperance is a town in the Goldfields–Esperance region of Western Australia, on the Southern Ocean coastline approximately east-southeast of the state capital, Perth. The urban population of Esperance was 12,145 at June 2018.[1] Its major industries are tourism, agriculture, and fishing.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

European history of the region dates back to 1627 when the Dutch vessel Gulden Zeepaert, skippered by François Thijssen, passed through waters off the Esperance coast and continued across the Great Australian Bight.

French explorers are credited with making the first landfall near the present day town, naming it and other local landmarks while sheltering from a storm in this area in 1792. The town itself was named after a French ship, the Espérance, commanded by Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec. is French for "hope".

In 1802, British navigator Matthew Flinders sailed the Bay of Isles, discovering and naming places such as Lucky Bay and Thistle Cove. Whalers, sealers and pirates followed, as did pastoralists and miners, keen to exploit the free land and cash in on the gold boom in the gold fields to the north.

The first European settlement of the Esperance townsite area was by the Dempsters, a pioneer family of Scottish descent, in the 1860s. The Dempster brothers, Charles, Edward, Andrew and James, were granted of land in the area, first settling in 1864. They initially brought sheep, cattle and horses overland from Northam, but in 1866 they shipped stock to the Esperance area from South Australia. They built Esperance's first landing, but only one ship made the Adelaide to Esperance voyage in the first year.

Once other settlers started taking up land on the Esperance coastal plain, a small settlement developed, serving as an important link in the Overland Telegraph between Albany and Eucla. A telegraph station was opened in 1876, although the formal gazettal of the townsite did not occur until 1893.

The town jetty was also built through the 1890s, following the discovery of gold in the eastern goldfields region. At this point, Esperance became the "gateway to the Goldfields."

The population of the town was 985 (623 males and 362 females) in 1898.

After visiting the town in 1898, Western Australian Premier John Forrest pledged to construct a railway line between Esperance and the Goldfields. However, due to a perceived threat that Adelaide merchants would take Goldfields trade away from Fremantle merchants via the Esperance port, Norseman was connected by rail to the Goldfields and Fremantle, but the line was not extended to Esperance. A railway line between Coolgardie and Esperance was eventually completed in 1927.[2]

The Mallee area approximately north of the town began grain production in the 1920s, and by 1935 the construction of a second jetty, tankers jetty, was completed. After a rail link had been established between Salmon Gums and the Esperance port in 1925, the wheat harvest rose from that year to in 1929 and more than two years later.

Large-scale agriculture was introduced to the Esperance sand plain by an American syndicate, in partnership with the state government, in the 1960s following the discovery that adding superphosphate fertilisers containing trace elements to the poor soils made them suitable for cropping and pastoral activity. Despite early difficulties, the project eventually became a success and large areas of land were cleared during this time.

The population of the town in 1968 was approximately 2,700.

In 1979, pieces of the space station Skylab crashed onto Esperance after the craft broke up over the Indian Ocean. The municipality fined the United States $400 for littering. The fine was paid in April 2009, when radio show host Scott Barley of Highway Radio raised the funds from his morning show listeners, and paid the fine on behalf of NASA. Skylab's demise was an international media event, with merchandising, wagering on time and place of re-entry, and nightly news reports. The San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab to be delivered to their offices. Seventeen-year-old Stan Thornton scooped a few pieces of Skylab off the roof of his home in Esperance, caught the first flight to San Francisco, and collected the prize.

On 14 February 1991, the bulk carrier Sanko Harvest sank off Esperance, leaking of bunker oil and of fertiliser into the surrounding waters near the Recherche Archipelago; the wreck later became a marine sanctuary and dive site.

In January 2007 Esperance experienced a storm with wind gusts of up to which brought of rainfall within 24 hours, causing significant flooding. More than 100 homes were damaged, several boats were destroyed, trees were felled, of bridge on the South Coast Highway, (the main road linking Esperance to Perth), was washed away, and power was cut from thousands of homes. The Western Australian Government declared the area a "natural disaster zone". At least 37,000 sheep were killed in the storm.

Research Tips


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Esperance, Western Australia. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.