Coffee Point:

That’s the reference point that we all give when the clubs name is mentioned…It’s the South of Perth Yacht Club, Coffee Point, Applecross.

Before Captain Stirling arrived in Western Australia, the area that we know as Coffee Point was used by the Wadjuk Beeliar people for hunting, fishing and shell fish gathering. It also served as a campsite during the summer season.

Heathcote Point we know, was named after a midshipman who served on Captain Stirling’s vessel HMS Success, but Coffee Point is a different story. The Applecross suburb was named after a land promoter Alexander Matheson’s home village in Northwest Scotland. It was part of the Melville Water Park estate promoted by A.M. after the area was first surveyed in 1896 and Matheson was actively engaged in promoting the locality by providing two paddle ferries imported from England (named Helena and Harley) and he built a small slipway, boatyard and a wharf at Coffee Point for their service and maintenance. They provided better communications with Perth itself and supported his Melville Water Park Estate housing venture.

Thanks to the interest in the area for picnics and the white sand that prevailed around the river banks it became a favoured disembarkation point for day trippers arriving from Perth on the ferries and it was only when a regular bus service arrived in 1924 that the ferry service fell into decline and activities at the yard gradually declined. Unfortunately relevant documentation has been destroyed with the passing of time and the actual reasoning for naming the point as Coffee Point has been lost.

However that’s not all. An item in the club magazine Soundings in 1986 has popped up with the fact that two government slips were built at Coffee Point in 1923 for the purpose of servicing two government ferries: the Dutchess and the Decoy. However Sir Frank Ledger has supplied the facts that the Norwegian Whaling Company, for whom he worked for in his early days, towed two derelict whale chasers from Careening Bay at Garden Island to Coffee Point to be refitted where they spent 10 months in total in 1923.

Coffee Point has had an interesting life and there are still remnants poking out of the water on the low tide today. Stop if you will, along Canning Beach road and there is a small plaque and a few stumps sticking out of the water with the rusting iron rails of the old slips visible on really low tides.

The club actually lives next door to Coffee Point below Heathcote Point on an artificial mound created in the late 1950’s from spoil taken out of the river during the redesign of the river edge when they built the Kwinana freeway. But that’s another story.

Rick Steuart

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