HISTORY
How it Started …
During the 40’s experienced fishers began returning from wartime deployment, ex-servicemen returned and searched for opportunities, and many immigrants sought untapped niches in new homelands. The market for frozen western rock lobster tails began to open up. Buyers arrived from the United States and local entrepreneurs established processing factories, reviving the fishing communities at Fremantle and Geraldton and spawning new ones at sheltered bays along the coast between, a maritime gold rush.
At Geraldton the rock lobster fleet quickly grew, fishing within a few miles of the protected waters of Champion Bay before venturing to the protected shallows of the Abrolhos Islands during the autumn and winter months. The price they received for their rock lobster increased slowly from five pence a pound in 1946 to eleven pence a pound by 1950. Fishers were aware that the returns processors were receiving from the United States were climbing even faster. When they returned from the Abrolhos Islands, late in the winter of 1950, a delegation from the Geraldton Licensed Fishermen’s Association called the three local processors together and requested the price be increased by tuppence , to 1/1d per pound. The processors insisted they couldn’t possibly
pay such a price, and a standoff developed. “What will you do if we don’t”, asked the processors. ‘Just wait and see’, said the fishers, not really knowing what they would do.
 The Fishermen’s Association formed a committee to investigate setting up their own processing company. Within three months they had gained the support of 90% of local fishermen, established the Geraldton Fishermen's Co-operative Ltd. as a legal entity, signed contracts with a United States importers for all they could supply, raised the necessary capital, purchased land and begun construction of a processing factory. By the start of the next Abrolhos season all was complete, and the first consignments were processed on May 5th, 1951. The fishers were able to pay themselves the price they had demanded, and at the end of the season set aside money for the development
of their factory and distribute a further 1½d per pound to shareholders.
The rest, as they say, is history.
A FISHERMAN RECOUNTS…
If anything epitomises the beginnings of Geraldton Fishermen’s co-operative this account by Mr Alf Valenti sums it up perfectly!!
“During the war and so forth we used to sell to factories and they’d give us what they felt like giving us and we got fed up. That’s how it started, down on the wharf, talking of a morning before we went out fishing, and if it was a blowy day, we’d sit down and talk and wouldn’t go out. Then, we decided we’d go ahead and build our own Co-op and we all put in. Some put in a hundred pounds, some fifty pounds but then at the end of the year out of each one’s catch they would take a certain percentage until you built it up to seven-hundred-and-fifty-pounds, that’s all you were allowed to have in it. Not everyone joined the Co-op, I reckon about two-thirds of the fishing fleet at the time did though. We had meetings in
the Lumpers hall and talked about it, discussed how it was going to go, had a lot of fun and games.
Everybody was called in to do whatever they were good at. We never had a trade, we were just fishermen, so all old Cecil Morley and I could do was make bricks. Cecil was a lot older than I was and his wife was his deckie, old Mother Morley. They used to get in that boat and go pull pots and you could hear them coming for miles on a calm day, arguing. He was a good old fella, Cecil. Anyway, he and I carted the sand from the river, I forget which river-bed it was. The truck we had had floorboards and by the time we got back to Geraldton we only had half the load we started with ‘cos the sand had all run out the cracks. When we got all the sand on site we started on making the bricks with Vince Basile, that was his sort of work, he was a grano worker.
The three of us had moulds and would make, four, half a dozen bricks at a time, put them in the sun for a couple of days and then stack them up into rows. This was in the off-season. I don’t know who laid them, perhaps it was Bert Campbell.
Another thing they sent Joey Bombara and myself to Perth in a Ford Thames to pick up the engine that was going to run the plant. We had to sneak into Perth in the early hours of the morning to pick it up to avoid transport fees or some such dam thing.
Cecil and I also dug a hole the size of this table, with shovels, a great big hole, until we struck water and that was as far as we could go. Then they filled it up with concrete and that was the bed that this freezer engine sat on. It was like digging a grave and when we struck water, this bloke that was running that whole thing, just dipped his finger in, tasted it and said, “Oh, ninety-eight.” Cecil said “What do you mean?” and I said, I think he means its ninety-eight percent sure it’s water!! He was testing for salt but he never had a clue what he was doing.
In twelve months our Co-op was up and going. But, you know when it was finished it didn’t look like it does now. It was just a couple of cement brick rooms and a freezer.
The first season we got a better price for the Cray’s straight away. I think we got one shilling a tuppence a pound that first year, that’s what we accepted in advance and then at the end of the season we got a bit more, a final payment, it was quite good, big sums of money.
I always fished for the Co-op after that.“Alf Valenti
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