Billycan's Tail of Two Crocodiles

By Alistair Pirie and Aaron Wolf

Five children meet a mysterious stranger named Peter Billycan, who directs them into a tunnel to discover an underground river system. And this is where the adventures begin...

Descending the tunnel, the group board a ferry boat, captained by a salty old sea dog, where they are swept away on a wild ride. The children witness tw

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922594204

Alistair Pirie

Alistair Pirie is a Melbourne based writer and sculptor who grew up in the then-unfashionable ,working class western suburbs of Melbourne. He takes inspiration from his childhood growing up in a time when children had a stronger connection to their environment. He aims to encourage the next generation to care for the land as the original people cared for it, to try and restore it to something like its original condition. This book is the first in a series which follows the adventures of the children and other people and animals which they encounter on their way.

Book preview

Title

Billycan’s The Tale of Two Crocodiles Copyright © 2021 by Alistair Pirie.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed in Australia

First Printing: August 2021

Playtime Books a division of:

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au

Paperback ISBN - 9781922594198

Ebook ISBN - 9781922594204

This book is dedicated to the author’s five

grandchildren and their late Granny Rosemary.

Contents

Explanatory Notes

Part One

Part Two

Explanatory Notes

This is a semi-fictional story based on the author’s experiences growing up in bayside Melbourne. Most of these places existed during the author’s childhood but have now been overtaken by progress. The reader can follow the adventurers on their exciting story by following the enclosed maps.

The entrance to the underground river and the Williamstown Swamp were both filled in with fly ash trucked in from the old Newport Power Station during the 1950s and ‘60s and have been replaced by an industrial development.

Owners are banned from lighting fires on the ground the factories are built on, as the ground may catch fire.

The destruction of the lower reaches of Kororoit Creek began in the 1950s with the construction of the oil refinery on the creek’s lower reaches. The refinery discharged overflowed waste oil into the creek for many years, holding some of the discharge back by a boom across the creek.

The saltbush and mangrove beds existed from Kororoit Creek around to the point at Seaholme where the Esplanade borders the sea front. The beds were progressively buried under landfill by the Altona Council in the 1950s and ’60s, much of the newly filled land being given to various sporting bodies that wanted the land to erect club rooms..

To add to this destruction, the council would have completely buried the reefs still existing offshore from Surf Street to construct a marina but were stopped by outraged local residents. One truckload of filling was in fact dumped over the sea wall right on the point at Seaholme as a precursor to covering the entire reef system, and the remains can still be seen if you look carefully at this point.

The extensive clean sandbanks and seagrass meadows that existed inside the protection of the encircling Seaholme reef system that were not destroyed by the council’s actions were destroyed in the 1950s and ‘60s by fishermen who came up with the bright idea of inserting open-ended metal tubes into the sand to bring up worms for fishing bait. What they didn’t realise or care about was that they also brought up the underlying sediments, which were then deposited on top of the clean yellow sand in black deposits. The effect of this activity was to destroy the seagrass beds and sandbanks within a few years.

The destruction was further accelerated by the construction of a bluestone seawall in the 1950s to shelter the esplanade from inundation by the sea. This completed the reef and sandbank destruction by destroying the previous natural shading of the sea into the land. It might have saved the seafront houses from inundation, but probably only temporarily, as the front yards of the houses along the esplanade would be flooded by high spring tides even in the 1950s. It was not uncommon to occasionally find a sea lion basking happily in the front yard of one of these houses.

Offshore, the reefs, which were so rich with mussels, abalone, sea urchins, and other marine creatures, were denuded of all shellfish within a few years of Melbourne’s population being swelled by successive waves of immigrant groups, some of whom looked to the reefs as an opportunistic, inexhaustible source of free food. Before that, the reefs had managed to survive in balance for thousands of years.

As to what became of the Aboriginal people who would have roamed so freely in this part of the world for thousands of years, we can only speculate. While some of their descendants still live in the local area, there is little physical evidence of their presence except in names such as Kororoit and Darebin.

The reader can make up their own mind as to whether there has been any enduring benefit to the community following the destruction of the environment that has taken place, as outlined in this book.

While the author has no personal knowledge about the destruction of other wetland environments around the Port Phillip Bay region, one could presume a similar fate.

The old Explosive Reserve still seems to exist in a new guise, although nothing remains of the old wharf used to load the explosives. The reserve was moved to a new site at Point Wilson near Geelong around 1960. Grass House Land is now overlain by houses, but maybe it only ever existed in the author’s mind.

The old coal mine did exist, but other than the fact that the author believes that the Prime Minister’s previous residence was close to where the old coal mine was, the author has no knowledge of its exact address. But if you look carefully in your backyards, you