January–February 2014 49volunteers and their goodwill extends to the preservation of
Rottnest’s culture. Wearing their signature yellow T-shirts,
guides take the ferry across the channel each day to give free
tours of the points of interest.
Richard Fox, 70, helped start the Volunteer Guides Asso-
ciation in 1986. Today it has 300 members. “It’s just another
way of sharing in the island, it’s a privilege to do that,” Richard
says. His father worked variously as Rottnest’s relief lighthouse
keeper, postmaster and island manager. Richard has observed
many changes over the decades but most alarming to him was
former WA premier Brian Burke’s desire to “turn Rottnest into
a Club Med-style place”.
Rallying against the plans, Richard’s resolve to continue run-
ning the free tours was cemented. “One way of protecting the
place is to show people what’s there,” he says. “If people know
birds fl y in from Siberia to be here, they’re more likely to want
to keep it how it is.”
Some of Rottnest’s charm lies in the fact that it is virtually carfree; other than a few island staf , people use bikes to get around.
Jody McDonald manages the island’s bike hire, a business that
operates out of a tin shed. In peak season, about 700 of the 1300
bikes are used daily – including tandems and child trailers that
parents attach to the rear of their cycles. Jody moved from what
she now calls “the big island” to Rottnest more than two years
ago, when she made a spartan WWII-era cottage her home.
“[The island] teaches you how nice it is to live so simply,” she
says, adding that her commute to work takes just one minute.
“It’s about being in a pristine environment and not having a
care in the world.”
Her father, Des Dans, was a former tourism minister, so her
childhood was fi lled with regular visits to Rottnest, a custom
that Jody continued with her own children. “We’re happy it
hasn’t been totally commercialised,” she says. “There are no
high-rise buildings. You don’t have to have a lot of money to
come here... Just 25 minutes [from Fremantle] and you’re in a
dif erent world.”F
OR THE PAST five years, Suzanne
Mather and Lorraine Marshall have
been counting birds on Rottnest Island,
most recently contributing their statistics
to the Shorebird 2020 Program, a national
monitoring initiative. Passionate twitchers,
the pair head up BirdLife Australia’s WA
branch and coordinate some 1200 members.
Rottnest is an important bird area,
supporting a number of threatened species
and hosting trans-equatorial migratory birds
that travel from as far away as Siberia. “The
red-necked stint comes here,” says Lorraine,
a medical scientist. “It only weighs 50g and
these ones spend the first year of their lives
on Rottnest. The brine shrimps in the salt
lakes are a good food source.”
She’s also fond of fairy terns, which
breed on the island, and banded stilts,
which congregate in their thousands. While
monitoring revegetation sites, volunteers
keep an eye on bush birds, such as the
golden whistler and the red-capped robin;
they are no longer found on the mainland
but numbers are increasing on Rottnest.BIRD SURVEYS:
THE TWITTERING
MASSESPopular with feathered tourists, too. A bridled tern (above) comes in
to land; they breed in colonies, often on rocky islands. The red-necked stint
(below) breeds in Siberia and Alaska. It follows the east Asian-Australasian
fl yway to spend the summer months in Australia.Onychoprion anaethetus;
JOHN HARRISON/
Calidris rufi collis