Crinia catchers of Ngooraganup: Herdsman's Lake

Crinia frog catchers of Njookenbooroo Ngooraganup: Herdsman's Lake

Their name is crinia, the small frog - and as children, we spied them in their thousands.

The water in which the crinia swam was finger deep.

Overhead, giant paperbark stood silent locked away from the breeze catapulting faerie fluff from the bending lakeside’s reeds beyond.

The water sat at a constant temperature resting, as it did, on a millennium bed of peat. A peat bed fed and feeding from its millennia of fallen branches and rotting trunks and leaves.

In Woodlands, in Perth’s western suburbs, bordering Herdsman’s Lake was a white limestone track that drew alongside the lake’s edge. Stepping over and through the bracken and long grasses of kikuyu one had to take care. Tiger snakes and dugites abounded there, and came with enlarged fangs, foraging in frenzy, hungry and, every bit as mad as a cut snake for every sound we heard, or at least we frog catchers had imagined and believed what others had told us, for we never saw one, not one.

Once on the peat the hottest day was forgotten, and sightings of crinia, golden bell and banjo, and all matter of unknown multi-coloured thumb-sized frogs took over.

Here, and there, the prizes of car thieves or forgotten wrecks sat rusting, brown and disregarded, forgotten by all except we frog catchers.

Temporarily this car yard was ours and oil spots or droplets of leaking aging fuel left rainbows, rainbows that expanded before disappearing in the wash of paperbark shadows. Was that a crinia, a banjo or golden bell? The eye had to be quick to catch their springing, swimming in the half-shadows, with their speckled back, legs and thighs golden, green, brown and sparkling, glinting in the half-light.

Shadows submerged them and, on hind frog legs ever quickening and bounding behind them, the crinia left us for dead darting to their sanctuary in the old Morris or radiator wedged between the corrosive chassis of some aged car gone to rust.

This sanctuary of car wrecks was their hideaway their secret world in the shadowed everglades of Herdsman's Lake. After school in the afternoon hours between 4 and sundown we played in the shadows on the peat, and for an hour or two both the crinia and my band of crinia hunters ruled the crinia kingdom together.

The lake side crinia kingdom whilst ruled by frogs overlapped with the reed beds and occasionally the elongated flexing staggered movement of the spear billed Egret came on reconnaissance seeking the crinia and its cousins, just as we catchers did, but with the desire for feasting, not for spying. The crinia were often no match for him, but his plumage of white might have given the frogs a moments warning. The moorhens were far better camouflaged for shadows and crinia, but their feast was weed. As was the diet of the swan, but we never put it past them, surely a feed was a feed, but crinia were hardly a feast, not that it ever stopped the Bittern or Nankeen Night Heron. These great hunters fished in the shadows. The sharp beaked ones were the best equipped to hunt the crinia and their larger frog cousins, as their plumage was camouflaged for shadow hunting. When the late afternoon lakeside hunters emerged from their reed hideouts, the crinia would not have seen what waited for them and what we crinia catchers knew was sure to hit them as quick as any Egret if given the chance.

Herdsman's Lake was named by the Noongar as the place of the black duck - Ngooraganup, but the duck is hardly black, pied perhaps, and a close relative of the European Mallard. In between its wing feathers, it revealed a plaid of navy blue, a navy commission of duck medals we imagined.

Black ducks, Moorhens, Swans and Herons hunted, preened and fed and out of sight and, although seldom seen, the musk duck was frequently heard and watched for every courtship performance in which it engaged. Its tail feathers bent like a peacock and its wings swept water in unison with its tail movement, before it let out its piercing ping like a submarine hunting Russians.

Bordering the reeds, the peat and paperbark was a field used for the equestrian inclined and some days we crinia catchers watched from our well-hidden sanctuary as riders and their horses competed in their jumping and competition. And beyond the field was a line of factories. On some afternoons, we went to the sanctuary by way of a wide detour, and made straight for a potato chip factory where there stood lines of kindly Italian factory women who handed out free bags of salt and vinegar, barbecue, tomato and plain. All of the chips were salty, such that each mouthful forced and drove us to thirst, but with nothing other than lake water to quench that thirst, we were forced to backtrack on a quickening return journey home.

The sanctuary of giant paperbark and its millennium of peat cooled the fringes of the lake. In the summer heat when the fires roared sending cinders over our nearby suburb of Woodlands, the sanctuary prevented the fires spread. It was a managed spectacle that flared into the night and in the shade and cool of the sanctuary the wading birds sheltered as if boats in their pens riding out a cyclone.

All around the lake's edge the seasons played out as the waders, coots, cormorants, and swans year in, year out, in their breeding cycle of nesting, laying and looking after their young was mimicked by the lakeside’s market gardeners. After one crop the swans would breed, their cygnets would hatch and after the harvest these families of swans and their bundles would forage, before making their perilous journeys over the busy Pearson Street to Jackadder Lake.

The human lake side dwellers knew when to expect them, each year the crinia hunters watched for them even acting as cross-walk attendants guiding, shepherding them to the lake. Too bad the same did not occur for the long-necked tortoise whose grey form matched the bitumen and left them and most car drivers unaware of each other.

Red mounds of broken brown-shell, sinew, guts, offal and intestine marked the previous night's rush to lay their eggs and rush to return to the lake, and many became a roadway road-kill. But one somewhere had always gotten through, had made it across the killing field, past the grey kerbed butchery that saw so many die, not just tortoises but birds, frogs and even cats. Someone's moggy that no one claimed would lie for days until rigor mortis had left him flat like cardboard, stiff and stinking.

But between these lakes lay arteries, networks of cement aqueducts that carried roadside run off in subterranean drains. All of them fed and led back to Herdsman's Lake. All of the underground drains carried oil leaks and road wash and all matter of fish joined in their swim to the lake. Periodically, great schools of golden carp fingerlings swam in the shallows, while much larger three-pound monsters swam in the depths. Goldfish also found their way into the lake and grew into Koei as large and as prolific as the carp. One stream, more a tributary connected distant swamps to the lake, and there in deep pools, we crinia catchers baited our hooks with bread. The fish, large hungry carp were caught, released and re-caught. The same fish being caught four times or more, and the same fish, we thought, appearing day after day.

From time to time the local council’s drainage team came through removing waterweed and teams of southern Europeans speaking in an unknown tongue moved slowly along the bank, removing weed and the gilgie - the small freshwater crayfish that lay waiting in the mud. We crinia catchers saw this and learnt fast.

On any day one could locate duck eggs, young ducklings, gilgie, and frogs and, with some help from the village butcher, we learnt how to lure the tortoise sometimes two or three at a time. Although whilst fun, this was not our favoured catch for the putrid scent of the yaargeny left their stench on our hands that proved difficult to remove.

The streams and drains all led to the lake, all a vast underworld network of waterways that entered the lake from one-side and fed another steam that meandered between the old police stables, Churchlands High School, Edith Cowan University before touring the flanks of Newman Sienna and disappearing. We crinia catchers went to these schools, and each day viewed the stream and its journey to the grate. The movement and rush of the streams to the grate entranced and reminded us of where the waters originated, and sadly where the sanctuary ceased. For we knew what perhaps the tortoise, gilgie, carp and fingerlings did not, that beyond the grated underworld a giant outlet pipe fed the waiting salt water schools of sharp-toothed Tailor, Skipjack and Trevally. This was the final destination of the subterranean drains of Woodlands, Innaloo, Osborne Park and beyond. All matter of fresh water things were fed through the Swanbourne drain till they reached their final destination and the unceasing appetite of the Indian Ocean. Unsuspecting, they went with the flow. If only they had known what lay in wait for them.

In time we crinia catchers grew up and our glimpses of the sanctuary were periodic single spied moments from windscreens, side windows, and rear-vision mirrors of what was quickly becoming another's sanctuary of progress. How unreal it seemed to see giant mechanical arms lifting bucket loads of peat as the sanctuary was up-ended and drained.
The offerings of the fresh water fish into Swanbourne's drainage pipe had obviously not been enough. With the peat removed the giant age old paperbark were cut down, all to make way for new roads that fed the factories and technology parks. Where the sanctuary once rested a four lane road was built and named 'John Sander's Drive' in memory of a lone round the world yachtsman. How ironic that the memory of salt water had come to occupy that which was once fresh water, in celebration of a roadway of progress built through what had once been a frog sanctuary.

Beneath the bitumen the peat swamp lives on. The bumpy road that rises high and low now forces each driver to remember what went before it. And where once the market gardens had sown seedlings and provided for the life cycle of the swans, an ever increasing population and its suburban sprawl has moved in and almost, very nearly taken their place. The peat and paperbark have gone now and only memories of the days we spent with the crinia and their cousins remain. But sometimes these old memories return to me. When I hear the plonk-bonk song of the banjo frog and that golden bell singing and guiding the swans in the darkness to Ngooraganup Herdsman's Lake and its near neighbour Yaargadup Jackadder Lake, I become that child again.
With the songs of the frogs singing in the darkness I eagerly remember our band of crinia catchers, and hope they are still out there in some sanctuary somewhere, watching with eyes and experiences anew, the magical world of frogs and water birds and the places they call home.