Settlement at Shallow Inlet

Tom and Mary Henderson and family moved to Shallow Inlet in 1934. At the time Permissive Occupancy of Crown Land was allowed for a peppercorn annual rental. They weren’t allowed to build permanent dwellings and so built houses mostly out of driftwood timber collected from the ocean beach. By all accounts they had a good time socially with the Pilkington families who were farmers in the Sandy Point area.

They fished in Shallow Inlet and their catch went by train to Melbourne where it was sold at the Melbourne Fish Market. During the second world war they operated a shark boat fishing offshore for gummy and school shark, as there was a great demand for shark livers as a source of vitamin A.

They also constructed and maintained, using hand tools, an all-weather vehicle track to the Inlet. Cars often became bogged on this road in very wet or very dry weather and needed to be assisted by various means.

Tom’s son Roy bought an old army tank in the late 1930s to haul logs at a sawmill they were operating on the road to Fish Creek. He later attached a blade to it and turned it into a bulldozer. During 1957-8, Roy did much of the early road building work for the Playground Estate company around the township now known as Sandy Point. After the tank became mechanically unreliable, the company brought in another contractor to finish the job.

Tom often drove the tank between his home at the Inlet and the town site, and when the original  road got busy and he was concerned about his being able to see oncoming traffic properly, he bulldozed another track parallel to and north of the main road. This became known locally as “The Tank Track”. When the inlet road was finally constructed this track eventually fell into disrepair, but was later upgraded and is now a popular walking and bike riding track between Sandy Point and the Inlet, known as the Roy Henderson Trail.

Ray Henderson and his brothers were sometimes driven to the school bus stop in Sandy Point and back each day in the tank. They initially attended Fish Creek primary school and later Foster High School. The bus was driven by Dick Martin. The permissive occupancies were phased out in the 1980s and the buildings were all removed and the sites cleared by the early 1990s Ray Henderson and other members of his extended family still live in Sandy Point.

In 1903 a small boat was washed ashore in Shallow Inlet. It turned out it was the Tilikum, a Canadian Indian war canoe, carved out of a single piece of cedar and  fitted out by its owner and captain, Captain John Voss, to sail around the world. It left Canada in 1901 and sailed west through the Pacific Islands towards Australia. After leaving Sydney, on its way to Melbourne, they sailed through the entrance into Shallow Inlet. There they saw 4 men waving at them from the beach and went ashore.

The Pilkington families provided hospitality to Captain Voss and his mate for a week while repairs to the rudder were made, after which the Tilikum sailed on to Melbourne and eventually to its final destination - London.