COUNCIL ACCUSED OF SHUTTING DOWN ELDERS’ CONCERNS OVER PUB
PLAN IN HISTORIC PARK
Paige Taylor The Australian 28 Nov 2025
The battle over a waterfront city park has aligned Aboriginal elders with first-settler families and turned political conservatives into conservationists in Western Australia, where the Cook Labor government’s development blitz is gathering pace.
The plan for a 650-seat pub and restaurant on the banks of the Mandurah estuary turned ugly when the local council called police on 81-year-old Aboriginal elder Ivy Bennell as she sat in her wheelchair trying to hand deliver a protest letter.
Now Sandra Muir – matriarch of the Tuckey dynasty that has farmed, logged and fished the region since 1830 – has come forward with surprise testimony backing local Aboriginal women’s claim that Hall Park was a birthing and burial ground for the Bindjareb people.
Mrs Muir’s family story is based on the eyewitness accounts of her first generation Australian relatives and passed down generations. It could be crucial in the community effort to preserve Hall Park as public open space.
However, Mrs Muir and the Aboriginal women are also united in their view that Hall Park has an important place in the Australian story before and after settlement. It is the setting for an extraordinary story of peace and reconciliation after frontier violence.
Hall Park was part of the farm owned by the pioneering Sutton family, whose long and mutually beneficial association with Bindjareb leader Yaburgurt is taught in local schools as an early example of “tolerance and co-operation” between Aboriginal people and Europeans. Yaburgurt is reported to have escaped the Pinjarra massacre of 1834 when WA’s first governor, James Stirling, led a party that killed Bindjareb people. Yaburgurt lived at the back of the Sutton farm until his death in 1915.
Classroom notes for teachers say Yaburgurt was a mediator who carried mail. Students see two photographs of him and learn of his “close and harmonious relationship with the Sutton family, who would help him with work and food when he was experiencing hard times and, in return, he would help them with advice about the land and the seasons”.
Aboriginal elder Barbara Pickett helped research that story for the state education department, which has made it optional for schools near Hall Park. Mrs Pickett said this was a chapter all Australians could be proud of.
“The history at this site is all of our history,” she said.
On Wednesday, Mrs Pickett asked the Cook Labor government to commission a survey of the site in order to reveal the truth of its past. The women say this should not involve the local council, which they see as wedded to the development as a means of attracting much-needed private investment to the retirement hub of Mandurah.
The dispute is shaping as a test of Premier Roger Cook’s public commitment to truth telling when it clashes with his government’s other priorities: WA Labor wants high density across Perth’s garden suburbs and is pulling apart planning laws to achieve this. State planning minister John Carey calls his critics BANANAs – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Mrs Muir, 80, joined the fight for Hall Park because she knew her grandfather, Roy Tuckey, was being truthful when he told her it is where Bindjareb people were born and buried.
“I can’t go to my grave and not repeat that conversation because it meant to so much to me,” Mrs Muir said.
She said her grandfather’s words that day in 1970 had a big impact because she was pregnant with her first child. They were sharing a Thermos of tea on the eastern foreshore of the Peel-Harvey estuary, facing Hall Park, when he pointed to the park and told her the story.
“He told me … they would set up their little camps, the aunties would look after the mothers and the babies and they would boil the water, wash the babies and make sure everything was hygienic.
“I said to grandpa: ‘How do you know all this?’ And he said: ‘My mother and father saw some of the women go through this’.”
Roy’s parents Charles and Emma Tuckey could see what is now Hall Park from the Tuckey family’s fish cannery on the opposite side of the estuary.
“I feel compelled to say this because it is a very precious earth and when the babies were stillborn they put them back into the earth,” Mrs Muir said.
Some of the region’s most prominent conservatives are insisting the women are heard. The tipping point for some came on April 4 when Mrs Bennell, well-known in the area, tried to deliver her letter against the pub plan.
A photograph taken in the City of Mandurah foyer shows Mrs Bennell in her manual wheelchair at the counter. Behind her is young relative Shoncay – Mrs Bennell’s carer that day – and elderly non-Aboriginal ratepayers who also oppose a pub plan.
A video shows City of Mandurah chief executive Casey Mihovilovich behind the counter saying: “I have to ask you to leave.”
The group was heard singing I Am Australian by The Seekers. At least four police cars arrived, the first with sirens on. A WA Police spokesperson said: “Police attended and the group dispersed. There were no offences detected.”
Ms Mihovilovich said the incident involved around 40 people entering the council foyer unannounced with raised voices and signage protesting the proposed development at Hall Park.
“The nature of the event was unknown at the time, disrupted services, and left some staff and members of the public feeling unsafe,” Ms Mihovilovich said.
“We fully respect the right of community members to express their views peacefully. However, this should take place outside of the workplace.”
The council also summoned police to eject Mrs Pickett and Aboriginal woman Lorraine Morrison from its open-air CrabFest on March 15. The women were seated at a plastic table and collecting signatures against the council’s pub plan when an events co-ordinator told them to leave because they did not have a permit. Two police officers arrived to move them on.
Longtime locals alarmed by these events include Kim Hames, who was Aboriginal affairs minister in the Court and Barnett governments. Dr Hames and fellow Liberal Peter Hick wrote to Cook Labor government ministers this month warning that local Aboriginal women have “a deep and valid belief that the area has vital historic significance that has been ignored and disputed” by council.
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