Cossack landowner loses heart

“I DON’T think my heart is in it anymore,” Geoff Van Waardenberg says before starting his night shift surveying rail lines out of Perth.
“I find it hard to talk about Cossack, I’m so disappointed. It’s killed us.”
The 49-year-old Guildford surveyor told StreetWise he pays a second mortgage on his Cossack block which he bought in 2001 on the expectation, and promise by local and state governments, of connecting water, power and sewerage to the historic town 1500km north of Perth.
Geoff’s dream was to open a ‘Thompson’s House’ B&B to honour his great great grandfather Andrew Stonehouse Thompson who ran a boarding house with his children after he arrived in Cossack in the mid 1870s in a pearling boat built in Fremantle.
Thompson, a shipwright, and his wife Annie Cave, raised eight children who went to school at Cossack and helped run their water delivery business. Andrew also served as undertaker and his pearling brother Robert owned Roebourne Hotel. Robert also bought land here and sold out in 1891.
Much of the surviving written history on Cossack comes from descendants including Geoff and Alan Wilson, great great grandson of William Shakespeare Hall who established Cossack after he arrived in 1861.
By the 1950s, Cossack was a ghost town, Geoff’s family having left in 1900 after a fire destroyed their home built in 1890, the only survivors a cockatoo and small box of personal belongings. The family, now in Perth, owned the block until 1953.
Andrew and Annie’s third eldest son Christopher, Geoff’s great grandfather, visited the former port and pearling townsite for the rest of his life. During the 1950s and 1960s, he became concerned landowners did not have their heritage links properly acknowledged and feared the government would take away their land.
“The town was re-gazetted in 2000 and it was all go ahead,” Geoff recalls. “Most of us would like to maintain our properties, but not for another 20 years of this.”

Death and taxes

Having bought his elevated block for $230,000, Geoff’s most recent bank valuation came in at $350,000 without water and power. At current market values, without any development allowed at Cossack, all Geoff can be sure of is having to pay his annual rates and charges on an empty block his forefathers left him.
He said he bought the block at Cossack after $3.9 million of local, state and federal funding was approved to connect the townsite to water, power and sewerage. He even inspected the purchased cabling and tubing at the City of Karratha depot, where it was left to rot for years because, according to council, “funding to install the cabling itself did not eventuate”.
Worse, Geoff said the State Government decision in August last year to knock back a City amendment that would have allowed people to provide their own water and power supply was gobsmacking given Premier Mark McGowan’s election promise to pump $425 million into tourism in the region, including at Cossack.
He said after years of consultancies, reports and meetings, he suspected there were people or some belief in State planning or high up in the government bureaucracy, “that doesn’t want anything to happen at Cossack, I just don’t know why”.
Mr Waardenberg is one of several private landowners who last month asked WA parliament to lift restrictions on developing their freehold blocks whose history is tied closely to the development of the North West. He said Cossack is part of his family story of perseverance, sacrifice and the hope of one day seeing the coastal gem reactivated as a thriving tourism precinct boosting local jobs and business.
StreetWise will bring you the Government’s response, expected May 12.