For decades until the 1950s, hundreds of itinerant workers, pensioners and migrants made homes for themselves in the dunes south of Fremantle, forming a community that became known as the Smelter's Camp.
Filmmaker and researcher Julie Raffaele has researched the camp extensively discovering the names and stories of the people who called it home.
The camp was "basically a shanty town" in several pockets in the area near South Beach and Woodman Point, Ms Raffaele recently told ABC Radio Perth.
"And there was a community that basically was there for decades, on Crown land."
It became known as the Smelter's Camp because of its proximity to the Fremantle Smelting Works on South Beach, which processed gold and other ores and had a distinctive smokestack.
The homes first began to be constructed in late 1800s, although it was used by Aboriginal people as a camping area long before that.
The camp housed a mix of people who found setting up house on sandy land not far from popular South Beach their only option.
"There were a lot of people who were living there who were workers at the industrial area, the abattoirs, Robb Jetty, later the smelter itself," Ms Raffaele says.
"Sometimes there were people who weren't able to mix in society quite as much. They were recovering from mental illness, there were migrants who weren't yet integrated.
"There were women who lived there a long time with their children, and obviously, a great population of transient men."
Painstaking search for inhabitants' stories
Ms Raffaele's research involved searching for the names and stories of the people who lived there.
With support from the City of Cockburn she found 200 names, and after a fellowship at the Battye Library, which holds much of the state's historical records, she found a further 60 names and details of residents of the camp.
"I spent a lot of time looking through electoral rolls initially because some people listed the camp as their place of residence in the electoral roll," she says.
"Then I was looking at newspapers where perhaps something had happened, someone had been robbed, or someone had been arrested, that they listed.
"Then you can start to see the network of people and how they survived and what their life was like and how they worked.
"If you were really lucky, you also got a glimpse of character.
Strange and beautiful tales
One extraordinary life story she found was that of Pietro Lujo, also known as Petar and Peter the Slav, who emigrated from Croatia and worked on the Boulder mines as a fireman in the early 1900s.
"In 1911, he came down with an illness and he was diagnosed with [lung disease] miner's phthisis and given two months to live," Ms Raffaele says.
"I don't know about this medical advice, but his doctors said that he could extend his life if he drank blood."
Lujo moved to Fremantle and determined to follow the doctor's suggestion, befriended the manager of one of abattoirs near the Smelter's Camp, and set up camp nearby.
"He had his two dogs, Billy and Susie, and he's quoted [in the Daily News in 1939] as saying there was 'a plentiful supply of the magic fluid'," Ms Raffaele says.
Lujo "drank three or four pints a day for 16 years", before dying in the Claremont Men's Home in 1943.
While the newspaper reports focused on the crime, poverty and squalor at the camp, Ms Raffaele says she also found happy memories of the community, including people still alive who remembered a camp childhood.
"I met a man named Terry Fulton, whose parents lived in the vicinity, and he remembers a really carefree childhood where he could roam around the area," she says.
"He described in great detail what his little house looked like … and it wasn't something that he perceived as lacking by any means.
"He had a really beautiful childhood until he was about 10 and had to go off to school, which he wasn't so pleased about."
Media attention, illegal letting spells end of camp
But by the 1950s, concerns about the camps were growing.
In 1953, The Sunday Times visited and wrote a story titled, 'They call it poverty point and no wonder!'
It went on to describe conditions at the camp and some of the people who lived there:
"To someone this is home. It is shabby outside. Inside they have even put pictures on the wall. An old chair outside has on oil drum supporting the seat where a leg is missing.
It will come as a shock to many — even in days of housing shortages — to find that people still live in conditions like this."
Mrs. M. Westicott, another old-age pensioner who has been in her present "home" for the past 7 years, said: "We've got to be satisfied with the conditions. We haven't the money to go elsewhere."
Opposition grew further as reports emerged of some homes being actually being rented or sold to residents, despite sitting on Crown land.
The Sunday Times published an editorial in January 1955 headlined: 'Notorious Beach Camp Must Go', calling for the camp's demolition:
"Its dwellings, many built of scraps from nearby rubbish dumps, mostly have crude sanitation and are without water, gas, or light. Some have been occupied for years. Several have been bought and sold.
Although some decent, respectable people — some pensioners — live at the camp, generally it is a dangerous, shameful refuge.
Every help should be given the poverty-stricken aged to find a new home. But the Smelter's Camp must go.
In June 1957, the bulldozers moved in, but Ms Raffaele says the demolition was not clear cut, and some people reported simply moving to the other side of the railway line, rather than out of the area.
These days the site has been extensively redeveloped and nothing remains of the former camp, but the stories are being preserved by Ms Raffaele's research.
"I just wanted these people to be remembered," she says.
"I just thought that they were entitled to be remembered as part of the time as [much as] any other person who had achieved success."
