Esperance is a town in Western Australia, located on the south coast around half-way between Albany and the South Australian border; 7 hours drive and 1 hour flight from the capital, Perth. Its population at the 2006 census was 14,450 and its major industries are tourism, agriculture, and fishing.
[edit] History
Esperance location in Western AustraliaEuropean history dates back to 1627 when the Dutch vessel Gulden Zeepaert, skippered by François Thijssen, passed through the blue waters off the Esperance coast.
French explorers are credited with making the first landfall near the present day town, naming it and other local landmarks whilst sheltering from a storm in this area in 1792. The town itself was named after the French ship, the L'Espérance,[2] commanded by Bruni d'Entrecasteaux. Esperance, roughly translated, is French for 'hope'.
In 1802, British navigator Matthew Flinders sailed the Bay of Isles, discovering and naming places such as Lucky Bay and Thistle Cove. Whalers, sealers and pirates followed, as did pastoralists and miners, keen to exploit the free land and cash in on the gold boom in the gold fields to the north.
The area of the Esperance townsite was first settled by the Dempsters, a pioneer family of Scottish descent, in the 1870s.[3] A telegraph station was opened in 1876, although the formal gazettal of the townsite did not occur until 1893.
In 1979, pieces of the space station Skylab crashed onto Esperance after the craft broke up over the Indian Ocean. The municipality fined the United States $400 for littering. The fine was never paid. Skylab's demise was an international media event, with merchandising, wagering on time and place of re-entry and nightly news reports. The San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab to be delivered to their offices. 17-year-old Stan Thornton scooped a few pieces of Skylab off the roof of his home in Esperance, Western Australia and caught the first flight to San Francisco, where he collected his prize. [4]
In January 2007, Esperance experienced a torrential storm with wind gusts of up to 110km/h and brought 155mm of rainfall within 24 hours, causing significant flooding. More than 100 homes were damaged, several boats were destroyed, trees were felled and 35m of bridge on the South Coast Highway, the main road linking Esperance to Perth, was washed away. The Western Australian Government declared the area a "natural disaster zone". Over 25,000 sheep were killed in the storm.[5][6]
[edit] Facilities
There are five primary schools in the region, Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Primary School, Castletown Primary School, Esperance Primary School, Nulsen Primary School and Seventh Day Adventist Primary School. There are also two secondary schools: Esperance Senior High School and Esperance Anglican College which opened at the start of 2008. Curtin TAFE also has a campus in the town.
[edit] Tourism
Near the town itself are numerous beaches, offering surfing, scuba diving, and swimming. Also nearby are a number of salt lakes, including the Pink Lake, which gains its rosy hue from red algae living within its waters. Esperance is most noted for its coastline and has been voted Australia's best beaches, Australia's whitest sand and Western Australia's most popular beach. Esperance is also home to the Cyclops wave, extremely heavy with massive amounts of water unloading on shallow reef. Cyclops is featured in the surfing films Billabong Odyssey, and the Bra Boys documentary.
There are five major national parks near the town. A major nearby tourist attraction, 20 minutes away from the town centre, is the Cape Le Grand National Park, which offers a picturesque coast of largely granite terrain and sheltered white sand beaches. The park is a popular spot for recreational fishing, as well as four wheel drive enthusiasts and hikers. Esperance also has a number of wind turbines supplying electricity to the town which is an amassing site.[7] Late 2007 a television advertisement promoting one of the newer Ferrari cars was filmed on Esperance's foreshore, to be shown overseas.
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