Busselton Jetty

Wooden sleepers and steel rails run dead straight along the deck of Busselton Jetty, flanked by white slatted handrails and a receding line of lamp posts drawing toward the horizon. Two red X-shaped signals mark a crossing point further down the deck. Rust colours the rails and open sky fills most of the upper frame. The long lens compresses the run so that the posts stack into a vanishing point, and the structure reads as a corridor over water rather than a path to anywhere in particular.

Busselton Jetty reaches 1,841 metres into Geographe Bay in Western Australia, the longest timber-piled jetty in the southern hemisphere. Construction began in 1864 and the first section, about 176 metres, opened the following year. Drift sand made the inshore water too shallow and forced an extension in 1875. A railway spur reached the jetty in 1911 to carry the timber trade out of the hinterland, and the structure kept being lengthened into the 1960s. Commercial shipping ceased in 1972. Cyclone Alby tore off a large part of the shore end on 4 April 1978, leaving the bend that is still there, and a fire took about 65 metres in December 1999. A refurbishment of roughly $27 million was completed in 2011 and the pier and railway reopened. Brett photographed the deck on 16 October 2017. The rusted rails are the last trace of the working line.