Mangrove Jack. aka Bill.
Mangrove Jack, the hobo fraud.
Not actually mangrove Jack, in fact his name was William, and he was just a straight out compulsive liar, which is probably half the problem, he was Dave one minute and mangrove Jack when beer was being shouted, then Brian the fisherman before disappearing for a week.
When you did run into him again he would be Box cart Joe on the north line, living in an empty box car and then there was Junk yard Bill who lived in a car in the Pt Wakefield Auto wreckers yard.
Now to back up this was around the time I knew Wolfe and lived near Pt Wakefield and I have done a lot of travelling since then, Mangrove Jack seems to be a mythological theme that permeates anywhere there is mangroves and hobo's as far as I have experienced.
And even though my mangrove Jack wasn't, he still sort of was.
So I heard the stories at the bar, met the man, and he left, people said he had a house in the mangroves built of drift wood with an iron roof floating on goon bags etc.
It was all rather amusing until it was sort of true.
The second time I saw him we were on the way out from the boat ramp in my mate Dave's dinghy, he was in a canoe and said G'day as we passed, there is only one way in the inlet so he was clearly going to the ramp/town.
I asked Dave and he said yeah he has a shack out here, I don't know where, it's bullshit he lives there it's just where he gets crabs.
The next time was almost the same, except with Milt from( Bow fishing ), Dave was busy had asked us to check his pots and rebait, I had a fox and a cat from trapping and a dead roadkill galah we spread across 14 pots, we got to keep 23 crabs and as we came back there was Mangrove Jack, paddling against the tide, we offered and he threw a rope then we towed him about 3km into the ramp.
He was quite thankful but took off, we moved the boat to Daves, took out crabs and stopped in the pub on the way back to mine, Jack had a 5ltr plasic bottle of port, like an oil container and the tide to catch before dark, but said he would meet us at the ramp at 5pm Thursday, he wouldn't say why.
It was Saturday.
So the next thursday I made a point of a town trip, met up with Wolfe and Milt at Daves, around 3pm, Milt asks, are we going to meet Mangrove Jack?
It is literally 1 km walk to the boat ramp, so we all grab a beer and the dogs and go for a stroll.
Sure as shit about 4:30 in comes Mangrove Jack, he is happy enough to see us but asks where is the car?
Well of course we have been drinking and all planned to stay the night within walking distance, so he was upset to start off with.
A few drinks calmed him and a discussion of slurred memories unfolded, along the lines of he had some materials to pick up, and needed a car and the trailer/boat.
Eventually he explained he had supplies he needed to get to his mangrove shack.
We were all buzzing to help now but had to wait till tomorrow, so we got pissed and discussed all sorts of rubbish, eventually Milt and I went back to his place leaving Wolfe Dave and Mangrove Jack at Daves.
The next morning we drove to Daves in my car, Hooked up Daves trailer, then Dave had his wagon and boat trailer with his tinny.
Off we went to Balaklava, we picked up 10 x Bondoor panels, 25 second hand sheets of corrugated iron, 6 x 44gallon drums, 250mtrs of Telsra rope and some rings of tie wire.
Lastly we stopped in the Auto wreckers where Jack had a Magna station wagon in the back corner, he stashed some port in there and just a check on his blankets etc. then we collected a bunch of inner tubes I forget how many.
Back at Daves Wolfe went home, Dave, Milt, Jack and I went to the ramp, we tied up the panels with the iron on top and floated them behind the tinny, It went Dave, Milt and I in the boat towing the panels/iron, then Jack in his canoe and finally the 6 drums in a line, it was a slow trip even with the tide.
We stopped at a marked tree and tied off everything, Wilt got in the canoe with Jack and Dave and I went back for the inner tubes.
Eventually Jack showed us the way through to his hut, it was real, Jack was very insistent no cameras (we didn't have phones then) and I oft thought about going out there after he died but I never did.
At his shack he explained the story of how it came to be.
I still don't know where to begin explaining it, it really needed photos.
he was out fishing, checking crab nets etc when it started to get late and a king tide was rolling in, he was tired and not even half way back to the inlet when it began to rain, He decided to try and cut through the mangroves and let the tide push him into dry land that way, eventually worn out and wet he just tied off the canoe and sat to wait it out.
That night the tide got higher than he'd ever seen, he was cold exhausted, lost by now and determined to just keep going.
The full moon was his only light and then he saw it, a huge rock protruding from the mangroves and a good half a meter above the water level.
His shack was built on said rock.
Small but not tiny it was 3mtrs x 5mtrs inside with a 2mtr x 5mtr deck with half a verandah.
On the day we were there it was a good 1.5meters above the water and we had to use his ladder to get in from the tinny.
It was in rather rough shape but not completely trashed, the north side was just chip board wall and like wet cardboard we removed it with intent to use bondoor panels to replace it and make it more weather proof.
It was genius, he showed us his tool for drilling into the rock to build the original one of a kind shanty style steel frame, it must've taken ages.
He had to work out where on the rock, wait till low tide, then smack it with a hammer and turn half a turn then smack with hammer and so on, then he had to get the measurements right and get angle iron pre drilled to match the holes then take them out 5 at a time in his canoe, using Silva seal in the hole and Dyna bolts to attach it all bit by bit.
Between the tide and weather in general you could tell he had spent over 10 years on this shack, one bit at a time, he said 6 months before he had 2 poles high enough to string a hammock up, I realised quickly why he was so secretive bordering on paranoid about anyone knowing about it.
He had a 10kgm gas bottle and burner inside, and a sink under the verandah part that drained straight into the ocean, He mentioned the hardest things to get out there was the mattress on his bed and the carpet on the 2x4 pine floor, basically both involved a lot of plastic, silicon and duct tape.
Even standing there fishing off his platform it was unreal, impossible to fathom how long and how many hours he must have spent over the last decade, in a place where clearly many things had been replaced or repaired multiple times.
All this effort just to have something so basic, literally RUSTic, so very simple in appearance a shanty shack if you will that clearly took more labour than a 2 story 10 bedroom house on land.
We were sipping port as he was telling us all about the place and how he started with a platform and tarps, indeed it all sounded more impressive standing there seeing it, waves lapping below.
It is hard to even try to explain what, the nature of the terrain itself was / is subject to so much constant change, the never ending rise and retreat of the tide alone is impossible to explain.
I don't know how to summarise such a man, Bill ? among other aliases or his achievements, nor how to contextualise his life, that is not for me to say, I can only relay what I know.
A hobo as they would say, he had shelters around the Port of Wakefield in the 90's and died in 2003, I believe he was 71 years old.
He had shelters / camps in abandoned train cars, wrecked automobiles, a shed near the pub owned by a friend (see below) and of course the amazing shanty shack he had built in the mangroves.
He was a drunk when I knew him, and proud of it, Port was his poison of choice but he was not adverse to any alcohol and often smoked pot, although it was often very low grade.
He died in his friends shed on a fold out cot, less than 50mtrs from the pub, with half a flaggon of port beside him.
I found out 3 days later, the few of us who knew him agreed not to speak of his shack for at least 10 years, it's been over 20.
Needless to say the legend of Mangrove Jack lived on locally, morphing and evolving into all kinds of Chinese whispers, amateur "journalists" came looking for the shack a few times, as far as I know only Dave and Milt ever went there again.
Imagine my surprise when I heard of the legend of Mangrove Jack in the Northern Territory some years later, then in QLD, and by the time I was 25 I never spoke about the bloke I knew anymore, until now, There must've bee a dozen of him all over country, who'd ever believe I met him and got invited to his secret shack ?
There were 11 people at his funeral, his remains were scattered from the warf by his brother in law afterwards.
This video starts showing the shed across the road from the pub in which he died, and I am struck by the mural, perhaps when he was 30 or 40 years younger ? Maybe someone else.
©JaymanWNewell 2025.
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