Turtle soup factory, Cossack

Joan Hall and Helen Glen standing on turtle at Cossack, c.1926.

Turtle sculpture outside the Cossack backpackers' in 2019.

The turtle soup factory at Cossack was operating in the 1920s, with Aubrey Hall working with it in 1925.

1908:

The red meat of the turtle is not wanted — and is of no value here — but I would suggest and would like to see a sort of Liebig Extract of Meat prepared from this red meat — and I think I could find a market for it.

1925, May:

On Friday evening a number of [Roebourne] residents visited Cossack to see the engine started that has been erect ed to work the machinery for canning turtle soup. As there were also others present to await arrival of the Minderoo a social evening was spent with song and dance.

In March 1931 "another turtle company" were getting ready to work. The Nicol Bay was being used to catch them, and the government imposed a limit of five tons per boat and the boats had to be unpowered.

E.M. Noblet writing in 1969:

In the old Customs House there was a group of pale faces called the turtle soupies, for they had leased the big place and fitted it out as a turtle soup factory, the high-wired enclosure with its railway line supports being the turtle pen. They ordered cases of cooking sherry through Nob and were dedicated to the task of creating a super brew for overseas consignment.

We were not long in Cossack when, overnight, the turtle soup factory became a madhouse. The still air rang with weird screams, laughter, song and dance, a veritable culinary chorus that went of for days and nights.

When a couple of the crazy chefs came to the bar for more cooking sherry, they told Nob that they had brewed a soup so aphrodisiacal that it had sent them into a seventh heaven of rapture they could not bear to leave.

Only when the cooking sherry ran out did they descend rapidly and painfully to earth, nursing incredible hangovers, groans replacing Elysium's songs, and little sups of weak whisky and water on the veranda benches gradually restoring them to normal.

Soberly they returned to the soup brewing business, soberly they awaited word from London in response to the trial consignment of nectar they had shipped there.

[…]

In October, a whing-dinger of a celebration started in the turtle soup factory when word from London brought high praise and a large order for another consignment of soup.

As before, it ran itself out, the chefs dried out and went back to work. There was a period of ineffable peace and quiet, then a week when panic reigned and the news leaked out that the first consignment could not be duplicated. There was no recipe. The crazy cooks, inventing as they went along, had simmered and strained the turtle flesh, thrown in seasoning, sugar, herbs and spice and sherry, tasted, and added a little more this and that, until had emerged the first delectable brew. Now, working in a frenzy, they sent abroad the nearest, the best they could come up with.

It was a failure.

They folded their chefs' caps and aprons and silently stole away.