Town Twinning
The twinning of Denham in Buckinghamshire with Denham Shark Bay in Western Australia was planned to help commemorate the centenary of Parish Councils in 1994. It was the idea of local resident Andrew Shaw, who did much of the original work involved with the scheme which has attracted many positive comments from far and wide.
The two Denham councils received generous gifts from John Denham, descendant of Captain Henry Mangles Denham. These were coloured reproductions of coastal profiles of Shark Bay drawn by the artist James Glen Wilson on the surveying expedition of Captain Denham in the mid‑nineteenth century. One set is in the parish office and the other set was taken to Shark Bay on a visit in 1994. The twinning is also marked by the road signs at the entrances to Denham.
It turned out that Denham in Shark Bay has no historical link with us, although we are pleased to have forged a new one because of the friendship we now have with John Mangles Denham, great-great-grandson of Admiral Sir Henry Mangles Denham (1800-1887) who as a Captain with the Royal Navy charted the coast of Western Australia in 1858 in his ship HMS Herald. Captain Denham was not the first European to set foot on this coastline about 500 miles north of Perth. That honour is given to the Dutchman Dirk Hartog in 1616, at what is now Cape Inscription, but only the native Nganda and Malgana people lived there until the 1860s. Their earliest known settlement is dated at around 2,200 BC. It was the English explorer William Dampier who gave the name Shark Bay to the area in 1699.
The Shark Bay town of Denham has a population of under 1,000 compared with our parish of about 7,000. Its main business was fishing and pearling. Europeans settled for the fishing (snapper, groper, whiting, mullet, prawns, scallops etc), salt production and for limited sheep farming in the land around. Today this is mainly supplemented by tourism, helped by the famous dolphins at Monkey Mia and other varied wildlife of the area which now has World Heritage Listing.
The water of Shark Bay itself is about 3,000 square miles in area, and much of it is very shallow. The weather is generally idyllic by our standards, with the summer and winter averages being 33°C and 25°C, the only difficulty being the occasional seasonal cyclone force wind and rain. There is now a tarmac road all the way from Perth, and there are good air links.
Over the years many residents of both Denhams have exchanged visits, children from schools in both settlements have written to each other, and roadside twinning signs have been erected in both communities. The Parish Council is very pleased to have this link between the white swan of Buckinghamshire and the black swan of Western Australia. Neither council has spent public money on twinning other than to exchange publications. To learn more about our twin town, visit these sites:
http://www.sharkbay.wa.gov.au/