Bindjareb country
Long before any European arrived, the estuary and its rivers were home to the Bindjareb people of the Noongar nation. The area was known as Mandjoogoordap, usually translated as 'meeting place of the heart' — a place where families gathered for fishing, trade and ceremony around one of the richest waterways on the coast. The City of Mandurah became the first WA council to dual-name its civic buildings, and the Performing Arts Centre now carries the name Mandjoogoordap Middar – Warangka Mia.
Thomas Peel and the first settlement
Thomas Peel arrived in December 1829 aboard the Gilmore with the first of his settlers, having missed the November deadline that would have secured his enormous land grant. The settlement he established at the mouth of the estuary struggled through disease and poor supplies; by 1837 the township had only a dozen residents. A road and ferry link to Perth followed in 1850, Peel died in 1865, and the first traffic bridge across the estuary opened in 1894.
Fishing, crabbing and holidays
For most of the twentieth century Mandurah was a fishing village and holiday town. A fish cannery operated in the early 1900s, the beach shacks of Silver Sands, Falcon and Wannanup filled every summer, and blue swimmer crabs became the town's signature. Mandurah became a Shire in 1961, a Town in 1987 and a City on 14 April 1990.
The Dawesville Cut
By the 1980s nutrient run-off from farms and gardens on sandy soils had turned the Peel-Harvey estuary into a regular algae bloom. The Dawesville Channel — 2.5 km long, 200 m wide, cut between 1990 and April 1994 at a cost of around $37 million — opened the estuary to the ocean, lifted its tidal range from 17% to 48% of the sea's and largely ended the blooms. It also created Port Bouvard and the southern canal estates.
The railway and the modern city
The Perth–Mandurah railway opened on 23 December 2007 — 72 km, around 50 minutes to the city — and turned Mandurah from a retirement and holiday town into a commuter city. The population passed 90,000 at the 2021 Census, with the northern estates of Lakelands, Meadow Springs and Madora Bay still growing. Lakelands got its own station in 2023.
Mandurah today
The Peel-Yalgorup wetlands have been a Ramsar site since 1990, the Lake Clifton thrombolites are among the oldest living structures on earth, the Crab Fest draws more than 100,000 people every March, and the estuary is still, as it always was, the reason people come.