Swanbourne lifesaver Tim Tucak with the club's photo of Herbert Voigt taken by Doug Burton just before the fatal swim. Picture by Billie Fairclough.
A Rottnest swimmer who died on a solo swim to the island from Cottesloe holds special poignancy for members of the Swanbourne Nedlands Surf Lifesaving Club.
This Saturday, 2,200 swimmers hit the water running at Cottesloe Beach for the Rottnest Channel Swim, with the Cottesloe Surf Lifesaving Club helping to organise the start.
But it is a rival club that has adopted the memory of Herbert Voigt.
The last photo taken of the foolhardy German hangs above the bar of the Swanbourne club.
Sculpture-like, framed against the ocean and the sky, the tall, handsome 23-year-old swimmer was snapped as he strapped his knife to his calf as protection from sharks.
But it was sharks that were thought to have brought his marathon attempt to a grisly end.
Swanbourne deputy president Tim Tucak admits that he became obsessed with Herbert Voigt's life and death when he saw the photo hanging at the club after he joined in 1994.
It sent him on a long journey of discovery about the mysterious German blue-water swimmer's past, and his motive for making the final, fatal swim alone.
At the time, the exploit made world news.
Mr Tucak found bizarre facts about the German, even to the very end of his life in the way his remains were discovered far to the north.
Mr Voigt is now patron of the Swanbourne club's way out ideas, such as midnight swims and raids under cover of darkness to paint the Cottesloe pylon in club colours.
A quirky directory of club caps is also named in his honour.
In the months before his final swim Herbert Voigt became known as "shark bait", a name was to become horribly apt.
He became infamous when he defied the authorities by swimming hundreds of metres off local beaches and was even arrested and charged.
He used to tow picnics with him, floating on his back to eat his sandwiches, drink iced beer and smoke cigarettes far out to sea.
Mr Voigt was born in war-ravaged Hamburg at the end of World War 11. The playground for him and his two sisters was the bombed-out ruins of buildings.
He taught himself to swim breaststroke and sidestroke, never mastering the crawl.
In 1960, aged only 15, he escaped the poverty and bleak future to work his way around the world, arriving in Perth in December 1968 to what he regarded as an aquatic paradise.
The energetic new migrant found a job on a building site and within days had begun his long swims westward in the Indian Ocean.
"When I am in the water I seem to gain strength I never knew I had," he said.
It was not long before he was in trouble with local lifesavers, worried about the danger of rips and sharks.
On December 28 the City Beach club called police after their lifesavers failed to coax Mr Voigt back to shore.
Eventually a police officer followed him to his old car, where, after a scuffle, he was arrested and handcuffed.
Later in court, Mr Voigt alleged that the officer had sworn at him so he pushed him away.
"Is there any law to stop me swimming out to sea?" the swimmer asked the constable.
"Yes, you have caused inconvenience to the life-savers and concern to the public," the policeman said in evidence.
The magistrate threw out a charge of creating a disturbance and cautioned him for refusing to give his name and resisting arrest.
He was fined $50 and had his licence suspended for dangerous driving on the way to court.
From then on, the evening newspaper the Daily News tracked the adventures of "Mr Shark-bait", including a swim from Port Beach to Peter's Pool at Cottesloe, after refusing two orders to leave the water.
He swam to Garden Island, escorted by a boat, after a night out drinking.
On Saturday, March 15, 1969, he had been drinking until 1am and decided to swim to Rottnest, leaving Cottesloe at 7.10am.
Some mates at the Ocean Beach Hotel had bet him big quantities of beer if he could make the trip.
With a strong easterly wind blowing, a small knot of people gathered on Cottesloe beach to farewell him, including journalist Hugh Schmitt, photographer Doug Burton and Daily News cadet reporter Bret Christian, to whom Mr Voigt gave a jokey final interview.
"I'll make it to Rottnest for lunch even if the sea breeze comes in," he said.
"There are a couple of 18 gallon kegs waiting for me."
He said he hoped the swim would cure his hangover from his big night out.
He was not afraid of sharks.
"Sharks don't worry you unless you panic," he said.
He had seen plenty on his other swims, but they had ignored him.
He said he trained on a diet of raw meat and beer, and 20 cigarettes a day.
He wanted to know which end of the island to head for, the one with the pub.
Mr Schmitt tried to persuade him not to leave without an escort, saying that if he waited an hour Mr Schmitt would get his boat.
But Mr Voigt strapped on his knife, slipped into the surf and the small group of worried witnesses watched him heading west in the calm inshore waters until he was out of sight.
The newspaper's boat Deadline left Freshwater Bay to try to intercept him, but could not spot him in the choppy, white-capped offshore conditions.
Radio station 6KY chartered an aircraft, but again there was no sighting.
By noon the jokes had been forgotten and a full-scale search was launched, to no avail.
Mr Voigt never arrived at Rottnest and his room at his Hay Street boarding house remained untouched, giving the lie to the theory that he had come ashore at a nearby beach.
"Plenty of long swims have ended with a beer, but he tried to do it the other way around," said Mr Tucak, who has swum the Rottnest channel as part of a team.
"His photo was always at the back of the bar, but no-one knew why," he said.
"Plenty of members invoked his name, so I decided to find out the true story behind him.
"Thousands of people are into ocean swimming now, and hundreds of people have swum the full distance to Rottnest, but in those days it was a very rare thing."
His sources included the State Reference Library, a rich lode of newspaper cuttings, and the book "Why swim to Rottnest when you can catch the ferry?" by Lesley Meaney.
Lesley Meaney, of Dalkeith, as Lesley Cherriman, was the first woman and sixth person to complete the epic swim, just one month after Herbert Voigt on April 13, 1969.
There were a number of theories as to what happened to Mr Voigt.
One was that he had become dehydrated and exhausted because of the alcohol in his system. He took no food or fluids with him, increasing the risk of cramp and hypothermia.
Fish or sharks could have attacked his body. He was in the water at the time of the autumn salmon run, when packs of whaler sharks tear into the schooling salmon.
The notorious tidal drift could have taken him well to the north of Rottnest.
Three weeks after Mr Voigt disappeared, an escaped convict, William Gisborne, found his skull.
Gisborne, who had fled Karnet prison, was on the run 35km north of Fremantle, when Constable John Foley tracked him to a waterhole.
Gisborne told the policeman about the skull he had seen on the beach near the wreck of the Alkimos at Eglinton.
Nine days later, four human ribs were washed up at City Beach, the scene of Mr Voigt's first brush with the authorities.
Photographs Hugh Schmitt had taken of Mr Voigt were superimposed over photos of the swimmer's unusually shaped skull.
The coroner decided that the skull was indeed Mr Voigt's. In those days there was no way of determining the owner of the ribs.
Lesley Meaney said she had not been able to find out what had become of Mr Voigt's skull.
Her sister, who speaks fluent German and has been in contact with Mr Voigt's family, doubted whether the skull had been returned home.
Her inquiries to WA police yielded no satisfactory answer.
Perth cemeteries do not have a record of a burial of Mr Voigt's remains.
He went largely unmourned in a community dismissive of eccentric behaviour, especially by migrants.
Historic footnote: Lesley Meaney's research shows that rumours of a first Rottnest Channel crossing date back to the time when Rottnest was a tragic penal settlement for Aborigines.
Aborigines were not swimmers, but quickly taught themselves my mimicking white swimmers.
But there is no proof of a channel swim by aborigines, although some might have "island-hopped" to the mainland, resting on Carnac and Garden Islands.
The first of 454 documented crossings was on January 24, 1956, by Gerd Von Dincklage Schulinburg.
| 
Houses go in heritage scramble
