One of the old boats to be auctioned at the Pompei clearing sale on June 13. Photo: Gollant Auctioneers

Pompei's auction of boat-building items to be 'marine event of the century'

Jenny Brown|Apr 17, 2019

A building clearance sale to take place this week in Melbourne’s southern bayside has set the boatie community alight because the goods and chattels and even old and half-built timber boats are to go under the hammer in a sale that signals the end of a legendary business.

For almost 80 years Pompei’s Boat Building Works has been a raffish presence strung out along the curving foreshore of Mordialloc Creek, near where it runs out into Port Phillip Bay and beside Pompei’s Bridge.

Big and little sheds, signage of the various aspects of the marine-based enterprise, large and small vessels beached on the creekside or bobbing in the water as part of the long-operating boat hire arm, are so much a part of the “Mordy” scene that it will be strange when most of it goes missing.

“It’s the complete end of an era” said Sorrento boat builder Tim Phillips.

“Pompei was the last commercial wooden boat builder left in Australia. He built boats for commercial fishermen”.

The family business was one of the last remaining commercial wooden boat builders in the country. Photo: Gollant Auctioneers

But the 937-square-metre wedge of land that Pompei’s Landing occupied was Crown Land and had been leased to business founder, the late Jack Pompei OAM who died in 2008, for a peppercorn rent of $100 a year in recognition of his willing acts of bravery – a reputed 600 Bay boating rescues, his work rehabilitating the creek, and the warm regard of his local community.

“Jack was a really great guy”, said Mr Phillips.

After a protracted lease dispute between Jack’s descendants who wanted to retain the land holding, and the local Kingston Council, that proposed resuming some of it for recreation facilities and public open space, and putting the remainder up for apartment development in a suburb rapidly renewing its resident demographic, the site was sold in December for $2.8 million.

While the Pompei family is almost speechless at their loss, “it’s difficult, a very hard situation for us”, said one who preferred not to be named, the physical situation of the land on the creek that is a short walk to both beach sand, and the station and increasingly hipster Main Street Mordialloc, made it incredibly attractive for apartment building.

The auction is expected to be popular with boating enthusiasts. Photo: Gollant Auctioneers

Agents Teska Carson had advertised the site that also runs beside the railway line as “Mordialloc’s Most Prominent Landholding” and sold Pompei’s Boat Building Works as a vacant possession. This has led on to this next phase of the process of big change on the little creekside.

With almost 500 lots up for grabs, from anchors to “a treasure chest of old tools and machines”, to towers of rare timbers, auctioneer Jason Gollant of Gollant Auctions reckons the sale on June 13 “is unusual, fullstop.

“This is a boat builder so many people are aware of and we’ve been fielding interest from up the east coast; from boating people and from builders interested in the timber”.

The Mordialloc Creek today. Photo: Jenny Brown

With almost impossible to get Huon Pine, Celery Top, NZ Kauri, WA Karri and Queensland Beech, the Pompei descendant said he was hoping “a lot of furniture makers will come along and buy the timbers so they’ll live on a bit longer”.

Tim Phillips said he would be there, not to buy “the pretty nice, high quality timber” but “for the curiosity value. There’s a lot of stuff there and this will be the Victorian marine event of the century”.