The railway line between Geraldton and Walkaway was laid in 1887. The BFT began life as a community hall in the late 1800s near one of the sidings called Bootenal, a name first given to a spring on the Front Greenough Flats earlier in the 1800s. The word derives (so they say) from Boolugnul – the pelican, and by extension from Bootenoo – the name given to the Greenough River by its traditional aboriginal custodians.

A mystery light has been seen over decades around the Bootenal Spring on the front Flats, and when sighted is similar to a hurricane light carried by a walker. A second light, seen by travellers in the late 1800s onwards, is a more terrifying and threatening phenomenon. Travellers on the road from Bootenal to Georgina describe seeing a luminous ball of light, brighter than any artificial light, that moved close to the ground in a ‘strange floating, circular motion, at times stretching forward and then moving back as though being retrieved by some magnetic force.’1
So we have two Bootenal sites, and two types of mystery lights.

1 S Gratte and M.Howard-Wright, at Geraldton Library, Local History.