Perth
Page 2
If anything, Perth’s distance from the other Australian cities fostered a spirit of making-do and innovation. The city may remain on the margins of the national consciousness, but I suspect that this is of little concern to most residents, if only because modern Perth is a city that doesn’t look in on itself. The sky that fills so much of any view across the city, the ocean horizon, the lowness and roundedness of the ancient hills – all induce an outward-looking frame of mind and a corresponding awareness of other lives and places.
There’s also something about Perth’s isolation that paradoxically diminishes any sense of real physical distance. Sometimes you forget that the nearest cities are many hours’ drive away to the south and north, and that the nearest capital city is more than 2000 kilometres away – not a great deal fewer than Perth’s favourite overseas holiday destination in Indonesia. This, coupled with the time it takes to get anywhere else, has accustomed us to a love of the journey, an easy-goingness inspired by a nonchalance about distance. Even distant cities on distant continents never seem too far away, merely just over the horizon, like everything else.
A city with porous boundaries, Perth has rarely contained the desires of its younger citizens, many of whom journey to find experience elsewhere, while a large population of workers commute hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres to their workplaces. This is only the latest expression of a mobile urban population that has always had strong social links to those who live ‘in the country’ or ‘on the mines’. It’s a mobility that reinforces the sense that largely suburban Perth sits easily upon the land, and on occasions feels as ephemeral as an encampment.
From the fifteenth storey, too, I’m reminded that Perth is a city of arcades: shaded strips over narrow paths running right through the city from south to north. I fondly remember my visits as a child from the mining towns of the north-west: the thrilling pressure of human traffic funnelled through the arcades in what was otherwise a lifetime lived outdoors, the close smells of cooking and perfume and multicultural humanity captured within the cool and noisy tunnels that echoed to your shout.
The arcades are a hangover from the initial surveying of the city in that first year of settlement, 1829, by John Septimus Roe. Perth was the first colonial city in Australia built to a plan, and the plan dictated an orthogonal shape parallel to the Swan River foreshore, defined by town blocks subdivided into ten allotments. There were strict rules as to the placing of buildings set back from the verge. The prohibitions against the unnecessary cutting down of native trees meant that in many respects Perth began its life resembling the contemporary garden suburbs that surround its city hub now.
Although the early European colonists were often disappointed with the conditions awaiting them at the mouth of the Swan River, in the port settlement of Fremantle, time and again their narratives became rhapsodic upon entering the river in one of the lighters, or barges able to negotiate the banks and spits of the frequent shallows, especially at the narrow channel between Chidley Point and Blackwall Reach. There, the first signs that they were entering a different world altogether: the high walls of craggy limestone rising above them, then the steeply wooded hillsides and rush-lined foreshores of Freshwater Bay and Melville Water; the sight of black swans, pelicans and cormorants drying their wings; avocets, stilts and dotterels wading in the shallows; the colourful spray of wildflowers beneath the sheoak, marri and jarrah woodland canopy. On the left flank rose the heights of Mount Eliza, crested with woodland forest, the river lapping at its base, concealing and then revealing the small settlement of Perth as they poled into Mounts Bay.
Before them stood a village of large plots and sandy streets, reed huts and canvas tents. Vines had already been planted on the flats by the waterline. Ahead of them lay Heirisson Island, and behind its mudflats flowed Clause Brook, with its adjacent freshwater lagoon and fringe of giant banksia and thirty-foot zamia palms. To the north, the settlement was corralled by a hidden chain of wetland lakes, while beyond was the floodplain around Maylands and the serpentine river narrowing as it descended from the third port of Guildford; the low blue rise of the scarp running in a cambered ridgeline across the eastern horizon.
Perth village in 1829 was a place, according to one observer, where few went to bed sober. It’s hard to know what ‘Old Yellagonga’, the Whadjuk custodian of the Perth area, which the Nyungar called Boorloo, must have made of the comings and goings of the people before him as he watched from his camp at Byerbup on the hill near Mount Eliza. A majority of the settlers were in their twenties and thirties. Many of the women were pregnant, and most had children. Down on the waterline they carried their canvas-wrapped goods across the mudflats of Mounts Bay, breaking the mirror surface with their poles and paddles, past the private boat of Governor James Stirling’s wife, Ellen, with its blue and red bunting that so excited the children.
From his position on the hill, Yellagonga had a clear line of sight to where Roe stalked the sand to mark out the allotments, across from the red clay bricks laid in grids to dry in the sun, the nets of the fishermen drawing in tonnes of bony herring and mullet, the drunks singing in the windowless tavern at night, the pigs and sheep and cows lowing in their pens, and the planting of crops on land that Yellagonga knew would soon be flooded.
Yellagonga, who had hunting rights to the northern wetlands through his wife, Yingani, was soon to be displaced from his favourite camp by the soldiers of the 63rd Regiment. He was forced to move his people out to Lake Monger, where they received rations of rice and flour. The practice was designed to discourage them from the new settlement, because of their mostly naked appearance and ‘quarrelsome nature’.
Yellagonga appears to have been well liked by the citizens of the colony, and an 1843 obituary in one of the village’s first newspapers, The Perth Gazette, described him as ‘mild and amiable’. However, Robert Menli Lyon, a young Scot who was drawn to empathise with the plight of the Whadjuk people, and warriors Yagan and Midgegooroo in particular, considered that Yellagonga was a fitting tribal elder, because ‘when fully roused, no warrior, not even Yagan, dare stand before him’. Despite this, Lyon was also to write that due to Yellagonga’s benevolent nature, ‘the settlers are greatly indebted for the protection of their lives and property’.
Neither Yellagonga nor the settlers who displaced his clan were to know that within the first year, which saw thirty-six ships arrive, bringing 2000 new arrivals to the colony, many of whom were to depart in disgust to the colonies further east, the arrivals would suddenly cease and there would be no net population increase for the next decade. Convicts arrived in large numbers in 1849, and their labour transformed Perth from a Georgian village into a small Victorian town: its buildings marooned amid streets of sand, so that in early photographs the town appears like a museum set-piece, or a diorama, or even a ghost town. Otherwise, Perth would grow slowly until the 1890s, with the coming of the first mining boom.
Those citizens who endured the first fifty years, who might also be described as shareholders, were participants in the creation of a city that, 180 years later, pushing energetically and destructively out at its margins into the banksia woodland, still maintains that initial aura described by artist and illustrator Shaun Tan, when he speaks of Perth’s ‘shoreline of light, space and restless silence’.
The River
‘Thank God we don’t outlive all of our childhood fancies.’
Tim Winton, Land’s Edge
Twice a day, the skin of the Swan River rises in a small ripple as the tidal surge makes its way from the river mouth at Fremantle through Perth Water and up into the higher reaches of the river near the fast-growing suburb of Ellenbrook, just over twenty kilometres north-east of Perth. In winter, when a layer of brackish water runs off the scarp towards the ocean, the river flows in two directions, with the fresh water flowing seawards above the saline water flowing in beneath it.
Today the diurnal bulge of water that reveals the incoming tide is invisible. It’s a Sunday
morning and I’m out on the river in an open kayak with my Uncle Scott, my father’s youngest brother. Scott moved from Tasmania to Perth as a teenager in the 1970s. Like so many others, he stayed for the climate and the lifestyle and the opportunity to work.
We put in to the river at Middle Swan and slowly glide our way upstream towards Ellen Brook, which takes its name from Captain James Stirling’s young bride. This part of the river marks the furthest point that Stirling reached during his reconnoitre of 1827, with his small crew in one of the HMS Success’s longboats, not knowing if he would get the opportunity to return.
Stirling had married Ellen Mangles, the daughter of a wealthy merchant with links to the East India Company, in 1823. He was thirty-two and she was sixteen. The story goes that Stirling first came across Ellen as a young teen, her feet astride two bareback horses, reins in her left and right hands, the nineteenth-century equivalent of hooning on her father’s estate.
Portraits of Stirling as a young man emphasise his dark eyes; his grim, almost bitter mouth; and the stiff military posture expected of an officer. He’d joined the navy at the age of twelve, but he was an ambitious thirty-six-year-old when he was posted to Sydney in 1826. He convinced New South Wales governor Ralph Darling to allow him to survey the Swan River, although he was not the first European to visit the area.
In 1616 Dutchman Dirk Hartog surveyed the western coast of Australia and by 1627 Rottnest Island appeared on the first maps. The first reports of the Swan River were made in 1697 by fellow Dutchman Willem de Vlamingh’s party, who entered the river and journeyed as far as the Causeway flats. While de Vlamingh is mostly remembered for naming Perth’s favourite holiday island Rats-nest (after the marsupial quokka), an island that he found to be a ‘terrestrial paradise … delightful above all others I’ve seen’, he also named the river Swartte Swanne Drift (Black Swan River). Representative of the fabulousness of European imaginings of the Great Southern Land at the time, de Vlamingh wrote that based on his discovery of ‘gigantic human footprints … That river leads to a land inhabited by giants.’
More than a century later, the French arrived in Western Australian waters as part of an expedition to map the coastline of the continent. In 1801 Sub-lieutenant Francois-Antoine Boniface Heirrison of the Naturaliste was commanded to take a longboat and explore the estuary and upper reaches of the Swan River. Post-Enlightenment explorers the Frenchmen might have been, part of the largest scientific team to ever leave Europe, but they were also chary of visiting a land where, according to academic Ross Gibson, there existed birds that didn’t fly, rivers that flowed inland, and wood that didn’t float. It must have seemed a bad omen when huge sharks circled their longboat en route from the Naturaliste to the river mouth (they caught one, a fourteen-footer). They were prepared for the worst, arming themselves with a small cannon and a musket for each man.
Inside the estuary, Heirrison was impressed. The area was densely wooded, with ‘beautiful flowering shrubs’, and the black swans were edible. Near the muddy, mosquito-ridden surrounds of the island that now bears Heirrison’s name, the men did indeed identify a giant’s footprint, which led to them doubling their sentries and burning bonfires through the night. However, it wasn’t until they were further upriver that they were greeted ‘by the most heart-chilling howls, so close that they seemed to emanate from the reeds,’ Heirrison wrote. ‘Feeling at a disadvantage under the cover of darkness, against an adversary whether man or beast, we chose to remain in mid-stream – where we spent a wretched night under the teeming rain.’
Twenty-seven years later, following his own inspection of the area, Stirling knew that London was the best place to influence those who might realise his project: a colony on the Swan River that he suggested calling Hesperia, ‘indicating a Country looking towards the Setting Sun’. He was in luck. The Duke of Wellington became prime minister of Britain in 1828, and one of Stirling’s old Scottish familial allies, the member for Perth in the national parliament, Sir George Murray, was named Minister for War and the Colonies. With a scratch of Murray’s quill, the settlement scheme was on. Stirling would later repay those who had made the venture possible by naming the settlement Perth (the alternative proposed was Kingston) and its main thoroughfares Wellington, Murray and Hay streets (the third after Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Hay, the public servant who’d supported Stirling).
As is the case with any real estate venture today, flyers were immediately circulated and advertisements were taken out. The resulting ‘Swan River Mania’, as it was described in British newspapers, came down to Stirling tapping into the desires of a motivated caste of largely urban Britons: adventurers and those who would these days be called the ‘aspirational class’ – those wealthy enough to emigrate but not so rich that they might be insulated from the difficult economic conditions of the period.
We paddle quietly past the newly restored All Saints Church in Henley Brook, made of local mud bricks and oyster-shell lime. It is the oldest – and perhaps the smallest – church in Perth. Adorned with a simple bellcote, the church was built to mark the place where Stirling had prayed with his men in 1827 before returning downriver. In his journal, Stirling described how
the richness of the soil, the bright foliage of the shrubs, the majesty of the surrounding trees, the abrupt and red colour banks of the river occasionally seen, and the view of the blue mountains, from which we were not far distant, made the scenery of this spot as bieutiful [sic] as anything of the kind I have ever witnessed.
For us, too, it’s a beautiful spring morning and the river is peaceful and the muddy banks high. You can smell the bricks baking at the local works and hear the drone of traffic on Reid Highway, but there is nobody else on the water. We pass some of Australia’s oldest vineyards – Houghton and Sandalford – and dozens of newer ones, part of the original allotments disbursed by Surveyor-General Roe. The dry winter has limited the run-off from the Swan/Avon catchment (the Avon, Canning and Helena rivers are the Swan’s three main tributaries), and while the water is brackish rather than saline, there is little flow to breach the incoming tide.
The tidal influence is felt right up to Ellen Brook, so the birdlife is similar to the lower estuary; there are shags and pelicans in large numbers, which suggests that there are plentiful fish but also that the river is more saline than usual. In a winter of heavy rain, practically the whole of the Swan River estuary is flushed out with fresh water and the more freshwater-intolerant fish are forced to migrate out into the ocean for a time. A neighbour of mine who works for the Swan River Trust told me that the Swan River bull sharks pup in the upper river during spring, and that one of their main food sources is birdlife. The pelicans and cormorants look unconcerned.
The shags move about like sticks thrown from tree to tree, or settle on pontoons and jetties to dry their wings. I’ve always been fascinated by the shag, the generic term for the four types of cormorant and one species of darter found on the Swan. When I was a child spear-fishing in the river, nervous of dark shadowy shapes, it was common to see a shag glide into a school of mullet or trum-peter beneath me, often many at the same time. Sometimes shags hunt communally, and because their feathers contain no protective oils (although strangely for this reason they look like the greasiest of birds) they spend a fair proportion of their time perched on rocks or branches with their sodden black wings comically draped in the sunshine, like skinny angels.
Novelist Seaforth Mackenzie wrote beautifully about this section of the upper river from his perspective as a boarder at Guildford Grammar, the same private boys’ school where my younger brother learnt everything he needed to survive some tough years in the army. The first time I read Mackenzie’s 1937 novel The Young Desire It, I identified with his narrator, a shy boy prone to spending time alone by the river. His budding sexuality is reflected in his observations of the waters, where the ‘air was warm and sweet with the rotting water-levels of winter floods. Snags thrust up above their brown reflections … drying and crusted
with their own watery decay, but hard as iron beneath, and slippery to the swimmer’s naked foot.’
I didn’t go to a private boarding school, but the dislocation that Mackenzie’s narrator feels when removed from his mother’s rural property was something I understood. Our family had moved from the Pilbara, in the north of Western Australia, to Perth in 1976. Because of my father’s employment in the Royal Australian Air Force, and later in the mining game, my mother estimates that in my first ten years we moved some twenty-one times before we finally settled in Perth.
We were used to moving interstate and overseas, from air-force base to small country town, but this was the first time I remember feeling any degree of culture shock. In the city, kids wore socks and shoes rather than getting about barefoot. They spoke a strange coded language gleaned from a popular culture that was alien to me. The air was heavy and damp (my sister recalls the ‘uncomfortable feeling’ that she was unable to articulate at the time, as it was so alien to us, of ‘being cold’), and the suburbs stretched endlessly on our weekend drives up into the hills.
So the river was a haven for me. It was a place that reminded me of the one I’d left behind, where spiders and goannas and parrots and eagles had ruled the gullies, mud crabs and hermit crabs and mudskippers had populated the mangroves, and wild donkeys and kangaroos had filled the spaces now taken up by people. It was in the yellow sands and quarried limestone crags and bronzed shallows that I felt most at home as a child newly arrived from the desert. Here my brother and I dug out cave cubbies from the banks of sand. We hunted rabbits with bows and arrows, we speared cobbler, and we paddled out on surfboards into the broader river.
I can still remember the moment when I was suddenly happy to be in Perth, when I first felt like I belonged to my new home. It was an early summer morning on an incoming tide and I was alone in the water. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. Walking along the muddy foreshore, I’d seen the imprints of flathead in perfect moulds at low tide, the fan shape of their side-fins and the great weight of their spotted flanks, the broad-arrow indentation of their cavernous mouths at rest. I’d become fascinated by this lurking predator, as I would later become fascinated by the kingie, or mulloway, and later still sharks, finding as many books and speaking to as many fishermen and women as I could on the subject.