Perth
Page 4
Later, when I was a teenager fishing on the river at night, the lights of the city still flowed in motile beams of red and gold and blue over the dark water. Sometimes, while prawning in the various bays neck-deep, with the tintinnids’ eerie chemical luminosity around my hands and feet, I’d look across to the city, and through my salt-smeary eyes I’d see the primary reds and greens of the illuminated buildings and sulphur-haloed freeway shimmering in colour. For a child of the suburbs, the city was never heard and it was never smelled; it was a purely visual experience, always out of reach. The fetor of the river and the silence of the night seemed to hold the city at bay in the distance.
Unlike in the bush, where the quiddity of things often startles and draws focus, there’s something dreamlike about the city beside the stillness of the river, with its backdrop of scarp and bluff. Author Elizabeth Jolley pointed this out in an image of the quiet city in the morning stillness, where ‘[a]cross the wide saucer of water the city lies in repose as if painted on a pale curtain … it has a quality of unreality as if no life with all the ensuing problems could unfold there.’
The mask that Perth shows the river has often concealed the true face of the city that lies behind. St Georges Terrace was once a street of famous views. It was the home of Government House, the dwellings of the gentry and the Palace Hotel, with what one Victorian commentator described as the ‘world’s most famous veranda’, because of its view over Perth Water. The low rise that barely protected the inhabitants from the smell of the stewing, algae-heated waters of Mounts Bay can still be observed as a minor ridge that descends again as it approaches the Causeway. In Robert Drewe’s novel The Drowner, the character Will describes this double city concealed behind the Terrace:
Jostling his way through the crowds along a narrow footpath of oyster shells and sand, Will saw how the early planners had actually created two towns within the one. There was the lovely town comprising the elegant and wealthy St George’s Terrace and Adelaide Terrace and their bisecting streets, with their macadamised road surfaces, Governor’s mansion, river views, shady Cape lilac trees and stately commercial buildings and residences. And the three streets of hotels and shops and boarding houses and small businesses running behind them seemed bustling and prosperous, if only because of the narrowness of the limestone roadways.
Perhaps this is why Rodney Hall, in his late-1980s travel memoir Home, in a chapter dedicated to ‘The Most Remote of Cities’, was able to write that ‘Perth people are friendly, this cannot be denied, and the pace is leisurely. Yet the city seems to have no heart, no shape, no character. In search of character, you should take the first available train to Fremantle.’ By this point in the story of Perth, St Georges Terrace, which had once been, as a local architect noted, ‘a street that you could spend your whole life on’, had become the site of a row of largely featureless office blocks, symptomatic of a ‘donut city’, one empty of life in its centre. Although as Drewe’s character Will suggests, there’s always life behind the now glittering glass-walled facade.
The power and wealth of the corporations resident on St Georges Terrace has magnified due to the latest boom, although the landscape still changes dramatically away from the Terrace. In the narrower Hay, Murray and Wellington streets, there has always been a more diverse human traffic. Here, you could argue that the atmosphere hasn’t changed much since the period described by Tim Winton in Cloudstreet:
Now the days were getting longer and the light was lasting, he’d walk up Hay Street in the evenings and hear the clock on the town hall toll the hour. He liked to walk in the warm five o’clock breeze better than the closepressed tram to the station. People would be hurrying along the pavements, calling, whistling, dropping things, skylarking. Pretty women would be spilling out of Bairds and Foys and Alberts. In Forrest Place, in the rank shade of the GPO, old diggers sat bathing in the breeze and swapping news pages. European fruit sellers, Balts and Italians, would be haranguing from the footpath with their sad faces weary as unmade beds, and along Wellington Street trolley buses would haul full loads of arms and legs up the hill. The sky would be fading blue. The station was sootrimmed and roaring with crowds.
The old diggers have gone from Forrest Place, whose seats have now been taken by office workers eating lunch or street kids with hard faces and sad eyes, as have the greengrocers that once abutted the now demolished Boans department store, although their calls live on in the hawkers cries of a bustling night market. Gone too are the desperately poor who used to inhabit the lodging houses and tenements of upper Hay and Murray streets, a stone’s throw from Parliament House. Entire families would share single rooms, and balconies were walled off and converted into crammed flats. Under the advice of Perth City Council, these tenements were done away with and their occupants were pushed out north and east of the city. Initially they went to the equally crammed tenements of East Perth, and to some extent Northbridge, or what was then called variously Northline, North Perth, the Latin Quarter and Little Italy, due to its long tradition of housing new immigrants. In the 1960s they were moved further afield to the new satellite suburbs of Balga, Nollamara and Girrawheen, where much of the initial public housing stock remains, as well as enduring pockets of disadvantage.
While there were some luxury apartments along Adelaide Terrace in an area traditionally inhabited by the wealthy, the link between tenement living and poverty meant it was very hard to convince councils to build high-density flat and apartment complexes anywhere near the city. The resulting lack of a mixed residential population in the CBD is part of the reason why, on the surface at least, Perth appears to be a highly legible city, a term writer and polymath George Seddon used to describe the accessible experience of Rottnest Island, meaning that it ‘can be easily comprehended, physically and intellectually’. Central Perth is a city of straight streets and right-angle turns that make getting around on foot relatively easy. There is little of the disorientation or social complexity experienced in a densely populated metropolis. Instead, as Alan Alexander indicates in his poem ‘Capital City’, ‘[b]y walking the streets I’m domesticated’. While domesticity of the kind Alexander is referring to here, one that suggests an uncomplicated happiness amid the ‘cultural rub, the vin ordinaire’ of the area behind the Terrace, is certainly not for those seeking edge and excitement, it does speak of the sense of remnant community that Alexander and many others found in the nearby streets during the 1980s.
Walking around the lanes and alleys behind the Terrace, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot more happening at street level in Perth these days. This is primarily due to the zoning interventions of Perth’s mayor, Lisa Scaffidi, the relaxing of once ludicrously restrictive licensing laws, and the fact that, for the first time in my memory at least, a generation of twenty-something residents have chosen to focus their creative energies on Perth rather than London, Tokyo, Sydney or Melbourne. It’s an observation supported by the recent statistic that Perth has proportionally the fastest-growing population of 25-to-29-year-olds in the country, by a factor of some 200 per cent, a majority of whom are choosing to live in inner-city areas.
Northbridge too has become a place that can repeatedly surprise, and for the same reasons. A residential area until well into the 1960s, Northbridge became home to a large Chinese, Greek and Italian population. Their presence is still strong in the many cafés and restaurants that thrived in the area, some of them converted from the original residential homes. Because the railway line separated the area from the CBD (although as of late 2013 this is changing), Northbridge has also been a beneficiary of neglect, protected from the wrecking balls of developers. A majority of its old buildings remain, as well as some of its sex shops and tattoo parlours, even if the sometimes sour heroin vibe that I remember from my teenage years has gone, as have many of the colourful characters who didn’t fit in anywhere else in Perth.
Throughout the twentieth century, Northbridge was also the beneficiary of a strong prohibition market that saw the area
become the centre of the city’s vice and gaming economies. It began in the brothels on Roe Street and then later spread to William Street and the numerous gambling clubs around James Street, which were highly popular until Burswood Casino opened in the 1980s.
Of late the area feels rejuvenated, a result of the efforts of local government, business groups and artists to add texture to the once drab and empty Perth Cultural Centre precinct, in particular. The increasingly popular Winter Arts Season, the terrific Fringe World festival, the opening of numerous small bars and a general atmosphere of optimism about the place have added an extra layer over Northbridge’s tabloid notoriety, the result of its sometimes problematic status as an ‘entertainment precinct’, the kind of place that thousands of weekend suburban partiers descend upon to drink, dance and sometimes fight.
My favourite images of the Northbridge streets were taken during the 1990s by Guy Vinciguerra. His photographs capture that characteristic Perth atmosphere of silence and space as well as the odd grace notes of absurdity at night: a vending machine marooned in the middle of a car park, or the eerily clean lines and fluoro-lit recesses of a highway overpass. He also chronicles those human traces of a disappearing community: the hard stern faces of an Italian family, flowerpots mounted high on a brick wall, the cheery smiles and vulnerable eyes of junkies and streetwalkers and street people.
The sense of nostalgia but also celebration in Vinciguerra’s photographs is also a reminder that the truest, if most intangible, heritage of our city exists in our memories. The recent creation of a ‘Lost Perth’ community page on Facebook attracted more than 50 000 ‘Likes’ and four million individual views in its first week. A cavalcade of uploaded images soon followed, referencing all of those places and institutions now gone, including the old Perth markets on Wellington Street and the vast floors of Tom the Cheap and Boans, the latter with its ‘largest showrooms in the Commonwealth’ spread across two miles of carpet: a place of wonder to many children over the years. Something also obvious about the Lost Perth page and various other websites and blogs is that their generative emotion isn’t only nostalgia for what has gone, but also naked delight in the daggy: the sense of pride in the way people have always made a little go a long way when it comes to entertaining themselves in Perth.
Artist Jon Tarry has explored this understanding that an emotional landscape ghosts the built environment of a city, even in the absence of the buildings, parks and places that once inspired it. His exhibition In My Beginning is My End followed the 2011 demolition of the Perth Entertainment Centre and the construction of its replacement, the newly minted Perth Arena.
Opened in 1974, the Entertainment Centre had a seating capacity of 8200 and was one of the largest purpose-built theatres in the world. Up until the late 1990s it was the venue of choice for stadium rock events, and many of my friends and I slept out front to get early tickets for the sell-out shows of acts such as David Bowie and Devo. It was quite a distinctive structure when new, although over the years it became tired-looking and underutilised to the point that it lay dormant from 2002.
Tarry was given free access to photograph the demolition. Over the months he chronicled its progress, his Facebook page attraced more than 120 000 views as locals documented their shared history and memories associated with the space. It’s also worth mentioning that an open day for the Perth Arena attracted a crowd of 25 000 curious visitors, a degree of interest in a new building that seems unthinkable in other, larger cities.
Regardless of Perth’s new urban charms, the vision of the city at night and its relation to the river still hold my attention – there is a harmony of perspective that has changed little over the years. The Mounts Bay waters that once lapped at the feet of the village may have been reclaimed and the foreshore gradually filled with dredging spoil, so that the river is now some considerable distance from the city, but at night this impression is ameliorated with the reflection of the vertical cityscape played across the broad level of Perth Water.
Against this watery canvas, the ferry that transports passengers from Barrack Street Jetty to South Perth moves like a swift water-beetle between the twin bridges of the Causeway and the Narrows. Traffic purls on the interchanges east and west of the city centre, with the long curling wave of the Darling Ranges and the limestone bluff of Mount Eliza forming dark cuffs around the centre of light.
The glittering faces of the St Georges Terrace skyscrapers tower above the older Georgian and Victorian buildings of the Supreme Court and Government House, creating a layering effect. I suppose this is in keeping with the invisible layering beneath the river’s surface as well as in the air above. Every second or third morning in winter, a thick inversion layer of foggy cool air many hundreds of metres deep sits over the land. In the river, for large parts of the year, the halocline system that sees freshwater flowing seawards over trapped pockets of deoxygenated saltwater in the deeper channels means that the shallower waters nearer the shore are the most highly oxygenated. The fresh and salt waters mixed there by the wind are best able to sustain life.
The hunting ground of Yellagonga’s clan on the shallow and samphire-rich waters near Pelican Point and Midgegooroo’s equivalent on the southern waters near Alfred Cove are largely unchanged, still home to bird species such as the Banded Stilt and Hooded Plover, but much of the area closest to the city has been modified. In the nineteenth century, when Perth was an important port on the river, dredging work facilitated boat traffic between Coode and Mends streets and Barrack Street and the Claisebrook Canal, and retaining walls were built to reduce flooding and erosion. Mounts Bay disappeared altogether beneath the freeway interchanges that lead to the Narrows Bridge, and the swampy flats that once constituted a few loose islands near the Causeway were consolidated into Heirrison Island. As a result of these changes, the black swan (Cygnus atratus) observed by de Vlamingh in 1697, the species that gave the river its name, and was still numerous when Stirling and Frazer surveyed the river in 1827, describing a flock of some 500 birds on the wing, is now rarely seen in numbers, although there’s a large colony in the Peel inlet further south. The black swan is still reasonably common in the Manning Park wetlands south of Perth where I take my three children for walks. The children love its loud bugle when roused by the presence of dogs, or its soft crooning when comfortable paddling in the shallows.
The black swan was admired for its beauty and difference from its European counterpart, becoming one of the earliest symbols of antipodean singularity, but in the early years when food was scarce it was also readily eaten. As late as 1936, a recipe for ‘Black Swan, Roasted or Baked’ in Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery suggested that the bird should be cooked the same as goose: trussed, stuffed with mince and wrapped with bacon.
Prior to the building of the Narrows Bridge in 1958, bores drilled into the black alluvial mud on the river bottom discovered rich peaty deposits that revealed how deep the river channel was before the end of the last ice age. The walls of Mount Eliza flanked one side of a high gorge that flowed all the way out to what was then the river’s mouth beside Rottnest Island, ending in the now submerged Perth Canyon, an incredible thousand metres deep. As recently as 6000 years ago, the river that has flowed the same course for sixty million years was thirty metres deeper in many places, but it gradually silted up as the water levels rose and the river became more estuarine.
Of late, the upper Swan and Canning are being treated much like an enormous fish tank. The authorities have added hatchery fish and prawns to maintain stocks, while oxygenation plants run bubbling black pipes along great stretches of the riverbed in an effort to sustain marine life when harmful algae becomes prevalent.
Stirling chose Perth as the capital from three prospective sites. The other two were Point Heathcote, which is located to the south-east of the city on Melville Water, and the port of Fremantle. As a navy man who had bombed American ports in the conflict of 1812, Stirling wanted a city that was away from the artillery-vulnerable coastline. The
reports differ, but it appears that Stirling favoured Perth over Point Heathcote because of the ready availability of water. Mount Eliza also commanded a great position from which to potentially bombard the French, although as the settlers had already discovered, to their dismay, the rock bar at the river mouth prevented the entry of anything except lighters or dinghies.
One important early source of fresh water was Mardalup, which the Europeans called Clause Creek, after the navy surgeon aboard the HMS Success, F.R. Clause. It was later known as Claise Brook, and the surrounding area became Claisebrook and is now Claisebrook Cove. In many respects, the utility of what started as a freshwater stream, became a polluted drain and is now an artificial stream reflects the development of the city that grew alongside it. Mardalup was an important camp for the Whadjuk, a place where they could catch gilgies, ducks and swans and other bird species, especially in the adjacent Tea-Tree Lagoon, mentioned by the early settlers for its placid beauty and fringe of giant banksia and zamia palms. These palms, which botanist Charles Frazer described in 1827 as being ten metres high, are a very slow growing species. They generally add about one to two centimetres a year, which puts the trees Frazer observed at somewhere between 700 and a thousand years old.
Both the French and the English surveying parties used the creek to draw water. The English, I imagine, were particularly glad to find the fresh stream, after it took an exhausting two and a half days to drag their boat and supplies over the Heirisson Island mudflats. It was at Mardalup that Charles Frazer was confronted by three armed Whadjuk men and bluntly told to leave the area, although Stirling merely records in his journal that ‘Mr Frazer discovered a freshwater lagoon, and I hit upon a Spring of delicious Water sufficient to supply all our wants.’