Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  When Stirling returned two years later and chose Perth as the site for his capital, it was discovered that Claise Brook drained from a chain of lakes to the west of the site, reaching as far as Lake Monger, and that the water table was very high. A similar freshwater source was discovered near where Spring Street in the CBD terminates today, and it was harnessed to power the colony’s first mill. The Claisebrook area was used instead as an agricultural zone and as the site for the colony’s first cemetery, on the high ground above the spring.

  Henry Lawson wrote one of the first detailed descriptions of the Claisebrook area in 1896, after he arrived in Perth en route to the goldfields with his young wife, Bertha, on their honeymoon. Despite Lawson’s status as a well-regarded writer, he and Bertha, who humped her own swag the twenty-three kilometres from Fremantle to Perth, were turned away from all the city’s boarding houses and hotels. The Lawsons were forced to spend some nights sleeping beneath the Barrack Street Bridge by the railway tracks, before moving to the sanctioned campsite alongside Claise Brook that housed thousands in makeshift tents. Lawson tells the story of how a miner camped there was dissuaded from digging a well, seeing as how the land was fertilised by the blood and bone of the dead in the East Perth cemetery.

  Shortly after, Claise Brook was turned into a drain, to facilitate the easy movement of flood-waters, and a permanent abattoir was built on its banks. A mulberry farm came next, part of a failed attempt to establish a silk industry, and some of the area was turned into one of Perth’s first parks. However, the coming of the railway and the establishment of the nearby East Perth Gas Works and the East Perth Power Station soon disturbed the location where the gentlemen and women of the nearby town might promenade and picnic.

  East Perth was to become the city’s main industrial area. The drain that still contained gilgies and the cove that contained plentiful crabs in the 1880s became an outlet for industrial effluent and a place to store the city’s sewage before it was pumped under the river to the filter beds on Burswood Island, from where overflow was piped directly into the river.

  By the 1980s, when much of the original industry and manufacturing had moved out to designated industrial areas such as Osborne Park in the north, the state government decided to redevelop the East Perth and Claisebrook area into a higher density residential and office zone.

  Precipitated by state and federal funding, as part of the Building Better Cities Program, the redevelopment of roughly 150 hectares of inner-city land was at that time the largest urban renewal project undertaken in Australia. Enormous quantities of contaminated soil were removed. Today Claisebrook Cove is open to the river. Apartment buildings, public artworks and cafés line the banks that funnel into the meandering brick-lined spring rising up through East Perth, still draining off the water table from a catchment area of some fifteen square kilometres. My eleven-year-old son, Max, loves the bricked and limestone edges of the stream and the cement faux-turtle shells that enable him to practise his parkour skills. He leaps between the upright and levelled spaces, participating in a stream-leaping play that no doubt dates back millennia.

  East Perth is no longer the industrial suburb it once was, with its overcrowded slums and wine saloons. Writer and filmmaker Stephen Kinnane, a descendent of the Miriwoong people of the East Kimberley region, describes the social history of the area as being erased by the ‘neatly paved streets, faux Federation lighting, and three and or four-storey townhouses’. Kinnane’s 2003 book Shadow Lines is one of my favourite narratives about Perth. Despite its often tragic subject matter, it illustrates in every sentence what Perth author and publisher Terri-ann White meant when she began her own narrative, Finding Theodore and Brina, with the words ‘We learn landscape through love. The physical spaces and our own thresholds of pleasure merge and proffer all manner of things: sensations, stored expectations, moments with sharp edges.’

  On the sharp edge of the curfew line, where after 1927 nightly police patrols were used to push out Aborigines still in the city after dark, East Perth was also home to many Nyungar and other Indigenous people who’d moved to Perth. Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville had the power to restrict Indigenous people’s access to the CBD unless they carried a ‘native pass’ to prove that they were gainfully employed there.

  Prior to the introduction of the pass laws, Perth had been a place, according to Kinnane,

  of meeting, of the crossing of railway lines, of rivers and creeks linked by corridors of black spaces. It was a place of alleys, of certain cafes and picture palaces that would serve Aboriginal people and others that would not. It was a town large enough to slip through if you had to, but small enough so that you could seek out your own kind.

  This was a time when segregation of the races was taken very seriously. During World War II, a white woman in Perth was charged for merely talking in public with an African American. These kinds of cases, with their attendant rumours of miscegenation, were the staple fodder of The Mirror newspaper, but as Kinnane points out, the judge overseeing the charge made his point very strongly: ‘[t]he worst feature of this case is that people have seen you, a white woman, associating with a black soldier. If you are seen with a black man again you will go to prison.’ The Sunday Times newspaper reported a similar case under the headline ‘Women Talked to Negro’.

  Amid this kind of absurdity, the emergence of the East Perth–based Coolbaroo League in 1947 appears nothing less than miraculous. The league was formed by two Yamatji returned servicemen, Jack and Bill Poland; a white returned serviceman, Geoff Harcus; and Helena Murphy from Port Hedland, whose progressive father Lawrence Clarke had formed the Euralian Club in 1934 to promote a similar culture of understanding and tolerance. With the support of Nyungar elders Bill Bodney, Thomas Bropho and Bertha Isaacs, together with younger activists Ronnie Kickett, Manfred Corunna, George Abdullah and George Harwood, the league chose the Coolbaroo, or magpie (kulbardi in Nyungar), as its emblem, suggestive of both the ‘mixed race’ status of many of its members and the first notions of a creed of reconciliation between white and black.

  Without the permission of the Native Affairs Department, the Coolbaroo League held the first Coolbaroo Club dances in the basement of the offices of the Modern Women’s Club in central Perth (started by Katharine Susannah Prichard). However, because the building was within the curfew line, the dances were poorly attended. The next dances were held at the Pensioners Hall near the railway station in East Perth. The club, which was the subject of a documentary Kinnane made in 1996, soon became popular as a meeting place for progressive whites and Nyungar and other Indigenous people from across the state – many of whom were inmates released from the Moore River and Carrolup missions, where so many Stolen Generation children were taken. The league published a newspaper, the Westralian Aborigine, did its own fundraising and became a forerunner of many Aboriginal organisations that exist today. When the government finally rescinded the pass laws in 1954, the league was able to hold the club’s dances in the centre of the city after dark – at the Perth Town Hall.

  The fear of large numbers of Aborigines congregating in Perth goes right back to the first days of the settlement, when the dispersed and poorly armed colonists expected to be overrun at any moment. The fact that the Coolbaroo Club was able to continue operating for some fifteen years in this climate indicates how effectively the organisation allayed white community fears, while also maintaining its identity as an Aboriginal entity and thereby resisting the assimilating pressures of the day. The ethos that allowed for this survival can be found in the name of one of the club’s regular musical acts, Kickett’s Kustard Kreek Killers; it satirised and subverted the Ku Klux Klan and the racist beliefs that strongly existed at the time, but also channelled them into a vehicle that gave pleasure.

  Although East Perth is still home to many Indigenous organisations, the bulk of the broader population moved into the suburbs. For Kinnane, who grew up in East Perth, what is lost is not so much the built environment but t
he fact that ‘there was always someone to visit in old East Perth’.

  Because Perth missed the gold rushes of Victoria and New South Wales in the 1850s and 1860s, there was never the concentration of workers in the inner-city suburbs that resulted in the ‘workers barrack’ terrace rows of inner Melbourne and Sydney. Perth’s gold rush happened in the 1890s, and by then the preferred building material was the highly transportable and easily erected weatherboard. Houses sprang up in large numbers in Victoria Park and Subiaco, suburbs almost entirely populated by a generation of Victorians who stayed.

  In the inner city of the mid-twentieth-century, you could still find weatherboard dwellings in Northbridge, West Perth and East Perth. There were pubs in downtown Perth such as the Ozone and Criterion; the Adelphi and the Palace and Esplanade hotels, each different in style and clientele; and for night owls there were jazz clubs and coffee clubs in the alleys that ran off Hay and Murray streets.

  St Georges Terrace, while always the financial centre of the city, was then still home to a retail mix that included tobacconists, newsagents, sandwich bars and cafés in large numbers, mostly because the pre-modernist buildings incorporated a layer of floor space down a level from the street. I can imagine my mother, aged sixteen, buying her magazines and sandwiches from one of these stores on her way to work. My most treasured image of her is a black and white photograph taken by a newspaper photographer on St Georges Terrace in the early 1960s. Finally free of school, she’s heading for her first day’s work as a clerk in the clearing room of the National Bank, wearing a tight skirt and sleeveless white blouse. Her hair is cut short and her smile is unguarded, radiantly happy.

  Her mother had made the snappy outfit, at a time when many people in Perth made their own clothes, grew their own vegetables, kept chickens and, like my mother’s family, regularly harvested mussels and prawns from the river. Not only did my mother continue this ‘making and making do’ tradition by sewing and stitching many of our childhood clothes, she also cooked our jams and preserves, baked our bread, dried her own excess fruit on the tin roof of our house (the best dried figs in the world), and pickled her own olives. She also made her own cordials and bottled ginger beer, which would commonly blow up in summer out in our back shed. My mother remembers downtown Perth as a place of tea-rooms and jive-joints and hole-in-the-wall Italian fruitshake stands, but also as a place filled with beautiful fabric shops and popular tailors and dressmakers.

  Photographs of St Georges Terrace taken as recently as the 1940s depict a street of three-, four- and five-storey buildings whose continuous but divergent facades are packed along the footpath. There are few stepped, raised or recessed entrances, and yet the street has something of the flavour of a sketch by Dr Seuss: wild variations in building height and architectural style, plus the tendency to mask the buildings’ brickwork with heavy stucco and concrete balusters, cornices and reeded columns, gothic arches and spires and mock battlements.

  Much like contemporary corporate videos, paintings of the period tend to idealise the calm civic aspects of the Terrace, its ‘European flavour’, where a gentle light shines upon a serene vista of citizens at ease within the neat facades of High Victorian buildings. Architectural historian J.M. Freeland described the transition of the Terrace when he said that

  [i]n 1892, Perth had been a primitive frontier town with all the rawness and lack of style of a pioneer settlement. By 1900, it had been dipped bodily into a bucket of pure Victoriana and taken out, dripping plaster and spiked with towers and cupolas in a bewildering variety of shapes, to dry.

  The Terrace might have looked ‘European’, and therefore sophisticated, although one photograph taken in 1912, of the length of the Terrace between William and Barrack streets, is perhaps more revealing of the prevailing nature of the street. The buildings appear eccentric with their gingerbread brickwork and icing-white stucco stained with coal smuts. The pedestrians in their buggies and rickety automobiles are dressed like workers, in shirtsleeves and boots and utilitarian wide-brimmed hats. In this photograph the Terrace resembles what it actually was, a busy street built with gold-rush money out of local materials at the behest of mainly local businesses.

  Perth’s second mining boom began in the 1960s with the lifting of the federal embargo on iron-ore exports, and this immediately began to make its mark on the built environment of St Georges Terrace in particular. The new-found confidence of a ‘state on the move’ saw a rush of new investment that required increased office space on the city’s most prestigious street. In the majority of cases, this meant the complete replacement of the buildings of the finde-siècle Terrace with staid office blocks. In other cases, a compromise was sought. The 1971 Howlett and Bailey redevelopment of the Cloisters site retained the convict-built and Richard Roach Jewell–designed secondary school for Bishop Hale (the site of the original Hale School, which is now in Wembley Downs), with its Gothic arcading and Tudor embellishments and beautiful brickwork. It was integrated with the twenty-storey heights of Mount Newman House, with its splayed block columns and bronze anodised aluminium windows.

  According to Jenny Gregory, by the 1980s approximately six per cent of the Terrace’s older built fabric remained. This was primarily because most of the investment flooding into the city came from elsewhere, so development decisions about the suite of new buildings along the Terrace were made in London and Melbourne and Sydney and New York. These people would never live in Perth, and their decisions weren’t guided by what was best for the broader cityscape and social fabric. Instead they were guided by what was best for the bottom line – the downside of Perth’s status as a branch office city. The situation wasn’t helped in the 1980s by a Town Planning Committee on Perth City Council. According to academic and member of parliament Ian Alexander, who was on the committee at the time, it was dominated by people who had ‘substantial declared interests in projects being considered by that committee’.

  It’s a well-documented and maddening fact that this period of opportunity during the 1980s was diminished by a brand of cowboy capitalism. As in many places around the world during the 1980s, this was a time of conspicuous consumption and punting on the stock market, but in Perth at least it was also a period of optimism and civic pride, especially after local tycoon Alan Bond bank-rolled Australia’s successful America’s Cup challenge in 1983. The win meant that the prestigious yacht race was held in the waters off Fremantle in 1987, and the state government embarked on a number of public infrastructure works in anticipation of the event. But Bond’s wealth was ultimately revealed to be a house of cards, and his good friend Laurie Connell’s Rothwells merchant bank (that had served its owner as a virtual ATM) failed despite a major bailout negotiated with state premier Brian Burke.

  Like every city, Perth has its fair share of boosters and racketeers, although rapidly earned wealth combined with a provincial naiveté have perhaps attracted a larger number of hustlers in business suits than elsewhere. In any discussion of the policing, business and political culture of the 1970s and 1980s, there’s a sense that it’s precisely the city’s noirish contrast between light and dark, plain sight and shadow, that reflects the way shady business was done and power exercised – or to use an old crime fiction cliché, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.

  In 1982, author and poet Dorothy Hewett wrote that in the case of Perth, ‘the corruption is partly hidden, the worm in the bud is secretive, and mainly bears only a silent witness’. Perth’s aura of manufactured innocence, one that presents itself as ‘naive, self-congratulatory and deeply conservative’, was in fact the ‘perfect field for corruption’. By the late 1980s, and the dealings that became known as WA Inc, the cronyism was very much out in the open. Bond and Connell were eventually imprisoned, and two consecutively serving premiers from both major parties, Ray O’Connor and Brian Burke, were jailed.

  Until the 1960s, you could argue that there had always been more sensitivity shown regarding the development of the CBD’s built environment
. This gentler transition and clearer line of evolution is perhaps best demonstrated in the delicate integration of the 1937 Art Deco Lawson Apartments just behind the Terrace, or in the ‘New York skyscraper’-styled Art Deco Gledden Building on the edge of the Hay Street Mall, or the functional but eye-catching International-style Council House on the Terrace (which is truly beautiful at night, under multi-coloured lights). The spirit of the 1980s, on the other hand, is most clearly illustrated by the tower Alan Bond built on the site of the old Palace Hotel.

  At the corner of St Georges Terrace and William Street stands what is now known as 108 St Georges Terrace and was previously Bankwest Tower and Bond Tower. It was actually the site of Perth’s first licensed premises: the King’s Head public house licensed to William Dixon in 1830. By the early 1970s, the buildings on the three other corners of the junction had been demolished, including the beautiful Donnybrook-stone AMP building and David Jones (formerly Foy and Gibson’s, one of Perth’s oldest department stores). The widespread belief that the Palace Hotel was next brought a surge of support from period experts; the ‘Palace Guard’, an organisation that claimed 23 000 members; the Builders Labourers Federation, who put a green ban on the site; and even for a while Alan Bond himself, who at that time was a city councillor and member of the town planning committee.

  Photographs of the Palace, the ‘last of the High Victorian Hotels in Australia’, built in the Free Federation Classical style, show the lustre of its coral-white facade and tuck-pointed brickwork. It was conceived in 1894 by an American entrepreneur, John De Baun, and designed to be the last word in luxury. Its interior included imported mosaic tiles, marble fireplaces and Italian barroom flooring, and every single one of its bricks was imported by ship from Melbourne.