George Seddon, in Swan Song, describes a similar atmosphere in relation to Rottnest Island. For Seddon, Rottnest is the location that most fully realises the self-image of Perth’s citizens as relaxed and egalitarian, tranquilised by sun and clean salt air, at ease with the pedestrian pace of the barefoot transition between shaded veranda and sun-bright beach, devoted to the simple pleasures of family, food and swimming. Calls to develop Rottnest with luxury accommodation are always met with resistance, just as proposals to build higher than a few storeys on the Perth coastline are regularly and decisively rejected. The beach is in this respect a sanctuary, defended as a timeless space, a place of memories and memories in the making.
The shark-spotter plane passes over my local beach in South Fremantle too, although like a dragonfly that has been hovering it soon quirts further south, where the beaches are whiter and the contrast of dark shape against white sand is clearer. Summer is the time of parties and barbecues, of breakfasts at outdoor café tables and drinks in beer gardens and pub courtyards. What draws many to my local beach is not its natural beauty but that it serves the same social function as the above. So many from my local community gather at the local beach to swim and sprawl and natter that it often has the atmosphere of a street party, an integration of the suburban park or urban space and private yard, a place where local people come together.
Fremantle is always a place where to walk down the street is to inevitably meet friends, but this experience is even more focused at the beach. At any one time half the kids from the local schools and their parents and grandparents might be present on the bank of grey-white sand, catching up and passing the time in easy conversation. With the heat and stupefaction and groups of friends lazing around, it feels as if we are somehow inhabiting a mirage outside of time, literally in the sense that the light is shimmering and distorted by the heat convection off the sand, and figuratively as an artist’s mythic representation of what might define community in the coastal suburbs of Perth.
One of my favourite albums when I was a kid was Dave Warner’s Mug’s Game, which came out in 1978, when I was twelve. The record is a sometimes fond and sometimes savage piss-take of Perth in the 1970s, and I knew it word for word, especially the parts that related to the beach culture of local teenagers. The chorus of the thirteen-minute title track details the futile pleasures of Perth’s nightlife, while three monologues ridicule the city’s inexplicably sexually appealing male stereotypes. It was the picture of the brain-dead surfie, Zongo, that resonated most:
A typical Australian beach, I’m struggling out of the surf, panting heavily for I’m overweight.
Two young nubile women on the beach:
‘Oooh, isn’t he spunky!’
‘Which one? That one in the lurex?’
‘No, not HIM!’
‘That one over there with the earring in his ear and the bleached blonde hair.’
‘That’s Zongo, let’s go over and talk to him.’
‘Okay.’
‘Hi Zongo!’
‘Hi girls!’
‘How are you, Zongo?’
‘Far out!’
‘What have you been doing with yourself lately,
Zongo?’
‘I’ve just been having an insane time … Hey, look there’s Rory! Rory couldn’t get a wave if he tried!’
(stupid laugh)
‘I’ve been having an insane time, last night I went out to the driveins to see Kung Fu Fighting and we drank two bottles of tequila and got really smashed. Insane!’
‘Ohh, isn’t he spunky!’
I was too young in the 70s to see Warner’s band, From the Suburbs, but I saw him doing stand-up when I was in my mid-teens before he was banned for being too explicit.
I was also too young to see Perth’s early punk bands The Scientists, The Victims, The Manikins and The Cheap Nasties, more’s the pity. Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy’s edited Vagabond Holes and Bleddyn Butcher’s Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids give a great picture of Perth’s live music scene in the 70s and early 80s. Although it was limited to a few venues hosting original acts in ‘cover band city’, the scene produced luminaries such as Dom Mariani (The Stems), Martyn Casey (The Triffids, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grinderman), Dave Faulkner (Hoodoo Gurus), the Farriss brothers (INXS), the Snarski brothers Mark (Chad’s Tree) and Rob (Chad’s Tree, The Blackeyed Susans), David McComb, Robert McComb, Alsy MacDonald and Jill Birt (The Triffids), Kim Salmon (The Scientists, Beasts of Bourbon) and the legendary drummer James Baker (The Scientists, Hoodoo Gurus, Beasts of Bourbon).
It wasn’t until I was living in London in my late teens that I heard either The Scientists or The Triffids, played to me by an Irish friend. He knew I was into The Birthday Party and The Pop Group, which seemed to suit the ambience of our grimy Wandsworth squat. While I immediately loved the swampy sounds of The Scientists, I’ll never forget the first time I heard The Triffids’ ‘Estuary Bed’. Reminded of the limestone coast that I’d abandoned, I think it was the first time I ever experienced nostalgia, and it was certainly the first moment I felt a twinge of longing for home. Hearing the descriptions of my Perth childhood captured so quietly, I wondered if perhaps my ‘old skin’ wasn’t shed after all.
When I look back on it, listening to The Triffids’ album Born Sandy Devotional for the first time was also something of a ‘growing up’ moment for me, aged nineteen on the other side of the planet. It triggered a new awareness that ambivalence might be turned into something other than ridicule – into art, in this case. The sound was, as described by Butcher, ‘both spacious and claustrophobic’, exactly how I’d felt as a teenager in a city where it seemed that the brightness was always turned up but the volume turned down. As Niall Lucy asked, how had The Triffids managed to overcome the problem of all Perth artists, whatever the form, that is, ‘how to lower your voice and still be heard above the noise?’ Perhaps, I wondered, by tuning into the ambivalence made explicit in the promo video for their song ‘Spanish Blue’, with its imagery of hanging out and mucking around that had a clear undercurrent of restlessness: ‘Nothing happens here, nothing gets done, but you get to like it, you get to like the beating of the sun, the washing of the sun …’ The Triffids’ frontman David McComb later suggested something of the sort in an interview with Lucy when he claimed that ‘I find no emotion real, in any art form, unless it’s present with its opposite.’
It wasn’t only ambivalence but also a sense of possibility that made me leave Perth. After that first pang of homesickness, I wondered whether my mixed feelings about my hometown might one day lead to my return (after ten years mostly bumming around, as it turned out). As a teenager who’d lived in more places across four different continents than I’d experienced years on the planet, I wondered whether a home that suggested itself in an art of contradictions, drawn to the darkness on the edge of town but also the fragile clarity of a child’s feelings, was something that I needed more than noise, crowds and concrete.
From the late 1980s, with the break-up of The Stems and The Triffids, it was no surprise to see a new generation turn Perth’s isolation and lack of expectation into a freedom to experiment and develop organically, channelling a lack of ready culture into the necessity to create their own. This is true of all Perth art forms, but it’s perhaps most obvious in the success of its musicians. Plenty of acts over the past twenty years have gone on to national – and often international – success, often without having to leave their Perth base: Ammonia, Jebediah, The John Butler Trio, Eskimo Joe, Little Birdy, The Sleepy Jackson, The Panics, Kill Devil Hills, Gyroscope, Karnivool, End of Fashion, Birds of Tokyo, Schvendes, Pendulum and more recently Abbe May, Drapht, San Cisco, Pond and Tame Impala (I could go on).
It means a lot, of course, to have local culture that speaks to your own place and your own time. At a recent party on a warm summer evening, a woman sitting next to me mentioned how during the latest heatwave she’d taken to going to bed early, lying beneath her ceiling fan
, and listening to The Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional and The Black Swan over and over again, in particular the song ‘Too Hot to Move, Too Hot to Think’, both as a panacea and a reminder that tenderness has been found, even in the sometimes brutal summer heat.
Robert Drewe’s short story ‘The Water Person and the Tree Person’ expresses something of the way I feel about the limestone coast of Perth, its importance to a sense of place and civic identity. Part of Drewe’s broad thesis is that to be a Perth child is to develop an awareness of the natural world that verges on the uncanny, imparted by osmosis as much as by teaching and learning. The main character, Andy Melrose, feels as though his wife is belittling him by stating that he is a water person while she is a tree person. Melrose, as a product of a state whose key economic indicators at the time are ‘timber and whaling and asbestos’, feels increasingly distanced from his wife, ‘product of a middle-class Melbourne garden suburb of autumnal tones … and the manicured cold-weather flora of Europe’. Although the couple live in Perth, she is an academic whose urbane friends ridicule his daily swim and suspiciously ‘manly’ ability to change a car tyre. He can’t help feeling defensive about the fact that he’s a product of his environment, just as she is of hers:
What did she expect? Unlike her, he’d grown up on this limestone coast, with the roaring forties blowing sand into his ears and the smell of estuary algae in his nostrils every night as he fell asleep. Ever since, the landscape in his mind’s eye was a crumbly moonscape of a coastline, a glaring beached desert fringed by those two big and wondrous oases, the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.
Melrose suspects that his wife’s love of the bush is just ‘literary-political correctness’, a fictional landscape of the denatured urban mind, while his is a sense of attachment felt in the body.
The limestone coast has its freedoms but also its dangers, and my local beach is not all peace and light. I once witnessed a brawl that involved upwards of fifty people, the result of a family feud, and there is occasionally violent drunkenness in the evenings. Homeless men and women used to sleep in the hollows within the acacia, melaleuca and hakea bushes that cover the dunes, and parents don’t let their children stray there. Mark Reid’s poem ‘Ode to South Beach’ captures the beach’s sometimes mood of sulkiness and decay when he describes its ‘miserly west coast wash’ and ‘rabbity scrub’ as he walks the dog:
I am walking the dog beach, old Manners
arse up snout down on the trail
of vermin or the corpses of sea creatures.
I am giddy with aroma, brine,
the stench of pickled things tossed
from the ocean’s window.
There is a Shaun Tan painting that perfectly catches this beachside id, beyond the usual depictions of its beauty and significance to local swimmers, walkers, surfers and multitude ‘fools on the hill’ – the focus on the jade-coloured reefs and the cobalt waters and volcanic sunsets. In Tan’s North Beach, only a sliver of brilliant blue ocean is visible, hemmed in on all sides by groynes covered in the ‘pickled things’ of Reid’s poem, set against a human-sculpted vertical bank and a darkened snip of sky. There are railings and stairs and road signs, powerlines and grey concrete buildings. The constructed overwhelms the natural. There is none of the space and comfort we associate with the beach – a few limestone bones that I always connect with the northern beaches poke through but most have been concreted over. A lone swimmer dries himself with a towel, facing inland, in line with the unusual perspective of the painting, a place where the light is muted and the perspective diminished.
A second Shaun Tan painting, West Coast Highway, reinforces the theme of North Beach. There is the same absence of people, the same fragment of ocean tucked in a corner behind a foreground almost completely carpeted with bitumen, the same tired-looking coastal heath and a muted grey sky. The same signs and railings and kerbs and powerlines. The ubiquitous burn-outs feature this time, black smears of carbonised rubber. And yet the light is gentle and the mood is unmistakably Perth. The light and the absence of people give the painting an eternal quality. There are no weeds; there is nothing to disturb the picture going forward into time. Watching the Oscar-winning animated short film The Lost Thing, based on Tan’s story of the same name, I was struck by how much the setting, despite its fantastical imagery, reminded me of Perth.
Tan now lives in Melbourne, but there is something about his paintings of suburban life that expresses my own childhood in the suburbs of Perth. Perhaps it’s the children negotiating the quietness and stillness of empty streets and parks and paths, always illuminated and crisply alive, even when the lines are blurred and the theme is darker. There is one picture in particular: ‘Our Expedition: Cliff’ from Tan’s book Tales from Outer Suburbia. In this pastel crayon drawing there is no natural environment left at all. Manicured suburbia stretches right to the limits of the vertical cliff edge, which is itself constructed of large blocks, above the level of the clouds. The light is warm and generous, and the shadows of the two children who sit comfortably on the edge of the world are long. It’s the kind of light that’s often a relief after the fierce light of a hot summer’s day. It brings out the best in the Perth landscape, just as the soft clear light and clean air of winter brings Perth into the crispest focus, drawing out all of the colours and textures of a cityscape usually bleached by the sun. Concrete pipes pour waste out into the sky, birds hover at the children’s feet. Fences, signs, powerlines. The children are confident, at ease; they are observing their world, much like the sole young man in Mary Ann Friend’s painting some 180 years earlier, gazing hopefully out into the future. The children each carry a small knapsack. They too are on an expedition, set down at the edge of the world, but there is no sign that they feel thwarted.
On warm nights when the sea breeze is gentle, my son Max and I wait in the car park at our local beach for the sunset to fade from glossy red to a faint saffron glaze over the ocean horizon. On other nights the sunset mingles all the gaudy colours of a fruit bowl, a canvas of blood orange and tangerine zest, fading to a thin watermelon red, leaving a lemony haze in its wake. On other occasions the sunset captures the alchemical drama of a blacksmith’s workshop, all fire and heat and steam as the glowing orb submerges in water, giving off an angry crimson mist that hangs in the air for nearly an hour. It’s hard to do justice to the sunsets over the Indian Ocean with words, although many have tried. The first example I’m aware of was written by a painter, Louisa Clifton, in March 1840:
The colouring as the sun began to decline became exquisitely soft and radiant, the hills robed in the brightest lakes and blues, the sky reflecting every colour in the rainbow, and yet so softly that every tint completely melted into one another. I cannot easily cease to remember the first Australian sunset.
It’s at this point that my son and I don our old sandshoes and check our gidgees, waiting until the beach is empty before we enter the water in the final moments of dusk. The ocean takes on a slippery celluloid quality, as it does just before dawn, when like a darkroom image coming into focus the murky shapes beneath the surface become distinct, stray photons illuminating the water from within, the sun not yet on the eastern horizon. It was then that my friends and I used to enter the water to go spear-fishing, having ached through the sleepless night with the special excitement that was reserved for dawn surfing, or dawn skindiving. There would be insufficient light to see by and only the cheering sound of my friend Fergus singing through his snorkel, his breathing rapid with the cold and dread of the darker water ahead, coming slowly into light.
Max and I turn on our torches and begin to mark the catfish, or cobbler as they’re locally known, that are already at the waterline, bowled over by the bigger waves but nosing into the shallows to feed. By day secretive and hidden in the weed-beds, by night the cobbler are fearless, often stranded on the beach between waves. They swim between our legs, their slimy skin always sending a bolt of shock though me. Unlike Max, who so far has been lucky, I
know how painful it is to step on the cobbler’s barbs, and the memory of the fierce agony can be felt from my toes to my fingertips. We wade through the chop looking for a single large fish for the plate. As much as anything the hunt is an exercise in teaching my son patience and restraint – fathers having taught their sons to gidgee catfish in this area and in roughly the same fashion for tens of thousands of years. Finally, we see the broad sandy flank and swirly ribbons of a larger fish and the spear is sent home.
Max beheads and guts the fish while I watch over the ocean: the sulphur lights of the port to my right, the winking lights marking the Gage Roads channel further out, the bright caustic bloom over Kwinana to the south. The suburbs there are named after settler ships: Parmelia, Rockingham, Success, Orelia, Medina. This is the season for shark attacks, and despite the fact that I made peace with my fear of them long ago, I am strangely unsettled by a recent article in the paper that described a twenty-foot tagged female white pointer cruising longshore through the night, from Safety Bay in the south to Quinns Rocks in the north, back and forth, down and back.
Further south is where I fish with my friend Mark. We’ve been fishing here for years, more for the company and sunset than the catch. Sometimes the tailor are on, sometimes skippy and tarwhine and always herring. For a while there we caught and released an old Port Jackson shark every time we cast a line. Once a great black seal the size of a small car waddled up behind my back, so that when I turned it was waiting with big friendly eyes. It sat and watched us for a while before surfing off into the waves. Our tradition is to always put the first fish back, because of some forgotten superstition, no matter that on occasions it’s the only fish for the night. Something that adds emotional weight to this superstition is the bronze statue that stands in the waves: a horseman turning his blank face over his shoulder, casting his eyes back to the port where his wife and children lie sleeping, his horse raising its head in fear.
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