Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  Outside of the CBD, any attempt to build higher than a few storeys is usually met with fierce resistance. The issue isn’t the amount of land that the buildings require, but that they eat into the sky, making the city feel smaller, less open to the horizon. It’s almost as though to be a resident of lowland Perth is to carry the openness of the plain within ourselves, and to yearn in its absence. When I read of the young Western Australian soldiers in Brenda Walker’s novel The Wing of Night, trapped between the Mediterranean and the limestone ridges of the Peloponnesian scarp, it didn’t seem at all unlikely that a newspaperman finds them ‘longing for the coming fight’, homesick, as they are, ‘for the open country behind the Turkish trenches’.

  It usually takes extremity to disturb the seemingly tranquil air that sits over the land: riotous parties and car chases, fights between suburban gangs, and meth labs going up in flames. Perth’s suburbs are sprawled enough so that it’s easy to ignore what happens over the horizon – out of sight and out of mind.

  At a break during a recent public lecture at the Alexander Library in Northbridge, I overheard one well-heeled woman tell her friend how she’d gotten ‘lost in Armadale’ as she started out on a trip to the south-west. Genuinely disturbed, she muttered, ‘It’s like a different country out there! Lucky I had my GPS!’ Her friend consoled her with a pat of her hand, but I didn’t sneer as I once might have. Only a few years previously I’d spent an afternoon in Armadale trying to track down a friend who’d just been released from jail, to pass on a message. When I found him, he told me about the speed dealers in the house two doors up who kept him awake all night with their fighting, their kids out on the streets. Even worse, some of the other local kids had found out about his wife’s terminal cancer and kept breaking in to steal her morphine. He felt more like a prisoner than ever, he told me, and I felt ashamed to recognise how alien the poverty that characterised his state-housing neighbourhood seemed, after two decades living mostly in Fremantle. It occurred to me, too, that over the previous years I’d been to Melbourne and Sydney more often than Armadale, or Midland, or Kwinana, or plenty of other places in Perth that I usually only visit when my son plays football there or I’m interviewing people for a story.

  In my own immediate neighbourhood it’s the presence of so many children that breaks down the sense that each house is a fortress of privacy separated by fence, verge and street. Their noise, disorder and fence-hopping play is also a demand for community, and I’m often reminded of the migrant’s courage of a friend of mine’s parents, Phil and Wendy, who live in Gosnells, a suburb in the south-east of Perth. Along with nearby Kelmscott, it has retained its sense of being one of the earliest of Perth’s riverside villages. My friend’s family were ‘ten pound Poms’ who came out to Perth in the 1960s and initially lived in the migrant camp at Point Walter. They had decided to leave Nottingham, move to the world’s most isolated city and never look back. They bought their first suburban Thornlie home at a time when their mortgage repayment was $10 a week out of Phil’s potential bricklayer salary of $200 a week – far more than a teacher or nurse or bank clerk earned then. For this reason, Phil has always thought of Perth as a worker’s paradise.

  Now in their eighties, Phil and Wendy are still an indispensible part of the multicultural street’s community, and they still open their home to the neighbourhood kids, who over the decades and generations have always turned to them for companionship and advice. Like everywhere else in Australia, Perth’s suburbs are full of people like them, who came to make a home in a quiet street but also helped create a stable community, a place that few people are interested in, perhaps, but which for the past fifty years has been the centre of their world.

  At a barbecue recently in Fremantle I chatted with a builder and ‘eco-property’ developer who was over from England to renovate his sister’s new suburban home. In England, he’s only able to receive council permission to build on the condition that every house is identical to every other house, down to the letterbox and doorknob. He found it surprising to learn that so many Perth residents over the years have been allowed to build a home of their own, free of council interference, one that reflects their budget and personal taste, even when others might find that taste questionable.

  It’s certainly true that architectural profusion appears to be the only constant in Perth’s suburbs. The price of Perth real estate may have everything to do with location, and easy access to the beaches and city, but while the streets in the richer suburbs may be leafier, the houses larger, the gardens better tended and the cars more expensive, by and large the only regularity is the irregularity of the streetscapes, the same parched parks and bore-stained walls, the same alternating ‘Marseille’ terra-cotta and corrugated iron roofing.

  The most substantial difference between the newer suburbs and the old is due to the fact that when the older suburbs were conceived there wasn’t the machinery to grade the individual blocks, or to infill each subdivision to make sure that it rose above the water table. As a result, what is appealing about the older suburbs isn’t that they are leafier, and therefore cooler in summer, but that the blocks rise and fall upon the crests and swales of the hardened limestone dunes that roll inland across the plain. Each house and street conforms to its original and cambered landscape, and often some of the original flora remains. Newer suburbs are generally bulldozed and re-contoured with powerful machinery according to a design predicated upon the level, taking out all of the native bush in one sweep. The broader vista of unremitting flatness only emphasises the sameness of the housing stock, the stunted imported vegetation and the same predictable suburban retail franchises.

  Both in its absence and abundance, water defines life in Perth today. The reliably generous winter rains that give Perth its Mediterranean climate, and its higher annual rainfall than either Melbourne or Hobart, have been in decline for decades. The low-pressure systems that spin like mop-heads off the roaring forties in winter are no longer making it as far north, leaving Perth’s dams increasingly empty. Two desalination plants are operating but there is still more demand than capacity, placing greater strain on aquifers such as the Gnangara Mound that have always been called upon in times of need.

  Perth was originally a watery place, defined by the ocean on one side and the river flowing widely through, regularly flooded due to the high water table and the wetlands that filled and ran over. These wetlands were not only a valuable food source for the Nyungar, supplying gilgie and turtle, birdlife and yam, but were also identified by Europeans as islands of fertility in the sandy expanse of the coastal plain. Western logic understandably identified the land that supported the tallest trees as the most fertile, but this was shown to be incorrect. In fact, the tuart, jarrah and marri woodlands flourish best in marginal soils, and market gardeners, often Chinese, who were unable to secure riverfront land in the 1890s began instead to cultivate the soils of the numerous lakes and swamps that form part of the broader Perth wetlands.

  There has been a lot written about the coastline as it relates to Perth’s sense of itself, as both a margin and space for reflection, but the absence of the wetlands in this picture suggests something else about their place in the city’s consciousness. Once covering twenty-five per cent of the Perth area, the string of swamps that run north–south along the coastal plain are all that remains after eighty per cent of the wetlands have been reclaimed. Large areas of the CBD and Fremantle are built on reclaimed land. Central Perth was the site of a string of lakes, of which only a few remain, and Fremantle was built on a promontory topped by Arthur Head, behind which a brackish wetland ran in a string up its stony white spine. As a result, the water table sits very high. Freshwater springs still flow beneath Perth’s streets, and in both the CBD and Fremantle many buildings are fitted with pumps to clear basements of water.

  The suburbs of Perth expanded away from the rivers and train lines early in the twentieth century. Town clerk William E. Bold’s plan to create a series of garden suburbs
that would function as commuter dormitories took in first the old lime kiln area around what is now Floreat Park and City Beach, and many of the intermittent swamps were either filled or encircled. If Robert Drewe is correct that Perth residents of his generation regard the beach in a nostalgic light because so many had their first sexual experience there, then perhaps the memories associated with the numerous swamps are more significant to childhood, an age that could yet find wonder and mystery in what were often degraded and rubbish-strewn points in the developing suburbs.

  Of no interest to vandals, too creepy a place for sexual liaisons, too sandy for joggers, too scribbly for picnickers, the swamps were perfect for children. The peaty smell of rot and decay, the tea-coloured water, and the reeds and banksia and gnarled paperbarks that resemble exhausted old men give the swamps an ethereal atmosphere, suitable for all kinds of fantasy. The presence of cannibalised car wrecks, old campfires and paperbark lean-tos only reinforce the swamps as a place of refuge, the kind of place parents never visited.

  When my mother was a child, it was still the case that even in the heart of suburban Perth, vacant blocks remained mostly in their natural state: quarteracre islands where balga, wattle and hakea stood upon a carpet of wildflowers such as hardenbergia and boronia, kangaroo-paw, blue leschenaultia, orange cat’s paw and often the donkey orchid. This was so when I first moved to Attadale, in Perth’s southern suburbs, as a child. It was a newly developing suburb that held numerous patches of remnant bush blazing with colour and harbouring blue-tongue lizards, mopoke owls and feral cats that were all wisely chary of kids. Perhaps they remembered the children of my mother’s generation, who often lit bonfires in the vacant blocks, some of which got out of hand.

  In winter, the swamps often reclaimed the nearby land as the water table rose and the wetlands glided in silver sheets across parks and roads and into yards and alleys. I remember being fascinated by this as a child, despite being accustomed to the long dry Perth summers and the sudden winter downpours. We depended upon those winter storms to irrigate our gardens. To my ears they contained all the drama of the foundry, with rain hammering on the rooftop and sheet lightning illuminating gouts of silver coursing down lengths of chain into forty-four gallon drums – and yet I was always startled by the capacity of the land to swell and silently bring forth water from its hidden stores.

  One story that describes the importance of the wetlands to children is Tim Winton’s ‘Aquifer’. It is set in the kind of new suburb I associate most with my childhood, all building sites and newly watered-in lawns, edging out into the poor banksia scrublands. The narrator is a boy just as I remember myself: solitary but never lonely, happiest in whatever remnant bush he can find (although I was lucky enough to have parents who allowed me to wander, unlike the narrator). On one level, ‘Aquifer’ is about the passage of memory through time, the laying down of memory like sediment that speaks of belonging to the city. In the suburban Perth streets, the citizens perform the public rituals of claiming the new neighbourhood: regular maintenance of the house and car, keeping up the garden and lawns. The narrator, now an adult, learns that a child’s bones have been found at the site of the original swamp, recently dried up because of the falling water table. This brings back memories, but although he returns to the swamp, now a crime scene, he does not share them with the police. They are private memories, to do with him and the wetland, and the presence of the police and media is like the intrusion of adults into what was the child’s domain. The bones belong to the English boy the narrator watched paddling around the swamp on an upturned car bonnet, only to capsize and disappear forever. The body wasn’t found, and the narrator had never informed the community of what had happened. And yet the narrator was haunted by the fact that in his eventual decomposition, the English boy would become liquid, part of the aquifer on which the swamp drew and upon which the citizens of Perth increasingly relied for their drinking water. Like Joe Lynch in Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells, the English boy has become part of the physical and metaphysical landscape, moving through the aquifer as the water seeps and runs, is drawn and flushed and dripped and evaporated and returned to its source, its mythic origins still present in the silent and secretive ‘waste-land’ that the new city has long forgotten.

  The wetlands of Perth have always felt to me like a secretive landscape amid the dry unconsolidated plain, but even in their dampness they have suffered the same fate as much of the bushland that surrounds Perth – the regular burning that mysteriously seems to accompany school holidays. The Nyungar were expert at firing the land to promote the growth of pasture attractive to kangaroos, so that the first settlers described seas of grassland flowing around deliberately preserved islands of forest. Unfortunately, the repetitive burning of much of the bush inside the Perth area has damaged what used to be a feature associated with the landscape in winter and spring: the coming of the wildflowers. Wildflower season is still popular, but generally Perth residents need to travel to the national parks in the Darling Scarp or visit the wildflower beds in Kings Park to witness what is one of nature’s finest spectacles – the bringing forth of carpets of delicate flowers of the brightest tints from the most barren of soils.

  If English author D.H. Lawrence had witnessed this spring ignition of the forest floor, the main character in his 1923 novel Kangaroo, Richard Somers, may not have viewed the burnt bush near Perth as something so metaphysically threatening, ‘so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses partly charred by bush fires, and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was deathly still … biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end …’ Despite Lawrence’s feelings of awe amid the silence and stillness of the wandoo forest, had he stayed for spring and seen the wildflowers of Perth then he might have attributed to the bush a sense of fertility and humour, too: a large part of the joy of walking through knee-high flowers is the improbable riot of colour, a laughing reply to perceptions of the Perth bush as drab, inhospitable and humourless.

  When I think of Lawrence’s character and his ‘roused spirit of the bush’, I am always reminded of the ‘wrongness’ of everything in Perth described by the newly arrived George Seddon. This alienation from his new home became something that he sought to comprehend, and he embarked upon studies in local botany, geography, history and geology. He was known affectionately around Fremantle as ‘Professor of Everything’, an acknowledgment of his erudition as well as his contribution to an evolution in the way Perth residents have come to view their environment. Peteris Ciemitis’s wonderful 2006 watercolour portrait of Seddon, Making Sense of Place #4, hangs in Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery and was a finalist in the Archibald Prize. It captures Seddon’s piercing intelligence and wise-owl stare. His aged face contains all the colours and textures of an aerial map of the Perth landscape: the dark riverine lines and weathered blushes of red and blue stained by a golden light.

  Seddon, who was born in Victoria and later worked in Europe and North America, arrived in Perth from Canada in 1956. His first impressions of the local bush were unkind, although not uncommon. He called the jarrah ‘a grotesque parody of a tree, gaunt, misshapen, usually with a few dead limbs, fire-blackened trunk and hardly enough leaves to shade a small ant’. This is not too unlike a description of the jarrah, marri and tuart woodland from 1844, when settler Eliza Brown said that the trees were ‘not handsome. It is seldom we meet with a perfect tree, they nearly all show a great number of naked branches and the trunks are in most instances blackened in consequence of the native fires …’ But Seddon, a man who realised upon his arrival that he was not Australian but Victorian, liked the city of Perth and its people, and so he stayed. However, it was his discomfort at the oddness of the Perth landscape (or moonscape, as others have described it) that precipitated his detailed and eloquent ‘experience of the environment’, something related in his four main books about Perth: Swan River Landscapes, Sense of Pla
ce, A City and its Setting and Swansong. This transition from a common early experience of distance to one of attachment essentially involved a change of focus, ‘a learning to see’ that required a perceptual shift away from the grander scenery that Seddon was accustomed to in Victoria and Canada, towards a focus upon smaller details, the secret life of Perth that ultimately provided him with sufficient nutrition to feel at home, newly warmed to its sense of place, a term that he might well have coined.

  This is a process that I’ve seen duplicated in others, especially my New Zealander wife Bella. Accustomed to the striking mountains and rolling green canvas of her homeland, she initially felt locked out by Perth’s dry air, bright coastal light and the lack of obvious scenery on the plain. She too acclimatised herself by learning to garden in the limestone soils. Soon she was attracted to the tough charms of the banksia and balga tree – the former whose leaves are like serrated swords, and the latter with its prehistoric aura, hard-earned flowers on long fibrous stems – and the sudden miracle of the dun-coloured scrubland flowering in spring.

  I can remember the first time I saw the cover of Peter Cowan’s 1965 collection of short stories, The Empty Street. I was in a second-hand bookstore, skiving off from my job as a supermarket trolley boy. I had never heard of Peter Cowan and didn’t realise he was from Perth, but there was something about the painting on the cover that both fascinated and repelled me. It reminded me of being a bare-legged boy in the white-hot streets of my hometown. When I came across the book ten years later, in the library attached to the Australian Embassy in Tokyo, where I often travelled on days off to get a fix of Australian literature, I recognised the cover immediately, and the feelings I’d had about it as a teenager and the images it had provoked came flooding back.