I sat down in one of the library’s comfy chairs and immediately began to read, but I found I had to keep pausing to stare back at the staring boy who is the subject of the Robert Dickerson painting on the cover. I later discovered that the painting isn’t of a Perth street, but that Cowan had requested Dickerson illustrate his book and had specifically asked for that painting on the cover. In any case, the hot glare that seemed to radiate off the painting despite the dullness of a Tokyo winter’s day reminded me of Perth at midday in summer: the heat, silence and oppressive stillness, everything conspiring against movement. The boy is alone in the empty street that is composed of geometrically conforming lines, and even the sky is cut out into a single blocky shape, although everything is pale and sand coloured. The faces of the houses that front the sandy street are windowless and doorless, and high white walls block all of the yards. There are no gardens or footpaths or curbs. The child’s one black eye stares out angrily at the viewer and the other is covered by shielding fingers, almost as if the sunlight hurts him. Robert Drewe, in The Drowner, describes the effect of the sky on the human figure in the summer heat of Perth: ‘The sky was not a neutral ceiling for the landscape. It was a force. It pressed low on the low hills, forcing them to make a horizon with the river.’ The empty street also appears spacious but oppressively close, and the boy seems marooned, much like one of the characters in Cowan’s short story collection, ‘alien as if they had never taken root in their environment, denied by the white bare rock’.
The protagonist of The Empty Street’s eponymous short story is psychologically riven, by day a white-collar drone and by night a murderer of suburban women. The narrative charts the murderous effects upon an apparently sensitive male of the dull suburban life that he’s submitted himself to, a realm of thwarted desire that only finds true expression towards the end of the story when the character, as in so many Perth narratives of the twentieth century, escapes to the beauty of the hills, where he helps tend a nursery garden before his arrest. Unlike many other Cowan stories, however, where his characters come together in fleeting moments of blunt honesty and sexual communion before the silence and space of the suburbs untether them, ‘The Empty Street’ is all about concealment and what the muted spaces of Perth’s flatland suburbs can mean to those who are vulnerable.
While ‘The Empty Street’ isn’t Cowan’s best-known work, it’s perhaps his most fully elaborated text that plays on the theme of a Perth suburban gothic, something also explored in some of The Triffids’ lyrics and Shaun Tan’s paintings. The idea of a surface beauty floating mirage-like upon an undercurrent of aggression, and weirdness, is epitomised in Dorothy Hewett’s poem ‘Sanctuary’, from her 1975 collection Rapunzel in Suburbia:
This nervous hollow city is built on sand, looped with wires, circled with shaven trees.
The bleeding pigeons tumble outside the windows, the children wring their necks.
Much of The Empty Street is set at night, when odd things happen in the suburbs, surreal moments that seem disconnected from the diurnal life of the streets but appear ignited by the dreams of the sleepers around. The return of the repressed, perhaps, leaching outside the boundaries of the picket fences and hedges and clinker-brick walls onto the narrow ribbons of black road.
Once, when a friend and I were returning from a party on a Fremantle backstreet, a driverless white HT Kingswood rolled over the crest of the hill, building up speed until it passed us and then crashed into a gnarled old peppermint tree and was silent. There was nobody around and nobody was roused. Another time I walked the same street at night and came upon a row of wheelie bins that had been set on fire, the hissing orange flames forming contorted holograms in the breeze. Again, nobody was roused. This was the hour when my beloved EJ Holden had been stolen a few years previously, just minutes after I’d arrived home from a party. At the sound of the hotwired ignition I’d raced out into the street, only to see the tail-lights float off into the gloom. I found the EJ the next morning, trashed and charred in the coastal dunes near the South Fremantle Power Station, alongside dozens of other wrecks. Only the alternator had been stolen.
I’m also aware of a friend of my brother’s, a country kid who got drunk one night and walked the suburban streets, shooting out the streetlights with a .22 rifle, forgetting that he was in the city. Fortunately for him, and by now innocently looking for some company, he’d wandered over to say hello to a man sitting quietly on his front porch. The man was an off-duty policeman who’d just finished the nightshift and tackled him to the ground, restraining but protecting him from the black-clad Tactical Response Group who soon arrived in numbers.
The early hours are also the time most people associate with the crimes of Eric Edgar Cooke, the last man hanged in Western Australia. Between 1959 and 1963, Cooke murdered eight people and wounded fourteen more. The tabloid version was that Cooke was a night-time prowler, a pervert and house-breaker turned monster. He certainly terrorised the western suburbs over the course of four years, and his crimes have taken on a mythic status. He is often described in the media as the man single-handedly responsible for stealing Perth’s ‘innocence’, at a time when many left their houses unlocked and their car keys in the ignition. Yet, by all accounts, to know Cooke was to like him, unaware of his secret passion for inhabiting the darkness.
Cooke’s crimes have been directly or indirectly represented by writers such as Tim Winton, Peter Cowan, Robert Drewe and Dave Warner, although it was Perth journalist Estelle Blackburn whose research into Cooke’s crimes exonerated two men who’d served time for murders that Cooke committed, and admitted to committing, and brought to light the extent of his random violence against women. Her 1998 book Broken Lives is heartbreaking reading. The title refers not only to the men Blackburn helped exonerate, and to Cooke’s blameless wife and children, but also to the numerous women who survived Cooke’s attacks and have lived quietly with their fear ever since. The strong sense begins to emerge that in a spread-out city where the streets are claimed by sometimes violent men, the stories of Cooke’s female victims and their experiences of another side of Perth’s quiet streets would never have come to light if Blackburn hadn’t given them voice. The fact that Cooke’s crimes began only a handful of years after the National Film Board produced its now sweetly nostalgic Postcard from Perth, a cheerful celluloid picture of a city at peace with itself, hints at the complex layering of the silence in Perth’s suburban streets and the sense that amid the quiet respiration of the sleeping city there lurks a presence that watches and waits.
Debi Marshall’s 2007 book The Devil’s Garden analyses the ‘Claremont Killings’, which, according to Marshall, were the subject of the ‘most expensive and longest running case in Australian history’. The forensic descriptions that detail the murder of two young Perth women and the disappearance of a third in the mid-1990s are chilling, as is the fact that during this decade some twenty women were abducted or went missing, never to be seen again. In the year leading up to the death of Jane Rimmer in 1996, the first of the two murder victims, there were two abductions and violent sexual assaults in the Claremont area, one of which, according to local newspaper owner Bret Christian, was never properly investigated and was later never linked to the Claremont murders.
But there is one story that is most chilling of all, as described by Con Bayens, who headed up Operation Bounty in 2000. The police operation was designed to clear street-walkers and kerbcrawlers out of Northbridge and Highgate, and it documented roughly 200 men a night being serviced by 350 prostitutes in the area. At one point Bayens, on patrol, saw a car that resembled an unmarked police service Holden parked in a side street. Assuming that the car was part of a drug squad operation, he acted only when he saw a sex worker enter the Holden. The driver was tall and impressive, and carried himself with the authority of a policeman, except that he was a civilian, who’d done a taxi-driver training course. In the boot of the man’s car, Bayens found a kit consisting of ‘zip ties, a balaclava, gaff
er tape and scissors’. Worst of all, ‘the boot was fully lined with plastic, top and bottom’. But the man couldn’t be charged with anything and was let go. And nor was he thought significant to the ongoing investigation of the Claremont Killings, then focused on another individual. Which means that he is probably still out there on Perth’s streets, driving around the quiet suburbs once darkness falls.
Perth was always a ‘spread’ city, with early settlements hugging the riverine and oceanic shore-lines, but it wasn’t until after World War II that it really started to sprawl. Government rationing of petrol and building materials ended, car ownership rocketed far beyond the estimates set forth in the 1955 Stephenson-Hepburn Plan for the Metropolitan Region, and the near full-employment conditions that endured for decades meant that for the first time home ownership was possible for the majority. Many of the migrants and workers who had inhabited the inner-city suburbs of East, North and West Perth headed for the newly subdivided lots to the immediate north of the city.
It was suggested as early as 1904 that the best way to encourage the ‘wage earning class’ out of the ‘rookeries and all tumbledown, unhealthy and decaying dwellings’ was to push suburbs out into the bush, linked to the city by way of tram and rail. Allotments in the earliest suburbs had provided land, but other infrastructure and especially roads had to be funded by raising taxes from the homeowners of the immediate area. Clearing and building was often done by the locals, and the jarrah-plank roads that spread out of the city were often sourced, milled and laid by local workers and paid for by public subscription.
Perth is something of an unusual city in that, initially at least, the directions in which the city has grown haven’t involved the replacing of arable land with housing stock. The riverine floodplain and foreshore market-gardens of the kind described so lovingly by T.A.G. Hungerford were never built upon, and until the coming of heavy machinery nor were the wetlands that were sources of fruit and vegetables well into the twentieth century. The important vineyards, orchards and market gardens in the Swan Valley, which to this day remains the wine-growing area closest to any Australian capital city, and the orchards in the hills and the Spearwood sands farmland along the south-eastern foothills also remained largely untouched by suburbia, mainly because it was vital to early administrators that Perth reduce its reliance on imported food. Perth’s geographical isolation meant that until quite recently fruit and vegetables could never be bought out of season. This taught people to be self-sufficient – even in the richest suburbs, most people grew small amounts of their own fruit and vegetables.
One important exception to this setting aside of arable land was the dairy country just to the north, in what is now Osborne Park. In 1903, the areas north of the city remained bushland. According to one account, ‘[l]looking across Beaufort Street … from the site of the Mount Lawley subway, there was not a house to be seen.’ But Perth’s population grew some 700 per cent in fifteen years, and housing stock needed to be found. Osborne Park was named after William Osborne, who was a butcher and abattoir owner. He owned much of the land alongside the newly constructed Wanneroo Road (made of jarrah planks nailed down onto jarrah sleepers, to avoid buggy, and later automobile, wheels catching in the sand), and he initially got into trouble with the Perth Road Board for complaining about the unsolicited logging of tuart and jarrah on his land. Once subdivided, the area became popular with market gardeners and dairy farms (there were sixteen dairies operating in 1913), although at four miles from the city centre it was thought too far for many seeking land. There are photographs that document the arrival of the road and the building of the enormous Osborne Park Hotel in 1903, an island of white walls and shining roof. They give a good indication of the early endeavours to suburbanise areas away from the river, showing men and women wading around in the ankle-deep sand.
The ‘build it and they will come’ approach was clearly successful, then as now. Posters from the period mirror the real-estate spin employed today, and because many of the company owners had positions on the Road Board, they were able to direct extensions of the plank road out to their subdivisions in North Beach (‘Perth’s favourite watering place!’), or to ‘Park Estate’ and the optimistically named ‘North Perth Extended’ and ‘Subiaco North’ estates in Scarborough (‘owing to the superior surfing at Scarborough, those engaged in this exhilarating past-time have “discovered” this new beach’), to Sorrento Estate and many more. Some subdivisions were clearly better planned and resourced than others, and there’s a marked difference in the character of these early designs that can still be felt today. The part-owner of the Mount Lawley development, R.T. Robinson, as a member of the Road Board and a King’s Counsellor, was able to bring a tramline extension to his new garden suburb. He also brought gas lighting, which was ignited in the evenings and extinguished in the mornings by a man who got about on a bicycle carrying a long tapering pole, like a medieval jouster. The suburb of Doubleview, so named because of its high position and therefore double aspect over the ocean and the Darling Scarp inland, was once characterised by the presence of much of its native bush, unlike other subdivisions of the era.
Some of the earliest suburbs, those of Floreat Park and City Beach, were shaped by the vision of William Bold, the prominent town clerk influenced by the automobile-centric garden cities he’d encountered in the United States, with their wide and beautiful boulevards. It took some time for his vision to be translated, however. Early residents of the two suburbs, living on land that had been used previously for extracting lime, complained of being isolated and forgotten. According to historian Jenny Gregory, one resident as late as the 1950s suggested renaming Floreat Park ‘Noanulla – no shop, no footpaths, no sewerage … very little transport.’
Which is not to say that the architects and bureaucrats of Perth as ‘City Beautiful’ didn’t care. As elsewhere, there is a well-documented history of the early twentieth-century humanist struggle to create a planned city whose design would improve the quality of life of its residents. Councillors, architects and planners such as Bold, Harold Boas, George Temple Poole and later Paul Ritter were influential and clearly cared a great deal about Perth’s future. As often seems to be the case in Perth, though, their best-intentioned plans rarely made it to fruition, stymied along the way by internecine feuding between councils and government departments, and the naysaying of the ‘pragmatic’. For example, there was a plan suggested in 1900 to submerge the train line that bisected the inner city, replacing the surface area with a pedestrian space allowing freedom of movement between central Perth and Northbridge. This plan is only now being realised, some 113 years later. The fixed-rail public transport branch-lines mooted to link the developing suburbs to the city were largely never built and are only recently back on the political agenda.
After World War II, the state government was heavily involved in development, initially using mainly prefabricated housing materials. The northern suburb of Innaloo, which was originally known as Njookenbooroo, and populated with largely European migrants (one described it as a ‘real never-never land, with only a few weatherboard shacks dotted around’), was one of the first to be developed, after Joondanna and Glendalough. It was followed by a public housing estate in Scarborough, although the largest project involved the building of the city of Mirrabooka, home to Nollamara and Balga, where nearly 5000 public housing units were quickly developed.
With Perth’s recent growth in population, access to public housing has become more difficult than ever, although it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t thus. As early as 1947, mention was made of the tough conditions in some state residences in Scarborough. Many of the one-bedroom flats built there housed recently returned servicemen and their families, some with as many as thirteen children. One man in the flats known as ‘the Alley’, designed to be temporary accommodation, was told that he had no prospect of being allotted a state house because he didn’t have enough children – there were only five in his family.
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sp; As Richard Weller, who was until 2013 the Winthrop Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Western Australia, points out, it’s an inexplicable fact that despite the wealth generated by the recent mining boom ‘homelessness rates in Western Australia … are significantly higher than in other states.’ This has a lot to do with the sad statistic that, according to the Community Housing Coalition WA, the state has one of the highest second home ownership rates in the world, but because of negative gearing and capital gains nearly one in ten properties across the state lie empty, simply because many of these landlords don’t need the income. Meanwhile, just like in the 1890s when tent cities sprang up all over the place, with an estimated 1500 new arrivals every week, more and more people are forced to live in caravans, tents and cars.
Perth is not a city commonly associated with high-density housing projects, although there are some enduring and well-loved precedents. Architects Harold Krantz and Robert Sheldon focused their apartment-building outside of the city centre to make the most of the cheaper land. They were responsible over a period of four decades in the mid-twentieth century for building more flats than anyone else in Perth, often some thousand a year, from high towers to three-storey walk-up swollen houses. Although many Krantz and Sheldon buildings have been torn down, others remain and are some of the most distinctive buildings in Perth. The duo was described as introducing a continental European aesthetic into the Perth building market, and a modernism whose minimum standards now seem generous.
Krantz and Sheldon took a cautious but innovative approach to building. Aiming to produce housing that workers could afford, they chose not to become a publicly listed developer and instead funded their projects by subscription, in some cases designed to attract the investment of Jewish émigrés looking for a home in Perth. In the words of Harold’s son David, ‘We turned the clock back and tried to use traditional methods and traditional materials in better ways.’ According to Harold, this method of employing a European functionalism within what the University of Western Australia’s School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts dean Simon Anderson calls their ‘monumentalisation of the vernacular’ is why ‘they do not get old fashioned as quickly as a lot of styles do’.
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