Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  Harold Krantz started out working for his influential uncle Harold Boas in the 1920s before setting up his own practice. He worked with Margaret Pitt Morison and John Oldham before he was joined in 1939 by Robert Sheldon, a Viennese Jew who’d escaped from Austria after the Anschluss. Their practice was later to employ dozens of architects newly arrived from Europe, many of whom, such as Jeffrey Howlett and Iwan Iwanoff, went on to design some of Perth’s most distinctive buildings. Harold and his wife Dorothy were also great supporters of the theatre in Perth. Krantz designed the Playhouse Theatre in Pier Street (demolished in 2012) near where he’d met Dorothy, an actor in many local productions.

  The bulk of Krantz and Sheldon’s buildings that remain are dotted around the edges of the inner city and throughout the older suburbs. Their best-known building is probably the Mount Eliza at the edge of Kings Park, nicknamed ‘The Thermos Flask’ because of its circular structure and finned extrusions, but my favourites are the humble walk-up red-brick apartment blocks. To me, they are distinctively Perth, somewhat run-down but often clothed in the cool shadows of gum trees. There is something about the Art Deco lettering and the blend of stucco, cement, brick and grille-work that reminds me of hot childhood summers and the imagined peacefulness behind the curved white balconies that resemble that staple form of my childhood – the curved hand shielding against a fierce sun. I think I was drawn early to these comfortable-looking buildings because of the atmosphere of nostalgia that I sensed around them, capturing both the faded glamour of old Los Angeles and a lightness of touch that contrasted with the brutalist lines of the 1970s structures going up on St Georges Terrace.

  I still get a kick out of picturing Elizabeth Jolley high up in Krantz and Sheldon’s Windsor Towers in South Perth (as described in Brian Dibble’s terrific biography, Doing Life), a twenty-one-storey slip-form concrete structure commissioned by Alan Bond in 1969. Jolley worked there as a cleaning lady but also used the time to pen her outsider novels, looking down over the city where her clients were at work.

  If Harold Krantz’s aim was to move beyond the traditional Australian dependence upon the terrace and the villa, and in doing so create a minimum population density and hopefully a more vibrant social landscape, the vastness of Perth’s suburban sprawl has always worked against this. As early as 1899, Perth’s inhabitants were reported to be ‘dispersed over a wide area rather than their concentration within comparatively narrow limits’. Today, with a projected population increase of thirty per cent over the next decade, and an anticipated population of four million by 2050 (from the 1.8 million resident in Greater Perth), state governments are slowly rethinking the long-held bipartisan view that public transport infrastructure is a cost and car ownership an investment in economic growth. In Richard Weller’s book Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City, some of the statistics are telling. Not only has economic growth in Perth rivalled that of China over the past years, but combined with the city’s anticipated growth, the most radical according to Weller that has been seen in an Australian city to date, it’s also the case that ‘[a]pproximately 70% of Perth’s new residential development still occurs at or beyond the boundaries of currently developed areas’.

  This continued sprawl will not only continue eating into woodlands but will exacerbate Perth’s dependence on the automobile, in a city that already has the fourth highest car ownership ratio to population in the world, in what is ‘one of the most sprawled (120km long) cities on earth’. The idea that Perth is a paradise for many of its migrants has a long history, but due to climate change – Perth has had four of its hottest years on record in the past five years – the suspicion that it’s a fool’s paradise is something altogether more recent. Tim Flannery’s comment that Perth might well become the twenty-first century’s first ghost metropolis is well known, although it was made at a time before the desalination plants came online. It’s clear that in the future Perth residents will become more dependent upon what Tim Winton calls our new habit of ‘drinking the ocean’.

  The post-war boom in Perth that led to a rapid doubling of population gave rise to the creation of the northern suburbs, but more recently much of the new suburban growth is taking place in the north-eastern and south-eastern corridors. For the first time in Perth’s history, much of the new development is replacing arable land that has been used to grow food for the city. With the population set to double by 2050, Weller’s point is that ‘the entire infrastructure of the city will have to double. Everything that was built in 179 years will have to be built in forty.’ In Boomtown 2050 he makes a case for different types of development, pointing out that the ‘business as usual’ model will simply mean that ‘Perth will become a 170km long city, a flatland of suburban sprawl covering more than 200,000 hectares of land.’

  Each of the different scenarios Weller proposes involves the development of high-density housing, from suburban infill to apartment towers lining the arterial highways, the coastline, the scarp. All are a response to the central question: where will we fit another two and half million people over the next few decades? The NIMBY attitude that has developed in the city, much of it as a response to what was regarded as the desecration of Victorian-era Perth, coupled with a traditional lack of political enthusiasm for public transport and the ancient Perth prejudice towards ‘flats’, is unlikely to change in the near future, meaning that the business-as-usual model of suburban development is likely to continue, resulting in the intensified clearing of bushland that is both ancient and highly bio-diverse.

  As Weller points out, much of the costs of suburban sprawl are hidden. It’s a remarkable irony that the aristocratic dreams sold to the earliest European settlers, where a family might own a house and a sizable acreage of land, has been realised in the suburbs of Perth, although the farmland and energy resources and labour required to maintain the suburban landowner’s house and lifestyle are hidden from view. Weller estimates that to sustain an individual in Perth’s current housing stock ‘takes 14.5 hectares of land, seven times the world average. Western Australians, Saudi Arabians and Singaporeans share the increasingly dishonourable status of being the most unsustainable people on the planet.’

  It’s perhaps telling that K.A. Bedford’s 2008 Aurealis Award-winning sci-fi novel Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait describes a 2027 Perth little different from the current city, only amplified. The comic novel’s protagonist, ‘Spider’ Webb, lives and works in Malaga, still a battlers’ suburb. His workshop is one of a number of ‘countless, ugly, concrete tilt-up structures built in Malaga over the past few decades’, nearby one of a number of ‘sprawling northern enclaves, all … monster homes and malls so big they had their own weather, permanent residents and airfields on their roofs … ’

  The City of Light

  ‘Perth felt like a peripheral place not just physically but in a lot of other conceptual ways. Peripheral in a positive way, implying great possibility and opportunity, a certain license to muck about in the backyard, invent your own meaning without great consequence. I often wonder if I would have felt as liberated growing up in a bigger city, surrounded by a more self-consciously artistic culture or family – maybe not.’

  Shaun Tan, Suburban Odyssey

  I’m meeting a friend for a beer in The Print Hall, one of the bars and restaurants that are part of the transformation of Brookfield Place on St Georges Terrace. Newspaper House and the WA Trustee and Royal Insurance buildings remain clustered at the foot of Brookfield Tower, the new branch office of BHP Billiton and a skyscraper that predictably reflects the monumentalism of a global mining giant.

  The Western Australian economy has doubled in size over the past two decades, but unlike during the flashy 1980s, when the wealth was largely paper money and its projections onto the city seemed both lazy and insensible to issues of identity, of late there appears to be a more considered attention to design and an eye to permanence rather than a quick buck. The costs involved in the restoration of Newspaper House and its
neighbouring buildings, now home to upscale bar and dining venues the Heritage and the Trustee, must have been considerable. These buildings were derelict for many years, and there’s evidence of both a painstaking attention to detail and gold-rush extravagance at the Trustee, of a kind not seen perhaps since the days of John De Baun and Claude de Bernales. The custom-made solid pewter bar weighs in at an incredible twenty kilograms a linear metre.

  Inside Newspaper House, the high ceiling of the atrium and the tabloid-shaped windows flood the hall with a crisp light. The print-room odours of molten lead, hot ink and heated paper have been replaced by the hoppy scent of boutique beer in elegant glasses, freshly shucked oysters and mullet toasties. It’s the time of year when the heat and winds are receding, coming into my favourite season. The high-contrast summer light has softened, too, and everything has taken on a crystalline definition.

  Ask many Perth expatriates what they miss about the city and the answer is often the light. It’s not a romantic or a nostalgic light, not the playground light of our childhoods, but a light so clean and sharp that it feels like an instrument of grace, seeing a new world with new eyes. Because the days are cooler, and the sun warms rather than burns, the pleasure in the air means that it’s almost impossible not to be happy. Days like this remind me of Nyungar man Barry McGuire’s comment that the reason Perth is so relaxed, so ‘wait a while’ and seemingly at peace with itself, so quiet and still at night, is because the songs of this place are still being sung, the place is still being ‘looked after’, even if not many people know this.

  It doesn’t surprise me to hear that in the Nyungar language there are different words to describe the different qualities of the local light – the warming, glowing morning light (biirnaa-ba) that shone down on us the previous week, for example, seated on iron chairs at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the river. It also doesn’t surprise me to learn that according to the Nyungar dreaming, light once encompassed everything; everything started with the light. Barry explains how, in a time when every bird, animal, rock and tree shone with its own internal radiance, the trickster moon convinced the kangaroo to reveal the name of its sacred illumination, and in doing so the kangaroo became separated from it. This fall from grace started a chain reaction. As the moon went about stealing the light of everything, darkness was introduced into the world, even as the moon became brighter. Now light only exists alongside darkness, although the daytime light is still the pure expression of that sacred illumination.

  The Print Room bar is packed with an office crowd of lawyers, public servants and executive types. There’s a strong whiff of money in the room, but it’s still a Perth gathering: informal and a bit raucous, no neckties or power suits. We admire the refurbishment of the hall, designed to replicate the pages of a book, each room containing a differently themed restaurant and bar, but there’s plenty of original detail left over from its previous incarnation as the home of The West Australian. The conversation turns naturally to the newspaper, Australia’s second longest running and now a monopoly daily, and some of the characters and personalities in some of the rival papers going back to the nineteenth century.

  Most of the early Swan River colonists tended to restrict their writing to diaries, or memoir, absorbed as they were in trying to make sense of their new environment. There wasn’t much written about Perth in the form of poetry or fiction until the twentieth century, and this was generally published in the local newspaper. As a result, the story of personal and political expression in Perth was played out most strongly in the often short-lived newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In competing with The West Australian, and before that its ancestor, The Perth Gazette, these papers tended to attract extreme personalities. One of the first was the ‘stormy petrel’ William Nairne Clark, another young Scotsman who emigrated to the colony. After a duel fought in Fremantle in which he killed his opponent, the lawyer by trade saw an opportunity for a contrarian voice in the media. The mouthpiece of the government, The Perth Gazette, printed things like the following, in reference to a Nyungar who’d stolen a ram: ‘A trial of this notorious offender would appear to us unnecessary, as it would incur expenses to the colony and much inconvenience to the prosecutors’ (in other words, Goordap should be shot without trial). However, Clark’s Swan River Guardian counter-punched with statements such as this: ‘No sophistry can conceal the fact that Western Australia is a conquered Nation, but still another fact stares us in the face; that we … must abide by the consequences of that first act of aggression which was sanctioned by the British Government.’

  The idea that the Nyungar were somehow justified in evincing ‘their repugnance by a thousand acts of hostility’ was predictably not a popular one. Clark’s various assaults on a government that brayed like a donkey ‘from its rear’ meant that the Swan River Guardian’s life was cut short. Clark eventually left the colony for Hobart.

  Of the many newspapers that sprang up after the Guardian, some were sober journals and some were mouthpieces for their editors’ opinions, focused on conducting bitter personal rivalries with other editors. These feisty rags must have provided an entertainment of sorts, because some of them lasted for a considerable time and gave rise to the careers of men such as John Curtin, Frederick Vosper, Charles Harper and John Winthrop Hackett.

  There was seemingly room enough for everyone in the newspaper business of the late nineteenth century, as long as you were male, had a thick hide and a keen sense of humour. My local newspaper, The Fremantle Herald, was started in 1867 by three ex-convicts and tailored to appeal to a largely working-class audience. The three editors used the forum to critique the convict system and challenge the ruling elites up in Perth, but like many papers of the time it also included local poetry and prose. This was before political hopeful John Horgan named and shamed what he called the ‘six hungry families’ of Perth, as part of his unsuccessful attempt to get elected to the state government’s upper house, the Legislative Council. Horgan felt that these families and their kind ruled to further their own interests, while ignoring the plight of the more numerous. Horgan was sued for libel and fined the significant sum of £500. But Horgan ran for parliament again two years later and successfully defeated one member of the ‘hungry six’ by a handful of votes. He drove the eight-hour-a-day agenda but there was little he could do to undermine the sense of entitlement of the older families.

  The Perth newspapers seemed to attract many from the first wave of migration from the eastern states who, like Horgan, brought with them a welcome dose of radicalism and fearlessness. The most notorious and fondly remembered is the distinctively tall and pale Cornishman Frederick Vosper, who was one of the best-known faces in Perth at the time. In the era of the ubiquitously bearded and moustachioed European male, Vosper’s cleanly shaved jawline, long black hair, sharp nose and dark clothes made him stand out from his peers. Before coming to Western Australia, Vosper had been imprisoned in Queensland as one instigator of a strikers’ riot. He had earlier suggested, in print, that Charters Towers shearers ought to let their oppressors ‘feel cold lead and steel; as they have starved you, so do you shoot them’. As an inmate, his head had been shaved, and he’d vowed never to cut his hair again.

  Vosper made a name for himself in the goldmining regions of Cue and Coolgardie, with his trade-union politics and his ability to rouse a crowd and cut down hecklers and fools. His response to being asked ‘What is alluvial, anyhow?’ was to reply that the questioner should ‘Go home, my man, and have a really good bath. After you have done so, let the water run off you, and have a look at the result. That is alluvial.’

  When Vosper was elected as an independent to the state government’s lower house, the Legislative Assembly, he moved to Perth, married a widow and drew on her money to start up The Sunday Times. Among other things, he used the paper as a mouthpiece to hound John Forrest for what he saw as ducking the issue of better representation for the miners of Coolgardie. Vosper had exploited the vehicle of an
earlier newspaper to attack what he called Forrest’s ‘makeshift devices and supine, spineless ideas of statecraft’, as well as the cosy relationship of rival paper The West Australian with Forrest’s government. Unlike Horgan before him, however, Vosper achieved some significant wins in parliament, including the introduction of a minimum wage for state-contracted workers and a successful inquiry into the treatment of female inmates at Fremantle Asylum. He died aged thirty-one of acute appendicitis and is remembered both as a political reformer and the leader of the attacks that felled C.Y. O’Connor, as a man Vosper considered too close to Forrest.

  By the early twentieth century, future prime minister John Curtin was another actively engaged in the sometimes brutal world of Perth journalism, as editor of the Westralian Worker. Victorian by birth, Curtin had gone to jail for his anti-conscription activities during World War I, and his mentor Frank Anstey had convinced him that the imagined quieter waters of Perth would be beneficial to Curtin’s health and career. Like many successful adoptees of Perth, Curtin assimilated into the suburbs, living in a small cottage in Cottesloe from where he caught the train to work every day. Despite being defeated after one term in Fremantle by an independent candidate and local butcher, Bill Watson (evidence of Perth’s enduring preference for strong local personalities rather than party-political candidates), Curtin was a great bridge-builder and organiser, and he did a lot to forge a stronger link between the industrial and political wings of the Labor Party in the 1920s. But in his early years as a doctrinaire socialist, penning editorials that included such phrases as ‘the bowed back of labour can expect to have the stinging lash of unemployment applied unrelentingly’, Curtin wasn’t above the kind of petty (if sometimes amusing) name-calling that seems to characterise the period. One such spat occurred between Curtin and J.J. Simons, founder of the Young Australia League (YAL), who together with Victor Courtney had started up The Mirror in 1922.