David Whish-Wilson - Perth

Perth

Other titles in this series

Hobart by Peter Timms

Brisbane by Matthew Condon

Sydney by Delia Falconer

Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham

Adelaide by Kerryn Goldsworthy

Alice Springs by Eleanor Hogan

Canberra by Paul Daley

Darwin by Tess Lea (forthcoming)

Perth

DAVID WHISH-WILSON

For Ollie and Jean, Jack and Doreen, Tony and Rosemary, and Bella, Max, Fairlie and Luka

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

David Whish-Wilson 2013

First published 2013

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Title: Perth/David Whish-Wilson.

ISBN: 9781742233673 (hardback)

9781742241623 (epub/Kindle)

9781742246611 (ePDF)

Series: City series.

Subjects: Perth (W.A.) History

Perth (W.A.) Description and travel.

Perth (W.A.) Social life and customs.

Dewey Number: 994.11

Design Jo Pajor-Markus

Cover design Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Cover photo Perth skyline after heavy rain, from the South Perth foreshore.

Nancy Wilkinson Photography

Author photo Karin Calvert, The Sunday Times

Image on pp. vivii Street art on Grand Lane, Perth

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

Contents

They are always with us, the people of other eras that exist alongside our own, quietly watching the new psyche of the city take form as the world that they inhabited is redrawn, torn down, reclaimed and redeveloped. Their presence is fainter, less vociferous than it was when the city was theirs, but they shadow it, and feed into it There are lives and spirits and maps and boundaries that they follow which newcomers cannot see.

Stephen Kinnane, Shadow Lines

Introduction

Its late afternoon on a spring day, and Im looking out over Perth as I wander alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fifteenth storey of Gordon Stephenson House. This government building is new, part of the award-winning one40william project that rises over the equally new Perth Underground train station. The windows are tinted green but theyre clear enough that I can see squalls running low and fumy to the south, trailing ropes of grey rain. And yet the sky above the CBD is blue, and the streets are awash with brilliant light. Even through the jade glass I can feel sunshine on my face.

Ive spent the afternoon in the temporary home of the City of Perth Library, working my way through the archives. While there are as many Perths as people who live here, of course, I wanted to commence the research for this book by revisiting two stories that have stayed with me over the years: one because I didnt understand its significance as a child, the other because it captured my imagination. This beginning also reflects the approach that Ive taken in the following chapters. Each takes its name from a natural formation or feature of Perth the river, the coast, the plain and the light that has evoked characters and events, moving backwards and forwards in time. The two stories that made an impression on me as a child take place in different centuries, but both represent something about the character of the city I call home.

The first time I heard the story of Fanny Balbuk, she wasnt given a name. I cant even remember which teacher told me about her in primary school. He must have been a good storyteller, though, because the images were powerfully clear. Fanny Balbuk came from the Whadjuk clan of the Nyungar, the Indigenous people of south-west Western Australia, and one of the largest language groups in the country. She was born and raised on the Swan River at Matagarup, or Heirrison Island. The year of her birth was 1840, barely a decade after Europeans established the Swan River Colony and not long before her father died on Rottnest Island. Like many of his kinsmen, hed been imprisoned there for stealing flour.

Balbuk expressed her frustration at the development of the Georgian village on her country by stubbornly continuing to follow the tracks of her ancestors. According to Daisy Bates, the Irish Australian who observed and recorded Western Australian Indigenous culture in the first half of the twentieth century:

To the end of her life [Balbuk] raged and stormed at the usurping of her beloved home ground a straight track led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms.

Bates goes on to describe how one of Balbuks favourite annoyances was to stand at the gates of Government House, reviling all who dwelt within, in that the stone gates guarded by a sentry enclosed her grandmothers burial ground.

Neither Bates nor Balbuk was alive to see it, but Balbuks refusal to be ignored and the records Bates kept of Balbuks clan territory helped the Federal Court to rule in 2006 that native title continued to exist in Perth, the first time such a claim had been upheld in an Australian capital city. Balbuk died in 1907. There is a photograph of her as an older woman against a backdrop of scrub. She is wearing a chaste ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to her neck, her face framed by long grey hair, but the image captures the pride and defiance in her eyes.

Where I stand in the south-eastern corner of the fifteenth floor, I can clearly follow Balbuks route from the edge of the CBD at the Causeway, past the Governors residence, heading north up Barrack Street towards the Perth train station that was built on the reclaimed freshwater lake. Balbuks story has always been a reminder to me that beneath the geometric frame of the modern city the bar-graph rectangles of concrete, glass and steel across the skyline there exist footpads worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the citys heart. I have found myself in other cities, on other continents, seated on park benches or riding the trains, thinking about Fanny Balbuk, keeping to her straight track through the streets of Perth.

Fanny Balbuks yearning for what had been taken from her is very different from the yearning of mid-twentieth-century Perth for what it might become: the City of Light whose significance, its burghers hoped, could no longer be ignored. The first sign of the tension between the citys aspirations and the relaxed lives of its inhabitants surfaced after Perths gesture of solidarity with an American astronaut in February 1962. John Glenn was solo-orbiting Earth, a fellow traveller on the dark edge of what was known. Perth kept its lights on overnight to keep the lonely Glenn company, but this action triggered a latent desire to be noticed, and admired, that became a source of amusement to many of Perths citizens.