I’d caught a few flathead on a line from jetties but they were nowhere near the size I’d witnessed in lies left in the squelchy mud. Armed with a gidgee, I swam out into the current and drifted over the local sandbank at high tide, with its wave-rippled skin and sea-lettuce tumbleweed, anticipating the flathead lying in wait for the school-fish who fed in the shallows. And they were, camouflaged against the speckled mud, watchful as my shadow drifted across them. I was able to remain immobile except for my shivering, and let the current carry me – relaxed and concentrating at the same time. The large brown phyllorhiza punctata and the smaller white aurelia aurita jellyfish drifted with me and around me, my fellow travellers in the tidal current.
In her novel Black Mirror, Gail Jones describes the jellyfish as ‘fruit bowls pulsating above her, light caught semi-circular in their fleshy domes … she half expected to see a baby-face heave jellyfish-like into view’, while Robert Drewe in his novel The Drowner describes them undulating ‘below the surface as if swaying under glass. In their translucent but individually patterned globes the urgent faces of unborn babies press up against the ceiling.’ These images of gestation would have appealed to me as a child, fascinated by the strange mobility of an unboned creature in an amniotic brine. The jellyfish were sometimes so numerous in the shallows that you could swim through them and upon them – the tactile nudge and little shiver of pleasure and revulsion as they brushed against my belly, face and legs.
This was a time in my life when, to use author Brenda Walker’s expression, I lived within ‘a loose muscular happiness that [my] mind was going to have trouble catching up with’, except that it did, and too soon, leaving me with only the memory of the small epiphany I had that morning floating in the river: the sunlight burning my naked back, illuminating the algae-rich shallows; the gobbleguts, blowies and hardyheads accustomed to my presence. As a giant flathead spurted away into the darkness leaving a trail of smuts like a departing steam train, all of the sensual confusion of cold water and hot sun, and levitation and submersion, came together in a sudden recognition that I have never forgotten: the feeling of belonging to a place that did not belong to me, but only made an introverted kid feel more protective, even loving, of the river that carried him along on its soft skin.
About a kilometre downstream from Ellen Brook, the still surface of the river becomes covered in the delicate white flowers of the flooded gum, while beside us cicadas work up a racket and a whistling kite swoops over to take a look. It isn’t hard to imagine the river as a billabong, so still and quiet in the midday heat, or as a place where restless spirits reside. I was a boy brought up on the stories of May Gibbs, who lived in Perth as a young girl and teenager. Her gumnut babies were inspired by the fruits of the marri tree, and her Wicked Banksia Men were created when, as a child out walking in the Western Australian bush, she came across ‘a grove of banksia trees, and sitting on almost every branch were these ugly little, wicked men’.
For a boy newly arrived to Perth, swimming in this part of the river always unnerved me, especially treading water in the pools dark with leaf litter and laterite alluvium, the shaded banks and strange cold currents tugging at my feet, the unusual lack of buoyancy. My parents had all the illustrated Ainslie Roberts and Charles Mountford books on Aboriginal mythology, and I remember watching the Swan River frothing over rock pools within a forest of sloughing wind and granite boulders, sacred kingfishers swooping dragonflies over the tannic water, and being reminded of Roberts’ pictures of dreaming landscapes, with their dramatic images of mythological characters. There was something about the resin-smelling water and lemony sunlight and humid dampness of the forest floor that evoked a sense of the uncanny. This impression was accentuated on our way home through the town of Guildford and its surrounding suburbs, although the mythos belonged to a different culture and a different time.
Just as it was affecting to see the Swan River in the hills so different from its long flat lower reaches, it was always odd to pass through Guildford on the same journey and be reminded of the illustrations of Tarry Town in Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Guildford was so unlike the open country and spreading suburbs I knew further west: everything seemed smaller and older, more like a medieval market village. The air was cooler and even the sky lower. Shadows were darker. There was dampness. The homes seemed snug and their yards resembled the cottage gardens of an English county village. The narrow river passed beneath a small jarrah bridge. It wasn’t hard to imagine a headless horseman and to relocate the stories of English highwaymen that I so enjoyed.
My impressions of Guildford and nearby Bassendean were always fleeting, made on trips to the footy and passing through to the hills. I usually only met kids from the hills at youth camps or football carnivals, and I was always aware that they seemed tougher than lowlanders. They spoke of owning rifles and motorbikes, like country kids. Their playground wasn’t the ocean but the expanse of bush on the other side of the scarp. I was always jealous of their freedom, which reminded me of my time in the Pilbara.
In a Judah Waten short story, ‘To a Country Town’, first published in 1947, the narrator’s father is a disappointed migrant in ‘a very hard, inhospitable land for a Jew to live in’. In contrast to the myth he’d been sold before his arrival of ‘a country bathed in gold’, he reflects that in the hills of Perth, he’d discovered ‘such poverty … that it would make your hair stand on end’. This is the older persona of the Perth hills, an area more usually represented as a place of quiet beauty and solitude, a refuge for lowlanders looking to get away from the city, a spot for picnics (which it always was for us as kids) and weekenders. But Judah Waten’s family soon found a community in the hills, where the poverty and hardship created a working-class camaraderie that defined the local culture more than ethnicity or religion. It’s the kind of culture that shaped the man that celebrated economist Nugget Coombs would become, for example, and it’s expressed in the short stories of Katharine Susannah Prichard and the tough-minded paintings by former German prisoner-of-war camp inmate Guy Grey-Smith.
The hills have also existed as a respite for those who don’t quite fit into the lowland suburban culture of greater Perth, people who might want to do things differently: bikies, artists, hippies and tree-changers, among others. As a result, the tough kids from the hills I met on camps were always hard to reconcile with my naive picture of wildflower season in the national parks that ridge the scarp, just as it was always hard to reconcile my picture of the slow, shallow Swan River near Guildford with what I knew was a river prone to severe flooding.
We were taught in school that during the 1926 flood the Swan River broke its banks and spread five kilometres across the fertile floodplain of the Swan Valley, while downriver the same flood took out the original Fremantle Railway Bridge only moments after a train had passed over it. The first recorded flood was in 1830, when the river rose 6.1 metres above its normal level. The floods continued regularly right up to the 1960s, by which time the river had been properly ‘trained’ to course along dredged channels that originate on the scarp near Northam and Toodyay, north-east of Perth, down to its mouth at Fremantle.
In the early 1960s, when my father was a new arrival at the Pearce Air Force Base, he was washed away in one of these intermittent floods. The base is north of Perth and my father had been eager to get into the city for an appointment. Upon seeing the stalled traffic and the swollen river washing over the bridge, he asked a local truck driver whether his Volkswagen Beetle might make it across. The truck driver, obviously noticing that my crew-cut father with Victorian plates was a t’othersider, gamely suggested that he might ‘give it a go’. But as soon as the Beetle entered the waters, its wheels lifted and it was carried downriver. Water gushed into the car past the brake and clutch pedals, the car tipped forwards, and my father thought he was about to die.
Fortunately, the river deposited the car on a knoll in a paddock downstream before it could tumble underw
ater. When my father turned on the windscreen wipers, he saw that a horse was staring at him from only feet away. My father wound down the windows and opened the car doors and waited until all of the water had drained out, turned the ignition key, and miraculously started the car. He then drove out of the paddock, with the horse following him.
This flood was almost as bad as the 1926 flood. According to the records, the 1963 flood caused families in the Guildford area to be evacuated, and the river ran high and brackish for two months. The 280-kilometre-long Avon/Swan River has a catchment area of some 193 000 square kilometres, much of which derives from the salt-lake country on the scarp, and the Avon River in particular is quite saline, where the Canning is fresh.
If Guildford and the Swan Valley seemed ripe for me to populate with mythological figures, this was because of my passion for all things bushranger. One of the first books my mother gave me was an illustrated history of Australian bushrangers, and I loved the reckless life of the men and women on the run. This fascination only grew once I came across the figure of Joseph Bolitho Johns, or Moondyne Joe as he’s commonly known in Perth. He’s named after the river-valley region beyond the Perth hills where he spent much of his time.
Moondyne Joe probably wouldn’t have made the illustrated Australian bushrangers book, even in the unlikely event that the publishers had been interested in areas outside Victoria and New South Wales. Moondyne Joe never killed anyone. He never held up a stagecoach or waged a pitched gun battle with coppers. Nor was he ever really ‘a terror to the rich man’, although like many of my childhood heroes he did have a passion for fast horses.
Moondyne Joe was the subject of the first novel written about Western Australia, Moondyne: A Story of Convict Life in Western Australia, published in 1879 (although banned in Perth during his lifetime). However, it’s fair to say that the historical Moondyne Joe and the fictional Moondyne are wildly different. The novel was written by John Boyle O’Reilly, a man equally admired in Western Australian folklore as the subject of his novel. He’s remembered in Perth as a Fenian prisoner who escaped the Western Australian convict system to organise a rescue mission for his comrades. Their escape was celebrated in the banned song ‘The Catalpa’ that was still being sung a hundred years later; we learnt it at my local primary school, as did every Perth kid of my generation.
O’Reilly’s novel is the kind of colonial ‘lost world’ adventure later popularised by H. Rider Haggard. Moondyne is taken in by the local Aborigines, who make him their king and reveal to him a cave stuffed with gold. But wealth is not Moondyne’s real focus and he returns to Britain, where he becomes a successful penal reformer.
The historical Moondyne Joe’s adventures and achievements were far more modest, although it’s precisely their human scale that made him such a significant cultural figure to the inhabitants of Perth. Moondyne Joe’s crimes included stealing a horse, petty thieving while on the lam, and allegedly killing an ox. There were escaped convicts who shot police and died violently, but their names have been forgotten; another convict bushranger, Frank Hall, spent time with Nyungar people in the south-west but little is known about him now. Moondyne Joe’s real legacy was his contribution to the satirical urges of his Swan River compatriots and their feelings of resentment towards Governor John Hampton in particular.
Hampton arrived in Perth in 1862 with an already tarnished reputation. He was alleged to have profited from the misuse of convict labour in his previous posting in Tasmania, and he had initially defended the brutal commandant at Norfolk Island, John Price. In Robert Hughes’s account of the early history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, Hughes describes Hampton as ‘a dismally cynical opportunist’ whose practices were ‘odious and corrupt’.
According to historian Ian Elliot, the number of convict escapes rose significantly during Hampton’s harsh tenure in Perth. In one nine-month period between 1866 and 1867, ninety made their getaway, although all were soon recaptured and no doubt flogged. There were some 12 800 lashes of the cat-o-nine-tails delivered during the convict years; every one of them, according to Fenian prisoner Thomas McCarthy Fennell, tore the flesh until ‘ghastly flow the purple fluids from the mangled pulp’. During the construction of the Fremantle Bridge, so many men bolted that a large area of scrub was cleared nearby and extra guards were needed. The regular firing of a warning cannon at Fremantle Prison proved highly unpopular, because, according to The Perth Gazette, it played ‘sad havoc’ with the town windows.
Moondyne Joe, comfortable in the bush of the Avon Valley and the Perth hills, was able to elude capture longer than any other escaped convict. He was rumoured to be living with the Ballardong Nyungar and ranging between many of the landmarks that now bear his name. He once survived for two years on the run within Perth’s small community, who never gave him up despite the large reward. In doing so, Moondyne Joe showed how one might disrupt the disparity of power between a famously cruel, unpopular governor and a powerless and often chained illiterate labourer from Cornwall, who had been sentenced to transportation for possessing stolen cheese, bread and mutton. He embarked on a series of minor actions that drew popular support away from the rulers and towards the lowest caste in white society during that period: the convict.
Moondyne Joe’s exploits came at a time when, according to the polemic of one Fenian prisoner quoted in historian Simon Adams’ The Unforgiving Rope, ‘more real depravity, more shocking wicked-ness, more undisguised vice and immorality is to be witnessed at midday in the most public thoroughfares of Perth, with its population of 1500, than in any other city of fifty times its population, either in Europe or America’. If this is to be believed, the nostalgic dreams of the early settlers to re-create a vanishing English way of life had never been more distant, although the citizens of Perth circa 1862 were greatly entertained by their favourite bushranger.
You can hear the glee in the most famous of the satirical ditties sung around Perth at the time: ‘The governor’s son has got the pip, the governor’s got the measles, but Moondyne Joe has given ’em the slip, pop goes the weasel’. However, there was nothing funny about the special cell built for Moondyne Joe at Fremantle Prison on the orders of Governor Hampton. It was a lightless slot reinforced with jarrah sleepers and iron spikes, and to this day it’s a popular exhibit on the somewhat ghoulish Fremantle Prison tour that also takes in the death-row cells, the whipping frame and the hangman’s scaffold. Neither was there anything funny about the months Joe spent in this cell, nor the fact that, as reported in The Perth Gazette of 12 October 1862, Hampton had personally visited the prison for the express purpose of seeing Joe in chains. The governor had subsequently returned to his residence, the new Government House, ‘with his mind in its normal state of placidity’.
There is something comical, however, about Hampton’s hubristic goad that should Joe ever escape the custom-built cell, he would receive a pardon. This throwaway challenge is the pivot on which the legend of Moondyne Joe turns, because this is precisely what happened next. At risk of dying in his slot, Joe was allowed out of the cell, but only to break rocks in the sun. He did this very skilfully and with a surprising enthusiasm: the pile of limestone rubble built daily until finally it obscured Joe from the nearby guard. Joe had been slyly taking a pick to the prison wall. After constructing an effective dummy out of scavenged wire, a pick and his prison smock, he escaped semi-naked and eluded the authorities until he was finally caught trying to steal wine from Houghton vineyard. He was thrown back into Fremantle Prison, although the new governor, Frederick Weld, upon hearing of his predecessor’s promise, released Joe on parole.
Sadly, little is known about Joe’s later life, except that his brief good fortune soured after he married. He tried to make a go of gold prospecting, but his wife, Louisa Hearn, who had also done time with hard labour on numerous occasions at Fremantle Prison for disorderly conduct, vagrancy and running a brothel (the common fate of many poor women of the period), died at Southern Cross in 1893. She was probably the
victim of one of the many typhoid epidemics that swept through the goldfields.
There is a poignant photograph of what was then called the Old Men’s Depot, on Mounts Bay Road east of the Old Swan Brewery. Taken some time in the late 1800s, the photograph captures the depot building in the background, at the foot of Mount Eliza. In the foreground, a number of old men mill around or sit on benches and look at the river. It’s a sad but tranquil scene, as many of the old men are ex-convicts, presumably institutionalised, seeing out their days on meagre charity. A quiet retirement at the Old Men’s Depot doesn’t appear to have interested Moondyne Joe, who escaped this institution as well upon being admitted there as an older man. By this point in his life Moondyne wasn’t ‘of a sound mind’, and perhaps the Depot reminded him of Fremantle Prison.
Moondyne Joe ended his days in 1900 at the place where so many working-class women were incarcerated for so many years, the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, just down the road from the Fremantle Prison. There were no friends or family at his funeral, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave at Fremantle Cemetery that today carries the motif of a pair of handcuffs, broken free at the chain.
I remember skirting the southern approaches of the Swan River at night, sleepy and warm beside my brother and sister in the backseat of our mother’s Volkswagen. The city across the water rose as cheerfully as the castle that bursts onto the screen before Disney movies, and I almost expected to see fireworks behind the cityscape as we crossed the Narrows Bridge, the patterned lights of the Swan Brewery depicting Captain Cook’s glowing HMS Endeavour or a sparkly cruise ship.
Perth Page 3
