I ride my bicycle most mornings past the Roundhouse Prison, where Nyungar men were held before being exiled to Rottnest Island. In 1834 the Pinjarup people crept nightly to the walls to whisper encouragement to their leader, Calyute, before his sentence of sixty lashes for stealing flour was carried out. Beside the bicycle track, somewhere in the soft white sand of the dunes beneath the prison walls, lie the remains of the first European legally executed in the colony: fifteen-year-old John Gavin, sentenced in 1844 to hang for murder. Gavin had been incarcerated at Parkhurst Reformatory on the Isle of Wight, but he and other boys were sent to the colony in 1842 in an effort to satisfy those agitating for convict labour. My four-year-old son, Luka, likes to watch the Roundhouse Prison cannon being fired (it happens at one o’clock every afternoon), although it’s impossible for me to descend the steep limestone stairs back to the street without recalling Gavin’s pitiful end, carried down the same stairs to the makeshift gallows.
Ironically the former prison offers the best view of Fremantle. On my most recent visit, I was carrying Luka on my shoulders through the old cells when I overheard an English tourist looking at a nineteenth-century panorama of the area, taken from Arthur Head. ‘I didn’t know it snowed in Perth,’ she whispered to her husband, who joined her to peer at the photograph. While the image does look like the town is covered in drifts of snow, banked into every corner and gutter, it’s actually the finest windblown sand, swept off the beaches by the southerly winds.
Once completed, the new Roundhouse Prison was quickly put to use. In one year alone, according to historian Geoffrey Bolton, ‘it was estimated that one quarter of the male population of Fremantle had been run in for drunkenness, and there was a good deal of petty theft and that was because people were pretty hard up’. This prevalence of crime wasn’t something that diminished over the decades, either. Later in the nineteenth-century, the crime rate in Perth was said to be seven times greater than in Adelaide: the result of poverty and the high price of imported food.
Until hangings were taken from the streets, essentially because it was felt that the citizens’ enjoyment of them was becoming unhealthy, capital punishment was a public spectacle. George Seddon describes the entire cohort of Perth Boys School taken out of class in 1847 to witness the hanging of convicted murderer James Malcolm. As was the usual practice, the execution was conducted on the site where the crime took place: ‘The school was marched to witness the spectacle, which took place on the Guildford Road. When the boys were nearing the Causeway, they were overtaken by a cart carrying the condemned man sitting on his coffin.’
The medieval imagery is telling. Britain might have been undergoing the greatest industrialisation seen in any country to that time, but in Perth the society of free men and women and their servants maintained many of the practices being phased out in England: the use of gibbeting and the stocks in punishment, serfdom for contracted workers, and a largely barter economy made necessary by an absolute reliance on agriculture and fishing.
The Swan River Colony was struggling, in part because the colonists hadn’t yet learnt to read the land. That skill was something that came much later, when they discovered that the presence of certain kinds of trees indicated fertile soil. The open tuart forest that stretched along the coastline of Perth behind the first aeolian (shaped by the wind) limestone swale wasn’t good soil, which was the reason most colonists clung to the river-banks of the Swan and Canning, and then later the swamps that fill the gaps between the limestone ridges that rise inland. While on Carnac Island, Robert Menli Lyon recorded Yagan’s description of the three long bands of geological formation running north-south along the lowland plain that in turn influence the surface vegetation. The three distinct bands were named by Yagan as firstly Booyeembarra, or limestone country, characterised by tuart and balga tree; secondly Gandoo, or what is now known as the Bassendean Sands formation, characterised by jarrah and banksia woodlands; and finally Warget, the more fertile alluvial Pinjarra formation nearest to the Darling Scarp, with its marri, wandoo and flooded gum. This description of the landscape seemed to surprise Lyon, who felt that Yagan’s understanding of ‘the country will show that these savages are not destitute of geological knowledge’.
Lyon’s surprise at the Whadjuk understanding of their country hints at the lost opportunities that were to follow, as the settlers went about effacing the knowledge of the Perth area that had taken millennia to develop. The situation in the first years was so desperate that Stirling sent the Parmelia to Java in 1829 for provisions, and later a government schooner went to Mauritius for resupply.
Perhaps the best that can be said of Perth’s early failure to thrive is that it served as a lesson to subsequent colonisers. One of the colony’s chief critics was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an agitator for the model of ‘systematic colonisation’ that was soon to find expression in the settlement of Adelaide. Wakefield regarded the Perth model as an object lesson in how not to conceive a colony: mistakenly offering generous land grants to masters who would struggle to hold their servants and labourers when so much cheap land was available. The theme of Perth’s difficulties was also taken up in Das Kapital by Karl Marx, who used the venture as an example of the need of capitalism to exploit all aspects of the means of production, especially labour, or otherwise fail.
One of the most common complaints in the colony was ophthalmia, an eye inflammation caused by Vitamin A deficiency. The only cure was a diet rich in vegetables and dairy products, largely unavailable due to the death of livestock (Mary Ann Friend observed the ‘common’ sight of dead cows on the windswept beaches) and the failure of local gardens to thrive without fertiliser in the limestone soil. Symptoms were described by one settler as ‘agony beyond anything; a sensation of scalding water poured on the eyeballs’. The settlers called it ‘sandy blight’ and believed it was caused by the sudden transition from the milder conditions at home to those encountered on the bright beaches. A diet of dried meat, biscuit and beer meant increased sensitivity to the fierce coastal light and a corresponding night blindness.
Nothing reminds me of my Perth childhood in the days before skin-cancer awareness more than the blinding light at the beach on a hot summer’s day. As a heavily freckled child with red hair and blue-green eyes, without sunglasses or a hat, I didn’t stand a chance against the raking sun off the ocean, even when wearing that characteristic Perth squint and sheltering hand. But I was a water baby and always outdoors. One of the things that initially drew me to skindiving was the contrast between my blindness out of the water and the richness of colour to be found under the glittering surface. The neon green of the sea-lettuce and the olive kelp and sea-grass on the sandy beds within the limestone reefs were a balm to my eyes. I remember diving through the cool shadows under ledges where colourful wrasse and red-lipped morwong peered. I speared crayfish with my gidgee and carried them clacking above my head to the shore, one eye on the waves that scrolled in from the deeper water.
I spent so much of my childhood and teenage years underwater that it’s not an exaggeration to say that, like Tim Winton, ‘The sea got me through my adolescence.’ Surfing and diving were an escape from boredom, but it was always more than that. As Winton writes, ‘Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting … a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed in the long moment.’
We were nerveless kids, my friends and I, uncontaminated by the fear of sharks that for many Perth swimmers has suffused these past years with a sense of menace. The ocean may have been burnished with silver, but being absorbed in the long moment beneath the cool surface meant release from the hormonal confusion to be found back on land. It was also about the intensity of the experience and an awareness of what was in the water with me, beyond the crystal facets of the reef pools: the schools of herring flashing against the darker water, the numerous shipwrecks on the reefs further out. I knew there was a vast ship graveyard over near Rottnest Island. But nobody had
told me that the dozens of ships were deliberately scuttled over the course of many years, having been retired from service. Nor had anyone told me that they didn’t contain the souls of thousands of drowned sailors, an image that spoke to me of the transgression of the boundaries between solid and liquid, stone and water, land and sea – whose comingling is in fact a natural feature of the Perth environment.
Perth’s windswept limestone coast is not generally considered a romantic landscape. Ron Davidson’s witty and erudite 2007 book Fremantle Impressions contains a recent description of the fragile clarity of Perth’s late afternoon light against the industrial structures that dot the harbour: the gantry cranes, derricks, hawsers and gas silos. The story, told by jockey and Melbourne Cup winner J.J. Miller to art dealer and ex-dockworker Larry Foley, concerns the initial impressions of the area by figurative painter Robert Dickerson. Dickerson was in the west on a painting expedition, and Miller invited him to the Fremantle beach to show him where racehorses used to train. ‘Dickerson looks across at the tanks and pipes and industrial depots scattered among the North Fremantle dunes. “This is Jeffrey Smart country,” he remarks to JJ, who gets the joke.’
The observation was made in jest, and yet there’s truth to it, in the light reflected by the shining steel of an industrial landscape and the aeolian limestone ribs that emerge from the coastal sands. There’s that double effect of the scalpel-sharp light and the general impression of space and silence and stillness – the strange marriage of a realist vision with an absurdist tone. It’s an atmosphere common to many first impressions of the city, and something exemplified in this passage from one of my favourite contemporary novels about Perth, Josephine Wilson’s Cusp:
In the parks and on the verges and in the front yards of suburbia, misdirected sprinklers stoically pumped black streams of rusty bore water out onto the sticky tarmac of Western Australian roads, sending steam up into the cloudless blue of yet another summer day. Willy-wagtails made the most of it, flicking their pert tails in the fine mist, while tiny black lizards darted for cover beneath a fragile head of blue hydrangeas.
A fat bobtail woke from its stupor and sluggishly headed across Canning Highway into four lanes of oncoming traffic.
… ‘What was that? Did I hit a bump?’
Robert Drewe’s historical novel The Drowner suggests a similar mix of the absurd and the sublime when his character Will declares that ‘[t]his is a landscape of such stark space and beauty that reason can only try to defy it.’ There is a secretive side to Perth that has everything to do with this aura of openness and beauty; it’s the feeling that the city doesn’t reveal itself without effort, forcing us to look closer. Such a register of space and silence in a modern metropolis is unusual, perhaps, and yet my own sense of Perth as a child was that the city’s spaces were rarely neutral.
Because my three children are relatively young, and because I spend so much time with them, it’s natural that my experience of the city often revisits my experiences as a child. Down on the beach after sunset, I watch them settle as the colours on the horizon fade and they begin to sense the night’s quiet ghosting, inhabiting the darkness in a way that’s really only possible in a city like Perth. It’s a landscape with presence, but balanced with an expansiveness that is perfectly suited to dreamers, especially those who draw nourishment from Drewe’s ‘stark space and beauty’.
The air is salty above the dunes that over the millennia have hardened into limestone hills upon which most Perth residents have built a home. But the air is also dry, and even the days of rain in winter are usually interspersed with hours of brilliant sunshine. Most winter storms come in the form of squalls that nip and sting and race over the land rather than settling in to drench. This is rust country, but of the creeping variety, and the fact that the atmosphere is most often dry means that abandoned buildings remain perfectly preserved, just like in the dehumidified desert interior.
The summer heat kills off the wild oats and other weeds that might intrude on the human landscape, and the paucity of water slows the growth of trees. It’s rare that moss or mould takes hold on the bare walls of abandoned factories or industrial structures. It’s this aridity and clarity of definition that reflects something essential of Perth, in the sense that what is built in this city feels strangely eternal when clothed in light.
One much-loved example of a building that stands relatively unmarked decades after its retirement is the South Fremantle Power Station, four kilometres south of Fremantle. When I was a child, the nearby industrial area was home to a foul-smelling tannery and an abattoir where teenage boys from Fremantle were employed straight after leaving school. (Many of the young women went to the Mills & Ware biscuit factory on South Terrace.)
The power station was built in the coastal dunes because the location was close to train lines carrying coal from Collie, south-west of Perth. Next to the power station was the old Robb Jetty, where the sheep and cattle driven from the stations in the hinterland arrived to be slaughtered at the abattoir. The cattle from the northern stations were forced to swim ashore to get rid of ticks; on occasions they broke free of their pens and stormed the streets of South Fremantle, posing a threat to children and the elderly, before being rounded up by mostly Aboriginal stockmen. The longevity of this cattle trade has been memorialised in an art-installation cattle run, made of steel, in the dunes near the power station. I go fishing there with my friend Mark and my eldest son, and to get to the beach we’re forced to take the cattle run down from the car park.
The power station was commissioned in 1948, at a time when Perth’s power shortages meant that electricity was rationed: one hour on, one hour off. From a distance, the towering stepped Art Deco structure can appear like either a Chernobyl ruin or a graceful remnant from a time when even industrial buildings had style. The building has been gutted of the gleaming turbines, boilers and tangles of pipes that once hummed with steam and fire, while vandals have knocked out the thousands of panelled windows. Somehow this dereliction only enhances the forlorn grandeur of the building for those passing by on the Old Mandurah Road.
On the day the power station closed, in July 1985, the workers, many of whom were housed in the nearby suburb of Hilton Park, described it as a ‘happy place’. This was primarily because of its position by the ocean and its fifty-foot-high windows streaming with natural light. One technician, Ray Mydoe, who’d come out from England in 1950 to help install the turbines and worked right through until the station’s closure, decided that he was now going to retire because ‘I don’t want to work anywhere else. This was the only place in the world for me.’
The abandoned station has been fenced off for many years, but that’s never really worked to keep out the street artists, skateboarders, ravers and homeless people. I’ve wandered the halls and balconies and stared out from the roof on a number of occasions. Despite the growing sense of decay inside, and the smell of urine, booze and rubbish, I’ve always walked away feeling strangely uplifted by my visit.
There are parts of the station that I don’t enter, namely the dark pungent rooms of the office section. These are beyond spooky, giving off a whiff of danger that catches in my chest as I step quietly over the rubble and broken glass in the corridors. There are supposed to be bloodstained walls and the remains of a crime scene in some of the pitch-black rooms, one of a number of murders that are rumoured to have taken place in the building over the years.
I haven’t been able to corroborate the stories of suicide and bloodshed, although on my most recent visit, in March 2013, I was reminded again of the sense that Perth’s vital aspects are often concealed beneath either a beguiling surface charm or a layer of unpromising material. In this case, it’s the barrier of a fence-line that must be walked until an entrance can be made, the facade of an industrial ruin, an atmosphere of danger, and then the revelation of entering the cavernous hall. The gentle sea breeze catches in the tattered plastic scrims that once covered the cathedral-like windows, while the
soft light plays over the hundreds of giant works of street art. There’s a sense of being in a vast gallery, a basilica or a cave adorned with paintings whose meanings are long forgotten.
The power station has been used as a location in more than one film, notably Ron Elliott’s 1998 Fremantle crime thriller Justice. With its cavernous halls, broken windows and fluorescent guts, it’s one of the few interiors in the city that captures the run-down urban vibe so closely related to stories of crime and desperation. It was also used as a backdrop to American band Fear Factory’s film clip for ‘Cyberwaste’ in 2004.
One other film that stages a violent scene inside the power station is the 2004 fight-film Aussie Park Boyz, which was written and directed by lead actor Nunzio la Bianca. This so-bad-that-it’s-good self-funded effort didn’t manage to secure a cinematic release in Australia but was a cult success overseas. In between set-piece brawls featuring rival ethnic gangs, the film lovingly details the Italian rituals of home life in the semi-industrial spiritual homeland of the Aussie Park Boyz, Osborne Park. While the power station, Fremantle Prison and a grungy northern suburbs pub feel authentic as venues for la Bianca to display his macho prowess, not even his best efforts can redeem the film when the locations are moved outside. The story suffers a fatal decompression and all intensity vanishes. The characters appear like schoolchildren capering about on a film set, miniaturised by the vast empty background of silent bush and industrial light.
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