The 2009 feature Two Fists, One Heart, which its writer Rai Fazio based on his own experiences, had a similar theme of tough Italian Australian kids demanding respect, but it benefited from a bigger budget and superior acting. In its representation of outer Perth suburbia, all dry verges and sun-baked brick and tile, the migrant virtues of hard work and family manifest themselves in vegetable gardens and laden tables. The film manages to retain the integrity of its setting, in its depiction of both the suburbs as they are and the human scale of the relationships and the conflict. The fighting takes place mano e mano, and there is no attempt to make of Perth something that it isn’t – big, dark and dangerous. Instead it focuses on the populated building sites and beaches and river, and the small clubs and busy footpaths of Northbridge, before returning to the backyards and kitchens and empty streets of the suburbs.
Some sixty years after Mary Ann Friend painted her sketch of marooned settlers and wrote how ‘we expected to find land but only found sand’, and around the time ‘sandgroper’ came to describe Perth residents, tracking through the sand like the eponymous tunnelling grasshopper-like insect, men toiled in waist-deep water and near-total darkness some sixty feet below the surface of Fremantle Prison. These prisoners worked wet and barefoot in chains for six years to complete the series of tunnels designed to supply Fremantle residents with fresh drinking water. The first mining boom was on and the port town was thriving, although typhoid had become a problem. The prison had its own water source, but now it was thought necessary to construct a deeper reserve to store and distribute water to the town. The water was pumped to the surface by hand, a horrific job that left one man dead from exhaustion (this man’s death in his twenties was recorded as being due to natural causes) and several others seriously injured.
It’s possible to journey through these tunnels today, in imitation punts. The tunnels run north to south outside the eastern wall of the prison, roughly parallel to Hampton Road. As in all limestone caves, the air is odourless as the porous stone soaks up every smell, and the darkness is enveloping once head-torches are extinguished. It’s interesting to spend a few minutes in this kind of darkness, where even looking with open eyes supplies no visual stimulus; the mind begins to involuntarily produce images, shapes that coalesce and drift, illuminated from within. It’s easy to see why prisoners kept in this total darkness for longer than a few days went mad.
It was common enough for children of my generation to hunt out limestone caves with torches – and, if you were serious, helmets and overalls that wouldn’t get snagged when you shimmied through tight entrances between adjoining caves. Some of these caves were engineered, such as those at Rottnest Island and at Buckland Hill in Mosman Park. Others were natural, caused by the slow dripping of a dilute carbolic acid over the years. The acid ate away the limestone but crystallised into stalactites and stalagmites the colour of wedding cake icing and the texture of the smooth whorls inside a sea shell. Just as they do in the tunnels beneath Fremantle Prison, the glittering roots of jarrah hang down, each hair on every delicate root holding a teardrop of water.
The roots work their way through the stone by secreting an acid drip that creates a tunnel of its own, allowing the root to follow. Often there are solution pipes caused by the roots of larger trees that have died and rotted away, forming glistering periscopes up through the stone to the bright surface. This is just as well, because the air in most caves is laden with carbon dioxide, and it’s dangerous to be underground for longer than an hour. Once, as a teenager, in a giant cave some hundred feet below the surface, I crept away from my party and found a quiet chamber. I lay on my back, turned off my torch and felt the weight of the stone above me, the stillness of the air, the muffled sounds of my friends in the distance. I felt so comfortable that I fell asleep and my friends only found me after a frantic search. I’ve always felt as comfortable underground as I do beneath the surface of the water, a feeling of peace that has everything to do with the narrowing of stimulation to what can be seen, and felt on the skin, the focus on breath, the sensual loci of the body. Such moments in a cave really do feel, as in Nicholas Hasluck’s poem ‘Anchor’, that you are wading ‘knee-deep in darkness’ and that the ‘fragile ceiling is propped up by silence’. In the absence of stimulation you realise that the absence has a powerful presence: the weight of rock above you, the pressing of the darkness against your body, the air that hasn’t been disturbed for millennia.
But my son Max, who is eleven and doesn’t have the same history of caving, is unaccustomed to the absence of light as we work our way along the prison tunnel. As our fingers push off the chalky walls, it’s like we’re floating in darkness. Despite his excitement, he’s also a little spooked, relieved when we near a small culvert in the tunnel and paddle over to where the others in the group are waiting. This culvert was where the guard sat on duty while the prisoners worked. At the end of the guard’s shift, a wading prisoner would tow him to the exit ladder in a plated steel currach so he wouldn’t get his feet wet. We shine our torch on a cement plaque on the wall. The inscription simply reads, ‘Excavations for Fremantle water supply done by prison labour, June 1898, signed by ER Evans, warder.’
The plaque has little significance until you learn the background story. Mr Evans was the warden who supervised the prisoners over six years of eight-hour days and six-day weeks. Once the tunnels were complete, he approached the superintendent of the prison and asked that he be allowed to acknowledge the work of the prisoners in some small way. After all, before the coming of water piped down from the Perth hills, this work had assured Fremantle residents of a supply of fresh drinking water into the future. Many of the men had ruined their lungs due to silicosis, or Potter’s rot.
Evans was alone in wanting to record the labours of the men, however, and the superintendent refused his request. Undeterred, Evans risked his job, stole some cement from the prison stores and made the plaque himself, in the farthest corner of the farthest tunnel, twenty metres down in the stone. The plaque remained there in undisturbed darkness for some hundred years until its accidental discovery late last century. Evans’ respect for the men is made explicit by the inscription. It’s also telling that Evans signed his name as ‘warder’, a slang term for warden that points to the respect being reciprocal. It’s the equivalent of a corrections officer today allowing himself to be called a screw.
I think it’s fitting that the depth at which Evans made his forbidden plaque is precisely where the sedimentary limestone, characterised by shell and sea-urchin grit, touches upon the tamala limestone, whose aeolian origins are far more ancient. It is also where the water table sits, with minor variations depending upon the season. At this point the texture and porosity of the stone changes, becomes denser and smoother. It’s like the difference between chalk and bone, consolidated by time and wind and leaching water – a combination of the elements that’s suggestive of the broader surface landscape.
From an aeroplane, the plain on which Perth is built appears perfectly flat, but this false perspective changes at ground level. Just like the ocean from which the land emerges, whose broad-backed swells are most obvious from a position on the water, the stone hills roll in great westerly swells across the plain. These broad wave-sets of stone were shaped by the very same wind that sculpts the ocean into waves, ending in the ridge of Mount Eliza that’s the westernmost point. There is continuity across the land and the sea, between stone and water. The swells of stone undulate in the same wavelike ridges out into the ocean, forming the north–south limestone reefs of the Parmelia and Success Banks – against which so many ships have been wrecked – ending with the line of Garden, Carnac and Rottnest islands, the continental shelf then dropping away.
Perth is one of the world’s windiest cities. When it’s still, you really notice it. The south-westerly ‘Fremantle Doctor’ sweeps off the ocean after the hot convection that pulses off the inland desert when the easterly blows. The salt in the wind settles on the land and the stunted coastal heat
h resembles the flowering seagrass that forms its sub-aqueous reflection across the sandy beaches, made of shell and the white grains of quartz and milky feldspar, carried down by the river from the scarp, deposited in siliceous blooms by longshore currents along the coastline.
Whenever I drive past the popular North Cottesloe beach, not far north of Fremantle, I’m always reminded of a friend of mine. After his girlfriend dumped him, he quit his job on a Sydney building site, packed enough to fit in a milk crate and struck out for Perth on his bicycle, an old thing that was ill-equipped for the 4000 kilometres of travails ahead. It was a picaresque journey with plenty of odd events and characters met along the way. On the Nullarbor he collapsed with sunstroke and was rescued by a passing truckie, who dropped him off at the next truck stop to rehydrate. From there he continued on, white sand and aquamarine shallows blocking out the creaking pedals and straining chain while the red desert and then stubbled dust horizons of the wheatbelt receded behind him. He rode into the city on a hot morning with the easterly at his back, cycled through the western suburbs, parked his bike, wandered down the beach and fell into the waves. As a cure for heartbreak, I am told, it was a total success.
The centrality of the beach to Perth’s sense of itself is something of a cliché, but that’s of no concern to the tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands, who, like my friend, take to the waters to cheer themselves up. The sprawl of Perth is so great that it’s approximately the same size as Tokyo or Los Angeles and many times the size of Greater London, and the length of the city on its north-south axis means that it contains many dozens of beaches. Every beach has its own personality and moods. Every beach is a focus for different communities who gather there to picnic and play and by turns stupefy themselves in the sun before invigorating their bodies in the cool water.
My own local, South Beach, is not as beautiful as the northern beaches in that the sand is a grey-white. It certainly has its charms, though, not the least being that it’s walking distance from my fibro shack in South Fremantle. In the days when it was known as Brighton, it was also something of a resort. The early twentieth-century foreshore sustained a built environment that included a roller-skating rink, a picture theatre, a merry-go-round and a shark-proof swimming pool. The opening day of the Brighton summer season once attracted a crowd of 35 000 people.
Now it’s just another beach. There is still a grassy foreshore behind dunes laced with islands of bonsai-looking Rottnest tea-tree, but it’s on the sand that the crowds gather. Only the dogs are segregated, with their own beaches on either side of the main shoreline. Like every Perth beach, on summer days the water is clear and the sand is so hot underfoot that it can burn the skin. But unlike most Perth beaches, the swell is barely noticeable and it’s rare to see the offshore pontoon pulling on its leash.
I can vividly remember the feeling of community I experienced as a child on the beach and also in the men’s change-rooms along the coastline, showering with my brother and father. It struck me as remarkable that strangers in large numbers could be more at ease around one another while completely naked than when fully clothed. No status symbols or attempts at posturing. Easy conversation, earthy laughter, no shyness or awkward silence – something that I’ve only seen elsewhere in the sento of Japan, where public nudity has a longer tradition.
Perhaps I felt so comfortable in the beach environment because I was a member of what Robert Drewe has called the ‘sand people’, something that unfortunately had a lot to do with my complexion – and I still carry the tattooed inscriptions of Perth’s sometimes venomous rays on my skin. As Drewe outlined in The Shark Net with a mix of fondness and revulsion the skin-peeling exploits of his own generation, it was still common enough for the Gen-X kids of my era to be permanently sunburnt for six months of the year. In winter my hair reverted from bleached wheat to carrot orange, and the colour of my constantly shedding skin faded to reveal a blotting of dark freckles that over the years coalesced into a pale tan. With eyes irritated by sand and wind, hair thick with salt, my friends and I would compete to see who could remove in a single ruby chip a perfect mould of the ends of our noses, or the twin jewelled scabs off the tops of our ears, or long sheets of papyrus skin off our shoulders and chests.
The beach has always been a place where people mix. The experience of warmth and light, cold and submersion, seems to sublimate the tribalism found inland into a pleasurable drowsiness or a physical charge brought on by the cool water, or a simple appreciation for the horizon of sky and sea, or even a tingling awareness of the presence of danger. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1937 novel Intimate Strangers charts the effect of the dawning beach culture upon Perth’s youth, as a place to literally and figuratively undress, and get away from the Protestant mores that regulated behaviour inland. Passages of stuffy dialogue that could have come directly from the diaries of the class-conscious settlers of the previous century contrast with the sensuality the main characters experience at the beach: ‘It was one of those idle imperishable days of which there are so few in a lifetime. Greg was lit up by it, a little unsteady with sun-dozing, the surge of the sea, the youth and beauty of this girl he worshipped …’
Sunlight unifies the characters in this novel and illuminates their secrets. Prichard, like so many Perth writers after her, lovingly describes the effect of the sun setting over the ocean as it lights upon the domestic realm:
Sunset, flame and amber, painted the edge of the sky: the islands were blotted dark against it: a hook of shags drifted inland. Windows of small wooden houses along the cliff took the blaze of the sunset as if they were on fire inside. Elodie watched the flame die in the sky, fade to saffron, and lie there in long flat streaks.
In Prichard’s novel the domestic is integrated into the social, and the most persuasive of the characters is a handsome Italian fisherman, sun-lover, worker and fearless political agitator. This dark-skinned energetic swimmer moves easily between the different worlds, an outsider who stands in strong contrast to the insular suburban matrons and patrons who are blind to the effects of the developing economic storm.
Many of Tim Winton’s characters are outsiders too. It’s a reminder of the fact that for the greater part of the twentieth century Perth’s beachside suburbs were often marginal places, despite the best efforts of the developers who parcelled up the land and sold it to young families who couldn’t afford to buy near the train lines. There are some terrific photographs of motorbike races taking place in 1930s North Beach (precursors of the illegal Scarborough drags of the 1960s and 1970s), with cheering crowds holding their hats against the surging wind. The hills around are patched with jerry-built corrugated iron shacks, gimcrack garden beds, limestone streets, and dust clouds chasing the daredevil bikers, a visual reminder that to live by the coast in those days you either had to be poor or a real sun-lover. There was no train line and no tram, only irregular buses that drummed over the jarrah-plank roads, carrying locals and day-trippers and, increasingly, surfers.
My home suburb of South Fremantle feels most of all like a coastal village, a bit run-down and half-asleep, which is exactly how I like it. My house is built on loose beach sand, and only salt-tolerant plants such as pigface, cushion bush, dune sheoak and cockies tongue grow well. George Seddon wrote a beautiful piece about gardening in the limestone soils of his home a few hundred metres to the north. In it, he pointed out something else I love about Fremantle: the obvious harmony of perspective in a town whose buildings are largely built out of the stone on which they rest. Seddon’s limestone home was built on a limestone hill halfway up to the rim of the stone chalice that encloses the port city. From the hillside you can still smell the salt and saltbush and baking limestone on the wind, the sound of ships entering the port with brute foghorn blasts, their flanks so high and wide that it looks like a wall of the city is scrolling back.
Recently I bodysurfed a huge swell at nearby Leighton Beach with my brother and our eldest sons. The swell was unexpected and we didn’t hav
e boards, but it was so powerful and the foam was so deep and the dumpings so violent that when we caught our waves the exhilaration was intense enough to remind us of being puny children again. We were riding the cold frothy banks of water as our father and mother had taught us, as my grandfather had taught my mother and her siblings while my grandmother, who never learnt to swim, waded in the shallows.
Calling himself a ‘littoralist’, Tim Winton has often captured the ocean’s hyperreal brilliance, its importance to swimmers and surfers as a place of renewal, as a site where the possible is made visible, a place of meditation and forgetting, but often married to a sense of danger important to the rites of passage of so many Perth teenagers for so many years. Those immediately recognisable marginal characters who crop up in Winton’s narratives of the coast, described in his memoir Land’s Edge as those who ‘feel forgotten, neglected, put upon, and yet proud to be far away, on the edge’, and those ill-at-ease with encroaching suburban homogeneity, have been driven north, to the quasilegal squatters camps and ‘squat little towns with their fish-deco architecture’ that dot the northern coastline. Yet the local beaches remain both a place of community and a place where it’s possible, with a turn of the head, to ‘have the mariner’s sensation of being merely a speck’.
As a swimmer and surfer, I always preferred the northern beaches of Scarborough and Trigg in particular, where the limestone protrudes above the dunes and the waves are larger. Now that I have three young children, however, we rarely travel far to swim. We occasionally cross the river to Leighton or Cottesloe, where the white sand squeaks underfoot and the champagne foam in the shallows tingles the legs and fizzes over the shoreline and makes children giddy with delight. Mid-morning, before the sun passes overhead and shears off the ocean, the cirrus clouds above the horizon often resemble passages of perfect cursive script written in soft white lines against the bluest page. This is the picture of a Perth in harmony with the stillness and space and silence that is its truest personality, the only prick of drama being the spotter plane of the shark patrol crawling over the sky.
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