Tony Jones’s statue memorialising the engineer C.Y. O’Connor is my favourite in Perth, despite the tragic subject matter. The statue is part of the living environment rather than a static image lodged in a public place, and its horseman sits stirrup deep or soused to the neck depending on the tide. He rides in the waves at roughly the place where on the morning of 10 March 1902 O’Connor removed and pocketed his dentures before he put the barrel of a .38 revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The statue is just out of our casting range, although it sits there in the darkness, catching the blinking illumination of the channel markers. One night at a nearby beachside rave I stripped down and swam out to have a closer look. The moonlight illuminated the horse’s flared nostrils and panicked eyes, animated by confusion and fear of the gunshot, while the horseman faces the port perfectly calm, expressionless – he is already at peace, on his way elsewhere. Once a year, on his birthday, O’Connor’s descendents swim out to the statue and perform a small private ceremony while sprinkling bougainvillea flowers and treading water, much like surfers do to celebrate the lives of their shark-eaten friends, at the very location where blood mingled with water.
O’Connor’s body was found by a boy next to the Robb Jetty site and what is now the remains of the scuttled Wyola. The boy worked in the nearby lime kilns and raised the alarm. By the time help arrived in the form of the local constabulary the body had drifted into deeper water, from where it was retrieved. In her short story ‘The Prospect of Grace’, Amanda Curtin describes how ‘Constable Honner recovered the body and examined the scene, reporting that O’Connor’s horse had entered the water at a canter. The tracks came out again near the jetty, which was splashed with wet sand “as if the horse had got a fright.” There were no footprints.’
O’Connor was the son of Irish parents who’d sold their farm during the potato famine to feed starving locals, and he retained a strong Irish accent to the end. He was widely revered in Perth as the man who not only created the modern port of Fremantle, which is still functioning effectively after more than a century of use, but also brought water to Perth after the creation of the dams and weirs in the catchments of the Helena River. Most ambitious of all was O’Connor’s engineering of the pipeline that carried water across the desert to Coolgardie/Kalgoorlie, to an inland community where water was more expensive than beer, across 600 kilometres of country with a daytime temperature range of 0°C to 50°C. The Coolgardie pipeline was an unrivalled feat of engineering for the time, although O’Connor didn’t live to see its completion.
A tragic figure, O’Connor is a subject made for literary representation. Drewe describes his mythic qualities in The Drowner:
The Chief is a formidable sight cantering on his grey hunter out of the dawn mist. Through the shallows and across the spit, scattering swans before him. A thin and straight-backed six-footer, all his control coming from his hips, the early sunrays shooting off his spray, he looks something of a centaur.
O’Connor was a tall and lanky man with a grey beard, strong nose and heavy black eyebrows. His darkly intelligent eyes were set in a kindly face. Premier John Forrest head hunted him from a posting in New Zealand and made him chief engineer whose purview included ‘harbours, railways, everything’. His was a well-paid public servant’s position that coincided with a time when the colonial government finally had the energy and means to commence major infrastructure works. O’Connor’s daughter Kathleen, one of the progenitors of modernist painting in Australia, said that her father was such a hard worker and so absorbed in his various projects that he barely realised they’d moved countries.
In John Forrest, O’Connor had an equally energetic premier beside him. If Forrest had been born in the eastern states, he would be far better known as an explorer and surveyor, along with his reputation as one of the fathers of Federation. As a younger man he had explored some of the remotest desert points in the Western Australian compass, but perhaps of most significance for the state’s future was his survey of the overland route to Adelaide that only Edward John Eyre had travelled before him. Forrest trekked in a small party with Nyungar guides and dreamed that the same journey might one day be made by train. The idea of the Indian–Pacific train route was such a central demand of Forrest’s at the meetings to decide upon Federation that had the other states not agreed to the plan Western Australia might well have remained independent.
Forrest was initially opposed to Federation and although he legislated for the right of women to vote, his motives were political. He hoped that by allowing the wives and daughters of the landowning class to vote, the voice of the more radical and largely male population of the goldfields might be diluted. As a result, in 1899 Western Australia became only the fourth colony in the world where women had suffrage, behind New Zealand, South Australia and South Africa.
The colony had only recently become selfgoverning in 1890, and it was under Forrest, by now a stout, bearded and bull-necked man, that the state progressed from fully autocratic to partially democratic. Forrest belonged to the generation born of the first settlers, many of whom fulfilled their parents’ best hopes regarding their accumulation of land, wealth and status, as well as their worst fears, specifically with regards to their often casual barbarism towards Aborigines on the northern frontier. Not only did Forrest claim to have shot several desert Aborigines in self-defence, but his biographer, F.K. Crowley, said that Forrest’s humble origins as the son of an indentured servant and his eventual success created in him ‘social snobbery, laissez-faire capitalism, sentimental royalism, patriotic Anglicanism, benevolent imperialism and racial superiority’.
As premier, Forrest was fortunate enough to preside over the city’s first gold boom, when the state’s population swelled and Perth grew rapidly away from its river base. He was a great abettor of O’Connor’s various projects, protecting him from interference and broadly encouraging the realisation of his ambitions. O’Connor is often regarded as a victim of his own success: his earlier projects had come in under budget and on time, making the problems associated with the Coolgardie pipeline appear worse. But the vacuum left by Forrest’s departure for the national legislature, which resulted in four changes of state government within a single year, created the conditions that left O’Connor exposed to the criticism of parliamentarians and the ridicule of sections of the press. While there are apocryphal stories of O’Connor losing his temper and stamping on his hat, his daughters described him as a generous man who often fed strangers at his table and gave money to the numerous poor, and he was also a clearly sensitive man with an artist’s absorption in his projects. But as an engineer, he was no naif, and he knew where he stood in the altered political climate.
At a recent lecture given in O’Connor’s memory by his great-grandson Mike Lefroy and academic Martyn Webb, I was able to look at his original suicide letter. It’s a tragic expression of pain and frustration, as might be expected, with an odd final flourish that indicates an engineer’s enduring pragmatism. Having described how ‘I feel my brain is suffering … I have lost control of my thoughts’, O’Connor ends the letter with the tacked-on imperative, ‘Put the wing walls on the Helena Weir at once!’
While it emerged subsequently that one of O’Connor’s deputies was trading land on the projected route of the Coolgardie pipeline, by all indications it was the vicious attacks on O’Connor’s reputation that most affected him. They were led by The Sunday Times’ Frederick Vosper, a t’otherside firebrand who’d been imprisoned in Queensland for encouraging striking shearers to shoot their oppressors, and Irishman John Winthrop Hackett, a parliamentarian and newspaperman who went on to found the University of Western Australia as the first free university in the British Empire. Vosper described O’Connor as a ‘shire engineer from New Zealand [who] has absolutely flourished on palm-grease … Mr O’Connor is a palm-greased humbug’, and this combined with the three official enquiries into the pipeline’s progress is considered to have been the source of O�
�Connor’s migraines, anxiety and insomnia, which eventually led to his suicide while of ‘a rational mind’.
The reaction was immediate and heartfelt. Flags flew at half-mast across the city, and the following day all public offices were closed. Workers at the site of the Fremantle harbour project and Mundaring Weir were given leave to attend O’Connor’s funeral, the largest in the state at that time. More than a thousand people waited outside O’Connor’s home in East Fremantle, and many thousands more flocked to see the funeral cortege as it progressed slowly towards Fremantle Cemetery, with the acting premier and the chief justice as pall-bearers.
However, according to Martyn Webb, the University of Western Australia’s Emeritus Professor in Geography, it wasn’t the Coolgardie pipeline that was O’Connor’s pride and joy – it was the Fremantle port, which he had ‘in good spirits’ showed visitors around the day before his suicide. There, a Pietro Porcelli statue stands in O’Connor’s likeness, raised high on a narrow plinth, while basreliefs of the Mundaring Weir and Fremantle Port lie at his feet. Less than a minute’s walk from my studio, Porcelli’s representation of O’Connor faces towards the hills, although it once faced the opposite direction, seawards across the protective arms of the port walls. The commerce of the port has played out beneath this statue since its unveiling by John Forrest in 1911.
From where O’Connor’s gaze now looks pensively downriver, his chin on his fist, dressed like a worker in overcoat and boots, he would have witnessed strikers dropping chunks of mortar from the Fremantle Traffic Bridge onto the premier’s boat on Bloody Sunday, 4 May 1919; when striking dockworkers threatened to riot, then the gunshot and killing of striker Tom Edwards by police; and the reading of the riot act while the coffin of John Forrest, who’d died en route to England in 1918 to accept his knighthood, waited to be unloaded from a nearby steamer. He would have observed all of the comings and goings of the hundreds and thousands of migrants who arrived at the nearby Victoria Quay, some of them like Judah Waten’s character in the short story ‘Looking for a Hus-band’, observing the Fremantle docks ‘fiery even in the shade. Only the gulls splashing and flapping their wings in the water lay cool and unperturbed … and everywhere harsh voices sounded.’
Many of the new migrants in the early twentieth century were met by A.O. Neville, the first head of the newly minted government department for ‘Immigration, Tourism and General Information’. Neville, whose name is now associated primarily with the assimilation policies of the 1920s to the 1940s, was initially stationed in his little Information Bureau office by the port. From 1910 he and his colleagues boarded the Lady Forrest and greeted, in person, many of the 10 000 annual arrivals, presenting them with a letter of welcome and a card detailing the rates of pay for workers in country regions. This was part of a government-inspired and Neville-directed policy of spruiking the arid eastern wheatbelt as a place where largely unskilled urban Britons might, with the help of a booklet describing how to sow their first crop, make a go of hardscrabble farming. In one year, 91 000 brochures and postcards were distributed overseas, leading tens of thousands to pack up their belongings and emigrate. The stated aim was for the state to have a population of one million. This of course all took place during the time of the White Australia policy. Prior to 1901, many of the ships that entered the port bore Afghans and their camels. They camped out on the foreshore and in the nearby dunes, beside the woolsheds and the wheatsheds, fragrant piles of sandalwood heaped for export and the stacks of jarrah bound for Britain. Jarrah sleepers were used across Britain’s extensive rail network, and many of the thoroughfares of London, Paris and Berlin were under-laid with jarrah and karri blocks, some to this day.
Perhaps in the quieter moments at night, when the stars are clear and the wind is blowing, O’Connor can see the ghosting of the past behind the living port and hear the chants of those elders whom Nyungar people believe sung O’Connor to his early death, as punishment for breaking the rock bar at the mouth of the river, and disturbing the Wagyl, or serpent spirit, who lives there. At low tide the bowed bridge of smooth limestone that looked like a serpent’s back allowed Whadjuk men to cross the Derbarl Yerrigan, the Swan River, swimming the last short distance across to Man-jaree, or what is now known as Bathers Beach on the southern bank at Walyalup, or Fremantle.
The limestone rock bar was also a great place to spear fish, because the narrow channel carried all of the marine life that entered and exited the river. O’Connor’s port required the rock bar to be removed, which was done by drilling into the hard travertine limestone and laying charges. Dozens of men drilled down from shaky wooden platforms that extended across the river mouth. The rock bar acted as a partial weir before it was removed, but its destruction consolidated Perth’s viability as a city. Until then, the natural deep-water harbour in Albany meant that mail and tourists were landed there, more than 400 kilometres south-east of Perth, and then transported to Perth overland. Most other shipping passed through Albany instead of Perth for the same reason. The blasting away of the rock bar opened the Swan River to the Indian Ocean, and therefore the city of Perth to the wider world, and in doing so changed the nature of the city forever.
The Plain
‘The drive of much of our technology is to obliterate distinctions of place … My hope is that Perth will become more parochial and that planning for it will become minutely topical: more so, and not less … every small hill and valley, every limestone outcrop repays attention on a sand-plain.’
George Seddon, Swan Song
Standing on the crest of the Darling Scarp overlooking the Swan Coastal Plain, it’s easy to get the impression that the height and mass and broad obstacle that the CBD represents is somehow more permanent than the encircling suburbs and their mostly single-storey homes nestled within trees. From this position, the suburbs appear much like camps on the margins of the city centre, tucked into bushland, spreading across the lowland plain as far as the eye can see. And yet this perspective is false, if only because it’s the structures in the CBD that have been built and torn down, sometimes many times over, whereas the buildings that people choose to dwell in have mostly endured.
Many of the city’s suburban buildings were constructed during the 1960s and 1970s, amid the great influx of British, Italian and Slav tradesmen whose skills translated into some of the best-made homes in Australia. They were often double-brick houses rather than brick veneer, with mostly Italian and Slav grano-workers doing the limestone trenching, footings and foundations and English tradesmen the bricklaying, carpentry, plastering and painting. These houses were built to last, and the rapid suburban growth on the lowland plain and the influx of migrants also had the effect of elevating a lot of Australian builders and tradesmen into positions of authority: supervisors, foremen and small-business owners.
In the city centre, very few of the original nineteenth-century brick buildings remain, and you need to take a stroll down narrow Howard Street towards the river to feel what it must have been like. On the fringes of the city and across the suburbs, very little is left of the already minimal pre-1950s industrial landscape. Unlike many of the Victorian-era office buildings that were stuccoed to within an inch of their lives, the older industrial buildings rarely attempted to conceal the labour that went into their construction: every brick laid by hand, every tile, and the frame of every window. These rare buildings, such as the now retired Midland Railway Workshops, are some of my favourites. They have a texture; they catch the grime and show their age, but they also use cathedral-like windows and natural light to flood their great interiors.
Perth is a city where the bulk of the built environment has been constructed over the past fifty years. There’s a general absence of this kind of texture and history, particularly among the city’s newer buildings, with their tilt-up walls and traceless glass facades, and the feeling that they’ve been made by machines and assembled rather than built.
A large number of Perth’s suburban buildings are less than fifty yea
rs old, too. That is time enough for the trees around them to grow tall, though, and Perth suburbs really only come into themselves once they are clothed in trees.
It’s in the suburbs that a majority of life is lived, albeit largely without performance, without witness and mostly without record. The suburbs are Perth’s quiet places, but this silence can have many qualities. For some, who don’t take it for granted, it can be a source of peacefulness, even of spiritual satisfaction. For others, it can generate frustration, the sense that life is passing them by, brought on by the feeling, as described by Shaun Tan, of being ‘somewhere and nowhere at the same time’. And yet the suburbs are also where Perth’s most vibrant enclaves can be found, places such as Leederville, Scarborough and Bassendean, Victoria Park and North Fremantle, Mount Lawley and Subiaco. The bars, pubs and restaurants of these areas attract both locals and visitors, but fewer of the suburban kids looking for kicks who descend upon the nightclub precincts of Fremantle and Northbridge at night.
It’s hard to imagine a city where the suburban pace of life is so closely linked to the gentle oscillation of the seasons and therefore the truest personality of the plain. Even in the unloveliest of suburbs, the sky arches from horizon to horizon, the sun passes unhurriedly across the usually blue sky, the stars and moon are clear at night. And many Perth residents choose to holiday somewhere even more relaxed and silent, where there are even fewer people, or at least likeminded ones, places such as Rottnest Island, or the surf breaks up and down the coast, or the quiet camp-grounds of the karri forests or the beaches of the Great Southern.
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