Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  Ron Davidson’s loving biography of the newspaper, High Jinks at the Hot Pool: The Mirror Reflects the Life of a City, describes how Simons and Courtney’s paper filled a niche by supplying Perth citizens with up-to-date sporting results but also gossip and innuendo. Robert Drewe, in The Shark Net, describes witnessing his father lurking suspiciously by the incinerator in their suburban backyard, ‘reading avidly’ through The Mirror before consigning the ‘sex and scandal sheet’ to the flames. But it wasn’t always so, at least not until the editors (one of whom was later Ron Davidson’s father) figured out that sex and scandal in a buttoned-down and largely blue-collar city kept the readers coming back.

  J.J. Simons was not only a part owner of the ‘clean dirty’ paper The Mirror but also a Labor parliamentarian with the nickname of ‘Boss’. He was also adept at marrying his political message with his editorial agenda, one that was often about ‘the villainy of his many personal enemies’. He engaged with Curtin over the matter of Simons’ own resignation from the party, the result of what he considered to be the machinations of a ‘secret junta.’ Curtin felt that Simons was determined to make a martyr of himself, and he ran the front page of the Worker with a headline spread over three columns: THE LATEST AND GREATEST OF ALL THE MARTYRS! SOME REFLECTIONS CON-CERNING A SWOLLEN HEAD …’ and an article that hinted at Simons’ mercenary reasons for abandoning his post and splitting the Labor vote, ending with ‘Too much prosperity is not always a good thing, as witness, that of the tapeworm – JC’. According to Ron Davidson, Simons hit back immediately by labelling Curtin ‘the wobbly worker’, a reference to his drinking problem, and ‘the journalistic odour from the Yarra’.

  Alfred Deakin had seen Simons’ public speaking and had tipped him as a future prime minister. In a measure of the levels of political engagement at the time, Simons attracted crowds of 2000 people to his rallies in East Perth, within a total constituency of only 5000 voters, but it wasn’t enough to get him elected. He withdrew to build Araluen, in memory of his beloved mother, now a popular park in the Perth hills, and to run the YAL and The Mirror, from where he could safely take pot-shots at his enemies.

  Courtney and Simons’ approach had been made clear in an earlier incarnation of the paper, The Call, which had baited the mayor of Perth at the time, William Lathlain, for his sycophancy towards the crown and favouring of conscription, among other things. They were sued for libel, although the jury only awarded the mayor a farthing in damages. The following week, according to Ron Davidson, the ‘Call featured its peace offering – a big picture of Lathlain wearing a mayoral chain of farthings’. It’s a very funny picture, with the farthings prominent beneath the mayor’s stern and unsuspecting stare, and must have driven Lathlain mad with frustration.

  Part of The Mirror’s success was its use of humour to cock a snook at the pretensions of what then passed for high society in Perth, as well as to ‘suppress the suppressionists’: the killjoys and wowsers who pontificated about morality from the pulpits and lecterns and court benches but, if the editors of The Mirror are to believed, were also given to boozy orgies whenever the opportunity arose. The Mirror’s readers loved to hear about Bacchanalian goings-on in suburban Peppermint Grove among the ‘naicest’ families, ‘the shameful doings of the Swagger set’, or ‘the Pseudo Western Aristocrats of Booze’, as evidence of hypocrisy from on high.

  The West Australian claimed to be a paper of record, whereas The Mirror stories ‘came from the courts, with murders … a specialty; from people oppressed by silly governments and bureaucratic bunglers; from germ ridden restaurants; and from the roving and quirky eyes of the paper’s reporters’. While Davidson casts a clear eye on the early tendency of the paper to opine at the expense of non-whites, in particular the imagined sexual allure of the ‘Celestials’, the stories in The Mirror ranged from images such as ‘STRANGE SIGHT NEAR CAUSEWAY … A man, his wife and their small boy, armed with an axe apiece, were seen hacking into the carcass of a draught horse, stuck in the mud flats at the city’s edge’ to stories about lurking males in overcoats and female suburban streakers with ‘CYCLING LADY GODIVA STREAKS THROUGH SUBIACO/YOUNG MEN STARTLED AS SHE WHIPS OPEN HER COAT’ (when truthful material was short). Detailed coverage of society murders became the paper’s greatest attraction, so that after a taxi-driver’s murder on Westana Road in suburban Dalkeith, this main thoroughfare was renamed Waratah Avenue to remove the stain brought upon the desirable new suburb by The Mirror’s relentless coverage.

  But the editors and journalists of the paper at least practised what they appeared to preach, that is, their celebration of the city’s underdog characters. One of The Mirror’s more successful pranks involved Percy Button, a well-known street acrobat and cadger about town, famously grubby and often charged with vagrancy for performing in front of the well-heeled crowd in queues outside His Majesty’s Theatre in the CBD. The Mirror staff allowed Button to wash and often fed him in the alley beside their Murray Street offices. On one occasion in 1929, the staff journos cleaned him up, dressed him in a tuxedo, gave him a fine cigar and perched him on the stairs at His Majesty’s Theatre, the site of many of his arrests. ‘Do you know this man?’ the paper’s readers were asked, above a front-page photograph of the anonymous ‘Perth silvertail’, with a prize offered for the correct answer. Predictably, the paper’s respondents identified him variously as the Prince of Wales, the Lieutenant Governor and the Duke of Cumberland, among others. ‘Clothes maketh the man,’ the paper wryly observed the following week when Percy’s identity was revealed, which led in turn to The Mirror defending Button when he was next arrested for vagrancy and labelled by the presiding judge as a ‘filthy disreputable sight’.

  When Button was bashed by two policemen near Cottesloe Beach in 1931 for being a ‘dirty looking cur’ and then put before the mercy of the same judge, The Mirror was there to give Percy’s side of the story. He wanted to earn his living his own way, as a ‘handspring artist’ and bottle collector, and besides, it was the Depression years and there was no work to be found. He was a returned soldier, who’d served with the AIF in 1917. The judge gave Percy one month’s hard labour.

  Another local character celebrated by The Mirror was Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan. He’d emigrated from Frog Hollow in Sydney, where, in 1914, he pulled off Australia’s first armed robbery and getaway in a car. Shiner had spent a lot of his adult life in prison, and he added to his total in Fremantle. Ryan became a Fremantle legend, in a town ‘crammed with characters’. Author Xavier Herbert, then working in a Fremantle pharmacy, described the port city as a place where:

  The narrow streets seemed always to be thronged … The town itself was no less colourful than its waterfront, peopled as it largely was by seafarers and globetrotters that the ships of half a century had left behind. The packed shops and restaurants, the wine bars, pubs, hash-houses, whore-houses, doss-houses, were run by people of all breeds … Of nights the bars fumed and roared, the drunks bawled and brawled and wept and puiked, the Salvos and their Brethren banged their drums…

  Shiner Ryan was Fremantle’s preeminent lock-picker, able to pick a lock with his hands behind his back so that he could stand innocently facing the street while leaning back against the shopfront. Unfortunately, because he was so expert, any time there was a clean robbery of goods rather than a ‘break-in’, the police only had to check whether Shiner was out of prison. While in jail he got into trouble for forging coins that one of the warders passed over the pubs of Fremantle, although he became the first person to get the prison clock over the entrance gates to run on time. The Fremantle Prison museum still has two model white sailing ships (which are quite shimmeringly beautiful) that Shiner made of leftover porridge, ground glass and salt crystals.

  Ron Davidson’s father, Frank, interviewed Shiner often, on one occasion about a painting Shiner had done of Jesus, standing in the prison’s no-man’s land between cell-block and watch-tower, holding a lamb, except that ‘it was a black lamb bearing Shiner’s naugh
ty schoolboy face’. The painting took Shiner back to Sydney, where a ‘Sydney art authority’ lauded it as a significant work. There he renewed his acquaintance with childhood sweetheart and Sydney identity Kate Leigh, who’d done five years for Shiner after perjuring herself to give him an alibi. The Mirror was there to welcome Kate when she arrived in Perth to take up Shiner’s marriage proposal, ‘an ageing woman … in a giant straw hat, with fifteen diamond rings and a silver fox’. Midway through the celebrations, a teacher dropped in from the South Terrace Primary School with a request that Shiner pick a lock whose key had gone missing. The newlyweds got into a taxi for the long drive over to Sydney, although the story goes that sixty-four-year-old Shiner only lasted 350 kilometres before he ‘did a bunk through a public toilet, stole a car and returned to familiar Fremantle’. When Shiner Ryan died in 1957, aged seventy-one, Fremantle mayor Sir Frederick Samson was a pallbearer at his funeral. Kate Leigh, upon hearing the sad news, provided Shiner’s epitaph, according to The Mirror: ‘His brain was in his fingertips. He could open any lock with a coat hanger.’

  Neither did The Mirror take the moral high ground when it came to describing the return to Perth of brothel-madam Josie de Bray, who’d been trapped in France and interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II. The brothels on Roe Street in central Perth, alongside the train tracks, had a long history. They were mainly small weatherboard cottages, except for Josie’s, which was a ‘custom-built villa with a piano in the vestibule’ that Ron Davidson’s Uncle Fred, a high-profile SP bookie, used to play when he felt the urge, since he wasn’t allowed to play his grand piano at home. Wearing a Maurice Chevalier hat, he’d sing show tunes to the revellers and waiting customers. The brothels were built on Commonwealth rather than state land, with both the Perth Central Police station and The Mirror offices a mere couple of minutes’ walk away.

  During World War II, with the presence of thousands of American sailors, Roe Street was quarantined from the gaze of passing train passengers, after the Mothers Union successfully argued for hoardings to be put up to remove the view of scantily clad women sitting on the brothel verandas. Roe Street was such a part of 1930s Perth life that when Josie de Bray, the most famous of the madams, took a poulterer who’d set up shop beside ‘Josie’s Bungalow’ to court for disturbing her custom (the sound of chickens being beheaded tended to cool the ardour of her clients), the judge ordered the poulterer to move and fined him £2.

  Such was de Bray’s authority that during her twelve-year absence, when her Roe Street brothel-keepers and accountant didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, they reliably paid their rent and her commission each week. A terrific sum of money awaited de Bray upon her return. She had once warned a youthful Victor Courtney that ‘You know, son, working on a newspaper is a dirty way to earn a living’, but when The Mirror quoted her as saying that she intended to celebrate her return at the races, the paper was inundated with vitriolic letters because it dared to treat someone in the sex trade as a real person. The Mirror had crossed the line, and the ‘fearful fifties’ were upon Perth.

  The one recurring theme from my conversations with men and women from a Perth generation now in their seventies and eighties, who grew up in the city before the wave of new immigration in the 1960s, and before the advent of television, is the celebration of the city’s characters and the importance of local storytellers. I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who was both a great raconteur and singer, and he could tell stories about the people of Perth for hours, becoming earthier and funnier as the night wore on. Perth may have been geographically and to some extent culturally isolated, but there were the older traditions to maintain community memories of the characters who peopled the city, as though their difference was somehow the proudest expression of the city that produced them.

  I occasionally have lunch at The Buffalo Club on High Street in Fremantle, one of the last places in the city to serve pony glasses of beer. The club manager, Leo Amaranti, himself in his eighties, takes me upstairs to look at what is essentially a shrine to one Perth eccentric, a man with the nickname of ‘Matches’. Matches was a street person who collected burnt matches off footpaths and barroom floors to make his minor sculptural creations. Eventually Leo, who is quite the character himself, put Matches to work with an unlimited supply of his favourite material. The result was two huge benches and high-back thrones made of matchsticks, shellacked a golden honey colour; the blocks of burnt sticks are arranged in parquetry formations that give the surfaces a three-dimensional effect. It’s a wonderful piece of outsider art with an important function – the thrones and benches have always been used for official Buffalo Club meetings. Beside Matches’ creation stands a heavy curved wooden bar liberated from the Aga Khan’s luxury suite at a nearby hotel in 1987, following his visit to watch the America’s Cup. The story of how the club members transported the bar from the suite across town and into the secondfloor hall is an epic in itself.

  In the window of the bar downstairs is a short narrative penned by Vince Lovegrove, who sang with Bon Scott in The Valentines during the 1960s. He and Scott were still teenagers, with Scott working as a postie and Lovegrove employed in a local menswear store. During their lunch-breaks, according to Lovegrove, they’d meet in the stands of the South Fremantle football club and ‘plot and scheme about how we’d take over the planet and be the biggest band in the world … but in the end, it was really about finding out where we fit in.’ Lovegrove, who went on to a career in journalism, television production and managing bands, including AC/DC, Cold Chisel and Divinyls, was the person who later introduced Scott to Angus Young and Malcolm Young in Adelaide. The brothers were looking for a singer for their band, AC/DC, and Scott ‘fitted in’ so well that, of course, the rest is history.

  Writers Niall Lucy and John Kinsella, in their recent collaboration, The Ballad of Moondyne Joe, take J.B. O’Reilly’s 1879 novel Moondyne as a starting point from which to examine the meaning associated with the life of Joseph Bolitho Johns, by way of ‘a work of the imagination informed by conversations on history, literature, philosophy and AC/DC’. Using a mixture of poetry, parody and reflection, the life of Moondyne Joe is drawn into broader discussions about colonisation, crime and punishment, and rebellion in Perth, demonstrating how Joseph Johns the historical figure can never be separated from the mythologised Moondyne Joe, the subject of song, photography, fiction and film (a feature film was made of Moondyne in 1913, although only the script that Lucy discovered survives). The authors discuss Moondyne Joe and Yagan, the Nyungar warrior, and Bon Scott, whose importance to recent Perth generations as a renegade figure approaches that of Moondyne Joe before him.

  With the exception of Yagan, who was incarcerated at the Roundhouse Prison and then Carnac Island, what links O’Reilly and Moondyne Joe and Bon Scott is Fremantle Prison, something captured in the spirited cadences of AC/DC’s song ‘Jailbreak’. While Scott was only incarcerated there briefly as a minor before being transferred to a juvenile correctional facility to serve an eight-month sentence (for carnal knowledge of a minor and stealing petrol), the link between the other names – one that ensures their enduring cultural meaning in Perth – is the way that each thumbed his nose at the authorities, escaped custody and survived on the run.

  One of my Fremantle locals is a pub called Moondyne Joe’s. The dining room wall carries the 1874 photograph of Joseph Bolitho Johns that most people associate with his name. In it, he stands cheerfully dressed in workman’s boots and trousers, wearing a well-used kangaroo cloak and carrying an adze. His hair is long and his eyes are friendly; his bearded face is set in a bemused smile. The fist that grasps the adze is strong and large, the hand of a workman. What’s unusual is that the photographer, Alfred Chopin, took another photograph of Joe dressed in an immaculate suit, with a dandy’s watch-chain, one hand stiffly on his hip and the other on the back of a bentwood chair. Joe’s expression in this second, and largely unknown, photograph contains the same patrician rectitude of the many
photographs of local Fremantle ‘Merchant Princes’ taken during the same period. That Perth has preferred the image of ‘Wild Joe’, the man who is alleged to have stripped off his clothes when in confinement, armed with an iron-age weapon, dressed in the kangaroo skin (the buka, or boka) of the Nyungar, suggests a preference in the culture for both the nostalgic perspective of a vanished frontier and the celebratory view of a very human hero, a very Perth hero, perhaps – much like Bon Scott nearly a century later. Littered with flowers and empty whisky bottles, Scott’s gravesite at Fremantle Cemetery has become something of a shrine amid the loose grey sands that also contain the remains of Moondyne Joe.

  One of my near neighbours in Fremantle, K, a man in his sixties, notices my four-year-old son’s black AC/DC shirt and dutifully reminds me that the thirty-second anniversary of Bon Scott’s death is approaching. While Luka and K’s grandson play with Jess, K’s border collie, K says he makes sure to take his grandson to Bon’s grave on the same day every year, and that he’s not the only one. The numbers get bigger each year, he tells me, and plenty of them are grandparents taking their grandchildren along to show them Bon’s grave and to ‘show Bon his legacy’. K is a working man, not usually given to sentimentality. Perhaps overcome with the emotion of the looming anniversary, he shyly asks if he can show me something and proceeds to peel off his shirt to reveal a new tattoo of Bon on his upper arm. The lifelike Bon smiles the same mischievous smile he’s often remembered by, one mirrored in the photographic portrait of Moondyne Joe, clutching an adze not a micro-phone, but with that same ironic glint in his eye.