Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  In the six months before Fremantle Prison was closed in 1991, its medieval conditions highlighted by an earlier riot on a day when the temperature in the cells reached 47°C, the prison superintendent decided that art would no longer be regarded as merely a tool of control used to reward good behaviour. The traditional lock-down regime was relaxed and inmates were allowed to paint the walls of their cell and exercise yard as they pleased. The resulting artwork forms a permanent exhibition of the end of an occupation before withdrawal, telling of the different yearnings, the comic and tragic inscriptions of the incarcerated in the different divisions.

  In the 3 Div exercise yard, which contained prisoners generally sentenced for violent crimes, there is a chilling but comically rendered floor-to-ceiling mural in lurid colours called ‘Wayne and Willie’s Swimming Lesson’. It depicts a river of blood, a rape scene, some mates drinking in a bar, a robbery in progress, a woman being dragged off by her hair. This image captures most people’s worst fears regarding the minds of prisoners, the callous cycle of life of the recidivist criminal. But this painting is a minority in the broader gallery of paintings, sketches and scrawls. In the nearby cells there are the usual male and female genitalia painted around the teardrop-shaped judas holes in the heavy iron doors, needing only the guard’s gaze to complete the satirical effect. There is the usual graffiti that like prisoner tattoos carries a coded language understood by initiates: spider webs suggesting entrapment; tear drops; Dali clocks with missing hands; burning candle stubs, especially in the cell of Bobbie Thornton, the state’s first accredited tattooist, who ran a homemade tattoo machine with naked wires plugged directly into the mains power.

  Over the wall from the 3 Div exercise yard is the identical exercise yard of 4 Div. It mostly housed lifers, many of whom had been on death row until 1984, when capital punishment was finally abolished. The artwork of the lifers is different from that of the short-term violent offenders. Gone is the cruel humour, replaced by a quietly reflective water mural painted by Peter Cameron, a Yamatji man, and Shane Finn and Erik Merrett. Although funding has lately been secured to protect the paintings from further damage, over the years the water mural has been slowly destroyed by damp. Its hauntingly beautiful portrait of water spirits from different Countries – the Wagyl, the Wand-jina and Cameron’s own characteristic water spirit – still covers the entire eastern wall of the yard. Cameron and Finn (who became a friend after I met him while teaching poetry at Casuarina Prison over three years) shared a slot on the highest floor of the division, and the walls and door are also covered with their vivid, charged and symbolically coded artwork. Beneath the whitewash in a cell across the row were discovered paintings done in the 1870s by convict James Walsh, now preserved behind Perspex screens. The paintings are classically influenced drafts of mainly biblical subjects and hint at the decorative work he did later in the prison chapel; they are quite different, though, from the paintings he created after his release, when he became one of the noted watercolourists in the colony.

  In another nearby cell is a floor-to-ceiling painting by Kimberley man Reggie Moolarvie from the 1980s, an image of his home Country depicted in painstakingly stippled brushstrokes, a pointillist landscape clearly influenced by his time in Nyungar Country, with the characteristic ‘Carrolup School’ use of saturated pigments and melancholic/mystical hues. It fills the cell with a heartbreaking beauty and nostalgia, a fourth wall that works as a window onto another world. Despite the comings and goings of countless other inmates, black and white, the image was left unharmed for nearly a decade after Moolarvie’s release; some thirty years later it remains in good condition.

  But it is in another cell that the discourses of punishment and control, and artistic expression, are brought into clearest relief. On the ground floor of 3 Div, in a darkened space in a claustrophobically small slot, is a floor-to-window Nyungar landscape painted by Les Quartermaine in the Carrolup style. In the darkness of the slot the painting exudes a poignant light, an image of open forest that captures what Peter Cowan called the ‘individuality, the strangeness and beauty’ of the south-west landscape, the characteristic fluidity of the self-aware trees with their delicately rendered foliage, the darkness and depth in the foreground retreating beneath layers of soft light that carry so much feeling.

  Quartermaine had been an inmate of Carrolup Native Mission in the Great Southern. One important difference between Carrolup and the Moore River mission came when Noel White arrived at Carrolup in 1945 to take up the position of headmaster. White encouraged his charges to go into the bush and paint what they saw. This wasn’t without its difficulties, and White was often stymied by locals demanding the labour of the children, and officials who couldn’t see the merit in teaching art to Nyungar kids. Either way, the initiative resulted in a body of work with a distinctive style characterised by a focus on landscape (at a time when Namatjira was a household name) and a richly textured palette of colours that captured something of the numinous qualities of a metaphysical Country. A selection of the ‘Child Artists of the Australian Bush’ toured Europe and ended up in collections worldwide, although the inmates were officially wards of the state and weren’t allowed to receive any financial gain from their work.

  The style has influenced many contemporary Nyungar artists, from Tjulliyungu Lance Chad to Christopher Pease, whose Nyoongar Dreaming depicts a human figure hemmed in by street-signs and poles and concrete barricades beneath an algae-coloured sky. Tjulliyungu Lance Chad, who has used the Carrolup style to depict the Swan River and the salt-eaten landscapes to be found in many places beyond Perth, also created a Carrolup-influenced landscape to form the cyclorama for the tragi-comic theatrical production Binjareb Pinjarra about the Pinjarra Massacre. In 1833, for an hour and a half, twenty-four armed soldiers and settlers fired continuously into a largely unarmed gathering of the Pinjarup clan, then hunted them through the bush, so that, according to J.S. Roe, ‘very few wounded were suffered to escape.’ The subject matter of the play is tragic, but it is leavened by what Nyungar playwright Richard Walley has called the wonderful ‘humour born of the breadline, and a sense of the real worth of everyone no matter how down and out’.

  The story goes that Les Quartermaine was stood over and forced to add another inmate’s signature to his painting, although this might be apocryphal. The landscape is nostalgia in its purest form, but also a holding on to a source of strength. I have seen the painting many times now, but the last time I entered the cell I was taken by surprise – tears flooded my eyes. It was a gloomy winter’s day and the cell was darker than usual, and yet the painting’s radiant light completely overwhelmed me. Prisons are the darkest of places, and yet the images of light in the artwork left behind by Peter Cameron, Shane Finn, Reggie Moolarvie and Les Quartermaine, and the prison works of Walmatjari man Jimmy Pike, each carry the illumination of sharp observation and tender feeling amid a regime of exacting control.

  When my father arrived in Perth in 1960 he found a city already beginning to grow away from its river base, but with remaining tribal loyalties to the older suburbs closer to the city. These loyalties were usually manifested in a strong identification with the different Aussie Rules teams in the state football league: Perth, West Perth, East Perth, Swan Districts, Subiaco, Claremont, East Fremantle and South Fremantle (subsequently joined by the Mandurah-based Peel Thunder in 1997). Perth seemed to him relatively multicultural. The city had a large Italian, Slav and Nyungar community, many of whom seemed to play footy.

  My father at that time was a young flying officer stationed out at the Pearce Air Force Base. He didn’t know anyone in Perth but had the perfect passport for entree into a sports-mad city: he’d played footy for the South Melbourne reserves in the Victorian league and for Launceston in the Tasmanian league; he’d recently won the Phelan Medal in the New South Wales league, despite being injured for half the season. Word had gotten around, and he was contacted by someone at West Perth. At the function to welcome him, there were speeche
s by the club president, Les Day, and the coach, former Footscray legend Arthur Olliver. Everyone made my father and the other new recruit, Collingwood star Ray Gabelich, very welcome, with invitations to dinner and drinks. Then it was straight into training, at what my father describes was a level and intensity he’d never seen before, even under Haydn Bunton, Jr. in the Tassie league. The first thing he noticed was that the sandy soil beneath the Perth ovals meant a fast track even on wet days and a game plan that suited speedsters. My father played in the centre as the replacement for Don Marinko, Jr. and speed was his big asset. And he needed it. His status as a new recruit and an officer with a double-barrelled name also marked him out for special attention – an assumption of privilege that was hugely at odds with his upbringing in rural north-east Tasmania. The second thing he learnt about the local conditions was that in the pre-season, when the temperature is often in the late thirties, it’s a bad idea to scull a glass of icy beer straight after a game: cold beer into an overheated body can cause instant paralysis. My father nearly died in the club change-rooms and had to be revived by the club doctor.

  My father’s league career was ended by an errant boot at the bottom of a pack, shattering his cheek-bone and nose. He required reconstructive facial surgery, and ‘Big Bear’ Ray Gabelich and others from the club visited him often during his time in hospital, helping him through the long recovery – acts of kindness that my father’s never forgotten. He also vividly remembers some of the great Indigenous champions of the day. He played alongside Bill Dempsey and against Ted Kilmurray, Polly Farmer and Syd Jackson from cross-town rivals East Perth. Later, Kilmurray, Farmer and Jackson would be the first of many Indigenous recruits to make the journey to the Victorian Football League, where their flair and speed helped shape the game that AFL football has become.

  My father is not the first person to describe to me something that he found surprising about Perth in the 1960s, what he calls the ‘wild-west admixture’ of the time. Unlike other cities he’d seen in Australia, in Perth all the classes mixed freely and seemingly without rancour and, in football season at least, so did the ‘races’. This was true at the local football games and still is. I take my son to watch South Fremantle play in the Western Australian Football League, especially the derby games against East Fremantle. The West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers may represent the state in the national competition, but in the WAFL games there is still a sense of local community and tradition. They are also far more relaxed and child-friendly than AFL games. In the breaks between quarters all the kids storm the field and play kick to kick, and punters wander over to huddle with the coaches and players and hear what is being said, or rather shouted. In the sometimes moody winter light and with the field crowded with hundreds of children and the soaring parabolas of hundreds of footys looping over and over, and the red-faced coaches shouting instructions within huddles of sometimes a hundred peering fans, the scene often resembles a Bruegel painting of a medieval public gathering.

  Perth’s obsession with sport has literally shaped the character of the city. Some eighty per cent of all open spaces within the city limits are sporting grounds, which are in turn used by only five per cent of the population on very rare occasions. The first mention of sport in Perth was made in 1829 by Captain Charles Fremantle, who’d been sent ahead of Stirling’s settler ships to secure the high ground of Arthur Head, on the site of the town that would bear his name. Fremantle had fought on an American battlefield at the tender age of eleven, when he’d become for a period a child-prisoner of war. He was later the recipient of the first gold medal awarded by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution back in the old country, for swimming a rope through surf out into the English Channel to a wrecked Swedish ship. Having set up a rudimentary fortification on Arthur Head, Fremantle described in quite neutral terms the sport his men (presumably bored and pent-up after months at sea) were having slaughtering seals with tomahawks around Bathers Beach.

  The first horse race in the colony took place a few years later, on October 2 1833, and further south, near where Tony Jones’s C.Y. O’Connor statue sits out in the waves. A crowd gathered in the dunes to watch the race, eat ginger bread and be entertained by a ‘lame fiddler’ until the seven Timor ponies (one owned by Lionel Samson had the name ‘More in Sorrow Than in Anger’) set off down the beach – although the winner’s name hasn’t survived.

  Whale watching also became a pastime for the residents of Fremantle, although not of the kind favoured today. Shore-based whaling in Gage Roads was an important early industry to Perth’s survival, and Arthur Head was a good place to watch the whaling boats paddle out to chase and possibly harpoon the passing Humpbacks.

  But all this was before the introduction of football and cricket, the former especially taking hold and consolidating community identities. Bishop Salvado, who once kept his New Norcia mission afloat by giving piano recitals to the citizens of Perth, organised a Nyungar cricket team in the 1870s. This team travelled down to the city and not only regularly beat the locals but were enthusiastically cheered on by local crowds. In Bishop Salvado’s journal, he describes:

  It is incredible how much excitement the New Norcia Cricket Eleven is causing. I have not stopped anywhere that they have not asked me about the New Norcia cricketers. If they were going to compete for a Chair in Theology or Canon Law, no-one would care about them, but if it is about cricket, what can be more important? They told me yesterday people will even come from York to see them play! Just imagine what a sensation it will cause if they manage to defeat the Perth and Fremantle cricketers!

  And they did, on many occasions, although the team later disbanded when their white captain-coach Henry Lefroy gave it up to concentrate on running his station, which is a real pity considering the influence that Nyungar athletes have had on football.

  My father’s team, West Perth, was nicknamed ‘The Garlic Munchers’ because of its strong ethnic contingent, and the term wasn’t derogatory. He said playing against the Fremantle teams reminded him of playing against Collingwood in the VFL, because the Fremantle crowds had a similar kind of feral intensity. The old Fremantle–Perth rivalry now enshrined in the Dockers–Eagles derbies started early, and so did the animosity. Ron Davidson describes one Fremantle–Perth game in 1892 that ended in a riot when the Fremantle crowd captured the umpire (a former Perth player) and beat him up, claiming bias. One of the Fremantle officials, Harry Marshall, by day an Essex Street baker and founder of the Lumpers’ Union, shouted out, ‘Bring ’em down and go for ’em. I’ll pay the costs.’ The umpire barely escaped with his life, and only then after the intercession of a Fremantle player. Marshall was charged and put in jail. When he’d done his time he was greeted at the prison gates by a marching band and large crowd, who cheered him through the streets. Soon after, and campaigning from prison on another charge, he ran for the state government’s Legislative Council, and was elected – something that The West Australian newspaper called ‘a disgrace to the whole colony’.

  I can still remember traces of this atmosphere at the games I went to with my father in the late 1970s, particularly when Phil and Jimmy Krakouer were playing. Writer and academic Sean Gorman has used football in Perth to look at local matters of culture and identity, and in his book Legends: The AFL Indigenous Team of the Century, it’s clear that respect was hard to come by given prevailing attitudes, although sport was one area this became possible. Ted Kilmurray changed the game with his invention of the ‘over the shoulder snap’ while running away from the goals, as did Polly Farmer with his use of the long handball. Then there was Syd Jackson, Bill Dempsey, Barry Cable, Stephen Michael and later the Krakouer brothers, who electrified the VFL when they first entered the competition (and are the subject of a terrific biography by Gorman, Brotherboys). And then there was that pivotal image in Australian sporting history: in 1993, in what Gorman describes as ‘both a delicately poignant moment and a statement of significant power … either Nicky Winmar’s most public priva
te moment or his most private public moment’, when Winmar, who started his career with South Fremantle, bared his breast to a taunting Collingwood crowd during an AFL match and defiantly pointed to his skin.

  It’s often said that a view of Perth is best appreciated from the heights of Mount Eliza, where you can look down into the city and observe the clouds playing across the mirrored surfaces of the glass towers massed by the foreshore. As George Seddon has pointed out, the ‘oblique aerial view’ of Perth from Kings Park, beneath the parapet of lemonscented gums that leads to the War Memorial, has been recorded by artists and photographers from the first days of the colony. Whether it’s the case that no other capital city in Australia has such a ‘constant and universally preferred point of vantage’, Perth’s ‘unparalleled visual record’ is relevant mainly because it offers not only a picture of the growth of the city at the foot of the bluff but also a way of interpreting how perceptions of the metropolis have changed over the years, and how these most often represent ‘aspiration rather than reality’.

  The very first recorded image of a view from the site is a beautifully rendered painting by Frederick Garling, the official artist on Stirling’s reconnoitre of 1827. The painting depicts an open woodland that is clearly the result of Nyungar firestick practices, near where kangaroo were driven off the bluff and into the spears of waiting hunters, and near where the recently constructed steel and glass walkway rises in a graceful arch through the tuart and marri forest canopy. What is curious about Garling’s painting is that, unlike the majority of images that followed it, the view is concentrated upon the south, at the convergence of the Canning and Swan rivers, oriented towards the assumed new capital at Point Heathcote rather than the site to the east that Stirling actually chose. It was here that Stirling named the bluff Mount Eliza, after Governor Darling’s wife, another offering to the benefactor who’d made the voyage possible.