Perth

by David Whish-Wilson

  Views of Perth recorded from Kings Park focus upon the low rise that St Georges Terrace straddles, sweeping round on the left and embracing the half-moon crescent of Mounts Bay, before the river disappears behind the city, with the Darling Scarp running in a corrugated line across the eastern horizon. The early sketches of Perth amid the tuart woodland spotted with settlers’ tent and wattle and daub huts, small jetties and sailboats out in Perth Water, market gardens planted along the edge of Mounts Bay, each capture a tone of fragility and respite, the first tentative landmarks of western civilisation set against an illusory ‘wilderness’.

  Subsequent images depict the disappearance of the market gardens along the shoreline of Mounts Bay, soon replaced by an avenue of cape lilacs, through to the appearance of the town’s first major buildings, although the tone is still Romantic, the image Arcadian. The elevation and the contemplative light allow the artist to frame the tranquil urban landscape from a hygienic distance, and thereby avoid the depiction of a village of expanses of hot sand between structures; the poverty of the majority of Perth’s inhabitants; the soot and grime from the coal furnaces, cement works, brick factory and train station dusted across the facades of ageing buildings. On the shoreline, disease was rife for much of the nineteenth century, due primarily to the unsanitary conditions, although according to the beliefs of the time the culprit was the miasma, the presence of foul air emanating from Third Swamp (now Hyde Park) through to Lake Kingsford (where the train station is now situated), and from the shallow and increasingly polluted waters of Mounts Bay, all of which were reclaimed to varying degrees in an attempt to reduce flooding and rectify the problem of disease. In this context, the role of the south-westerly wind in blowing away the miasmic odours, believed to be responsible for diseases ranging from dysentery to ophthalmia, gave added importance to its traditional nickname: the Fremantle Doctor.

  Postcard pictures taken in the twentieth century do little to alter the Romantic perspective, although the delicate hand of the painter, so effective in capturing the almost supernatural clarity of Perth’s early morning and late afternoon light, is replaced by the photographer’s need for direct sunshine. Since the advent of colour photography in the 1940s, the pictures have maintained a remarkable consistency in their slightly over-exposed but cheerful tone. Photographs taken at night over the past decade hint at a new aspiration, suggesting a city of stimulation and nocturnal action: all neon, flashing beacons and fluorescent skyscrapers above a freeway streaked with traffic.

  The images of Perth also reveal an evolution in the way that the Kings Park foreground is perceived, as well as a record of how it was transformed, according to the gardening fashions down the years. English country garden with rotundas and grottos and stone-bordered rose beds have given way to a contemporary preference for local native flora. Early nineteenth-century paintings of the park also contain idealised images of Nyungar, whose decorative function serves to reinforce the atmosphere of the pastoral idyll, while the trees are not recognisably Australian until much later. Kings Park is deservedly beloved by many, as a place where generations of children have played and adults have biked and walked, a place of celebration for families and wedding parties. The park is the site of the city’s botanical gardens and the hugely popular wildflower festival; at four square kilometres it is one of the largest inner-city parks in the world, with two-thirds of the total acreage made up of native woodland interspersed with walking trails.

  What is now known as Kings Park was set aside as public lands by Stirling and Roe in 1829, although the park grew in size due to the intercession of Roe’s replacement, the Surveyor General Malcolm Fraser, and subsequently Premier John Forrest, who, urged on by his forward-thinking and botanically minded wife Margaret, expanded the park’s area in 1890 to roughly its current 1003 acres.

  Margaret Forrest was a noted artist, and although born in France to a French mother, as the daughter of Edward Hamersley she was, like her husband, among the first generation of settlers’ children. Margaret’s painting career diminished after her husband’s election to the federal parliament in 1901, but she is remembered in particular for being one of the originating members of the short-lived but influential Wilgie Club (wilgie is the Nyungar word for ochre), who practised plein-air painting in the manner of the Heidelberg School, and later as president of the Western Australian Society of Arts, but more particularly for her wildflower paintings. Perth is situated in the middle of one the world’s thirty-four biodiversity hotspots. With its distinctive flora, in particular its numerous banksia varieties, there was a great interest in botanical drawings to add to the collections of various museums.

  As Jan Altmann and Julie Prott describe in Out of the Sitting Room: Western Australian Women’s Art 1829–1914, after an invitation by Dr Mueller of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, a few skilled Western Australian women were able to make a good living from botanical drawing, at a time when women were excluded from arts education in general. In particular, Margaret struck up two friendships with visiting British women, Marianne North and Marian Ellis Rowan, whose combination of detail and composition had greatly influenced the development of botanical illustration into an art form, primarily by locating the painting of flora within the broader landscape tradition. Margaret and Marian Ellis Rowan travelled extensively throughout Western Australia, but it’s one particular painting by Marianne North (now kept at Kew Gardens) that illustrates the way these artists were able to redefine a genre by painting native flora plein-air, or on the site of its discovery. North’s Eucalyptus Macrocarpa, painted in 1880, consists of the detailed depiction of the flower in various stages of undress, its sticky flowers containing hundreds of tiny floating arms like sea anemone. Because the flower is foregrounded against the backdrop of an inclined woodland, the eye slides off the image but always returns to the mysterious and vital flower that dominates the plane of view, and lends the painting a quite disorienting power. The story goes that upon hearing of the presence of a flowering Macrocarpa near Toodyay, the two women saddled their horses and rode eight hours to find and paint the tree.

  The ‘Fallen Soldier’s Memorial’ to commemorate those who died in the Boer War was built in Kings Park with a view over the city, on land sacred to the Nyungar. After the Great War came the 10th Light Horse Memorial and the Pietro Porcelli– designed Jewish War Memorial. The latter’s foundation stone was laid by Sir John Monash and it is believed to be the first Jewish memorial in a public place in Australia. The defining feature of the memorialising landscape is the Cenotaph, an eighteen-metre Egyptian-styled obelisk designed by Sir Joseph Talbot Hobbs, who was a World War I general and divisional commander, as well as one of Perth’s leading architects. Hobbs’s Cenotaph was completed in 1929 and finally dedicated by Rabbi David Freedman. As Anzac Day grew in popularity the Concourse was constructed, and then, after World War II, came the Court of Contemplation, with its eternal flame set amid a pool of cool clear water, above the graven words ‘Let Silent Contemplation Be Your Offering’.

  If all this seems rather elaborate, this is because the Great War affected Perth, and indeed Western Australia, very badly. The state had only twenty-four years previously received its right to selfgovernment from Britain, at a time when a majority of the population were London born, and many Perth residents still saw themselves as part of a ‘land facing west’. Western Australia voted for conscription and fulfilled its expected quota of volunteers three times over. Consequently, fully one-quarter of the troops at Gallipoli were Western Australian. With more than 30 000 men and women volunteering, the percentage of volunteers per head of population was well above the national average; this enthusiasm is expressed in the tragic casualty rate of 53.7 per cent of those who enlisted, or some 18 000 men. That was nearly half of the eligible male population of Western Australia wiped out or physically and mentally debilitated, meaning that their families also became casualties of the war. One tragic example is Katharine Susannah Prichard’s husband, Victoria Cross wi
nner Hugo Throssell. He took his own life after the war, after she had already lost her father to suicide.

  My own father is a Vietnam veteran. Because of the hostility he and others encountered upon returning home, and the sensitivities involved, we were never brought up to particularly observe Anzac Day, although he began to march a few years ago in Tasmania. However, as a child in Kings Park it was hard not to be affected by one thing more than any other: the Avenues of Honour along the kilometres of roads that curl through the park, with each of the 1500 gum trees marked by an understated plaque at its feet that details the name of the dead soldier and the manner of his dying (‘action’ or ‘wounds’). Most of the memorial trees were planted by family members, many in unison on 4 August 1919 at the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, when hundreds of the fathers and mothers and wives and children of the dead soldiers knelt in the grey sand down long sweeping stretches of limestone road.

  In keeping with the tradition of utilitarian monuments, the park contains many seats and drinking fountains whose users are probably unaware of their original dedication. One the most popular statues within the park is the Margaret Priest–designed Pioneer Women’s Memorial. This nine-foot bronze mother holding her baby is surrounded by stepping stones and bubbles and jets of water, designed to represent native trees of differing heights. The memorial is built near a Whadjuk women’s place, a spring where the Wagyl is said to have risen to from the men’s place at Gooninup, and a birthing site near a scarred tree. Much loved by children, who play in its cool mists, the Pioneer Women’s Memorial stands in contrast to perhaps the oddest of Mount Eliza’s memorials, perhaps because it is not actually in the park: the Edith Cowan Clock on the roundabout outside the park gates.

  Edith Cowan was the first female member of parliament in Australia, one of the founders of the Western Australian National Council of Women in 1912, and a strong campaigner for the welfare of migrants and children. She lived near the park, but upon her death her supporters discovered that her memorial could not be admitted within its extensive borders.

  The debate over the location of Cowan’s memorial gives a representative picture of the struggle that she and others like her faced in the conservative Perth of the 1930s. Whether it was because she’d offended someone on the Kings Park Board due to her activism or because the board was genuinely ‘disinclined to favourably view the erection of further memorials other than national ones’, the result was that the mayor could only endorse the placing of a monument to Cowan’s memory at the gateway to the park, on council lands. Cowan’s status as a defender of the underdog was invoked, her nurturing presence as homemaker, but it was the justification of a writer in a daily newspaper that is probably most representative of the discourse of the time, the fact that above all else ‘[s] he was an excellent speaker and a brilliant thinker. She was one of the best read women in Western Australia … It has often been said that she possessed the mind of a man.’ And so the six-metre Art Deco Donnybrook-stone clock that memorialises Cowan’s service to the community, she who had succeeded in a ‘male domain’, the first public monument to an Australian woman, is actually a rather unremarkable clock tower.

  I drive around Cowan’s memorial on my way into the city, often negotiating tourist buses heading into Kings Park, although I’m never able to observe the memorial without calling to mind the career of her contemporary, but sometimes rival, Bessie Rischbieth. Rischbieth grew up in Adelaide, raised by her uncle and aunt. Her uncle was a progressive politician and made sure she received a good education. She married into money, and after moving to Perth she became one of the founding members of the Women’s Service Guild of Western Australia in 1909. Alongside formidable working-class woman Jean Beadle, the first-wave feminist Guild, under Rischbieth’s leadership, went on to lobby for major reforms, which, according to historian Kate White, included the appointment of women police and justices of the peace, the setting up of free kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training, the improvement of girls’ educational opportunities, the establishment of a monthly paper, and ‘improved conditions for women in government institutions, particularly the Old Woman’s Home and Fremantle gaol, improved and extended nursing services in the state; and, perhaps its most persistent demand, the provision of a government maternity hospital’.

  Rischbieth had a bitter falling-out with Edith Cowan but pressed on both interstate and internationally. Having confronted Billy Hughes in his Canberra offices after World War I, she persuaded the prime minister to appoint an alternate female delegate to the newly constituted League of Nations, among other successful measures, so that, according to writer Dianne Davidson, ‘In 1928 a visiting Victorian feminist hailed tiny, isolated Perth as “the Mecca of the Women’s Movement in Australia” and the source of “streams of inspiration and knowledge to the rest of the continent.”’

  Rischbieth was trapped in Europe for the duration of World War II, but during her absence, the prime minister, John Curtin, finally instituted one of the Guild’s main demands for a universal child endowment payment. After her return, she remained active in the women’s movement, although she’s mostly remembered for an iconic photograph taken in 1964. Only months before her death, aged eighty-nine, she stood by the Swan River in bare feet and raincoat and cheerful hat, holding a brolly above her head to protect herself from the rain, while blocking bulldozers at work reclaiming Mounts Bay for the Narrows Bridge project.

  In a period that tended to create strong rather than pliable characters, both Cowan and Rischbieth have become intertwined in my memory with the type of unsentimental and forthright Perth woman that I remember among the generation of my grandmother, who was herself a case in point. Despite strong ideas about how a woman should behave, and despite the limited opportunities available to women at that time, my mother and her three sisters have each remained creative and resilient and adventurous and, most obvious of all, comfortable in their own skins. Their Perth childhood was idyllic: they swam, surfed, danced, played in bands, painted, travelled and worked, part of a 1960s Perth generation insulated from the conflict and turmoil going on elsewhere in the world.

  Something else that’s evident from the view over the city at Kings Park is the length and breadth of the reclaimed land that now constitutes much of the city foreshore, although the scope of this expanse of grass is most apparent when on foot, crossing the foreshore in summer, the sun belting down and radiating off the hard-baked earth.

  The Perth City Council’s strategy has always been to adjust plot ratios for those developers prepared to facilitate pedestrian access and retail and dining options on the level of the street, but only recently has this been successful in terms of drawing people back into the ‘dead heart’ of the city. The revitalisation of many of the derelict buildings and alleys and arcades of the inner city, and the opening of small bars and restaurants throughout, has gone some way towards achieving this; however, one oddity often remarked about Perth is the continuing separation of the river from the city by the broad swath of grass that stretches from the freeway ramps beneath Mount Eliza to the Causeway Bridge at the other end of the foreshore, and still looks like the airstrip it once was.

  If the Esplanade and Langley Park have become rarely used civic spaces over the past eighty years, this was not always the case. From 1885 until they finally closed in 1920, the Perth City Baths, with their beautiful Moorish cupolas at the end of a 300-metre jetty, were very popular. Following the closure of the baths, the equally popular White City at the foot of William Street, run by the Ugly Men’s Association (who had a smaller, but similar site in Fremantle), was a fixture from 1917 until 1929. A kind of low-fi Luna Park, at a time when Perth city still hosted a residential population of workers and their families, White City was often described as a place for the common man and woman to recreate and relax. Run as a charity, whose funds went to Trades Hall, by day White City was a fairground with all of the usual side-show treats for children, including an open-air cinema and an enormous wo
oden slide, but also, according to Terri-Ann White – ‘Boxing, Buckjumping, Whippet racing and Games of Chance – Housey-housey and Sweat-wheels.’ By night the dance floor came alive, and the brightly lit fairground became a place for the young to gather.

  The fraternising between the young, the possibilities for gambling and, even worse, communication between whites and blacks, was what ultimately caused White City to be seen as the moral equivalent of the site’s sewage problems, caused by the high water table and the often flooding river. Stephen Kinnane’s book Shadow Lines refers to the importance of the place for enabling meetings in a space that allowed for relative anonymity. It might even be the place where his white grandfather and Miriwoong grandmother met for the first time, maintaining a love affair that survived long after A.O. Neville relinquished his power. It’s for this reason, I suppose, that while White City is largely unremembered by the broader community, it seems to hold a special place in Indigenous memories of the time.

  The new Elizabeth Quay project, despite the medieval thinking behind its naming (apparently when Premier Colin Barnett told Queen Elizabeth it was to be named in her honour, she responded that she was ‘broadly in support of it’), aims to return the city to the lapping edges of Perth Water, and to bring back the pedestrians with it. I quite liked the original ‘Dubai on the Swan’ proposal put forward by the previous Labor government, with its towers and restaurants and large pool of circulating river water, although even the heavily compromised replacement design underway has been criticised for its potential to disrupt traffic – always a big no-no in car-centric Perth – and otherwise disturb the status quo.