The River

‘Thank God we don’t outlive all of our childhood fancies.’

Tim Winton, Land’s Edge

Twice a day, the skin of the Swan River rises in a small ripple as the tidal surge makes its way from the river mouth at Fremantle through Perth Water and up into the higher reaches of the river near the fast-growing suburb of Ellenbrook, just over twenty kilometres north-east of Perth. In winter, when a layer of brackish water runs off the scarp towards the ocean, the river flows in two directions, with the fresh water flowing seawards above the saline water flowing in beneath it.

Today the diurnal bulge of water that reveals the incoming tide is invisible. It’s a Sunday morning and I’m out on the river in an open kayak with my Uncle Scott, my father’s youngest brother. Scott moved from Tasmania to Perth as a teenager in the 1970s. Like so many others, he stayed for the climate and the lifestyle and the opportunity to work.

We put in to the river at Middle Swan and slowly glide our way upstream towards Ellen Brook, which takes its name from Captain James Stirling’s young bride. This part of the river marks the furthest point that Stirling reached during his reconnoitre of 1827, with his small crew in one of the HMS Success’s longboats, not knowing if he would get the opportunity to return.

Stirling had married Ellen Mangles, the daughter of a wealthy merchant with links to the East India Company, in 1823. He was thirty-two and she was sixteen. The story goes that Stirling first came across Ellen as a young teen, her feet astride two bareback horses, reins in her left and right hands, the nineteenth-century equivalent of hooning on her father’s estate.

Portraits of Stirling as a young man emphasise his dark eyes; his grim, almost bitter mouth; and the stiff military posture expected of an officer. He’d joined the navy at the age of twelve, but he was an ambitious thirty-six-year-old when he was posted to Sydney in 1826. He convinced New South Wales governor Ralph Darling to allow him to survey the Swan River, although he was not the first European to visit the area.

In 1616 Dutchman Dirk Hartog surveyed the western coast of Australia and by 1627 Rottnest Island appeared on the first maps. The first reports of the Swan River were made in 1697 by fellow Dutchman Willem de Vlamingh’s party, who entered the river and journeyed as far as the Causeway flats. While de Vlamingh is mostly remembered for naming Perth’s favourite holiday island Rats-nest (after the marsupial quokka), an island that he found to be a ‘terrestrial paradise … delightful above all others I’ve seen’, he also named the river Swartte Swanne Drift (Black Swan River). Representative of the fabulousness of European imaginings of the Great Southern Land at the time, de Vlamingh wrote that based on his discovery of ‘gigantic human footprints … That river leads to a land inhabited by giants.’

More than a century later, the French arrived in Western Australian waters as part of an expedition to map the coastline of the continent. In 1801 Sub-lieutenant Francois-Antoine Boniface Heirrison of the Naturaliste was commanded to take a longboat and explore the estuary and upper reaches of the Swan River. Post-Enlightenment explorers the Frenchmen might have been, part of the largest scientific team to ever leave Europe, but they were also chary of visiting a land where, according to academic Ross Gibson, there existed birds that didn’t fly, rivers that flowed inland, and wood that didn’t float. It must have seemed a bad omen when huge sharks circled their longboat en route from the Naturaliste to the river mouth (they caught one, a fourteen-footer). They were prepared for the worst, arming themselves with a small cannon and a musket for each man.

Inside the estuary, Heirrison was impressed. The area was densely wooded, with ‘beautiful flowering shrubs’, and the black swans were edible. Near the muddy, mosquito-ridden surrounds of the island that now bears Heirrison’s name, the men did indeed identify a giant’s footprint, which led to them doubling their sentries and burning bonfires through the night. However, it wasn’t until they were further upriver that they were greeted ‘by the most heart-chilling howls, so close that they seemed to emanate from the reeds,’ Heirrison wrote. ‘Feeling at a disadvantage under the cover of darkness, against an adversary whether man or beast, we chose to remain in mid-stream – where we spent a wretched night under the teeming rain.’

Twenty-seven years later, following his own inspection of the area, Stirling knew that London was the best place to influence those who might realise his project: a colony on the Swan River that he suggested calling Hesperia, ‘indicating a Country looking towards the Setting Sun’. He was in luck. The Duke of Wellington became prime minister of Britain in 1828, and one of Stirling’s old Scottish familial allies, the member for Perth in the national parliament, Sir George Murray, was named Minister for War and the Colonies. With a scratch of Murray’s quill, the settlement scheme was on. Stirling would later repay those who had made the venture possible by naming the settlement Perth (the alternative proposed was Kingston) and its main thoroughfares Wellington, Murray and Hay streets (the third after Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Hay, the public servant who’d supported Stirling).

As is the case with any real estate venture today, flyers were immediately circulated and advertisements were taken out. The resulting ‘Swan River Mania’, as it was described in British newspapers, came down to Stirling tapping into the desires of a motivated caste of largely urban Britons: adventurers and those who would these days be called the ‘aspirational class’ – those wealthy enough to emigrate but not so rich that they might be insulated from the difficult economic conditions of the period.

We paddle quietly past the newly restored All Saints Church in Henley Brook, made of local mud bricks and oyster-shell lime. It is the oldest – and perhaps the smallest – church in Perth. Adorned with a simple bellcote, the church was built to mark the place where Stirling had prayed with his men in 1827 before returning downriver. In his journal, Stirling described how

the richness of the soil, the bright foliage of the shrubs, the majesty of the surrounding trees, the abrupt and red colour banks of the river occasionally seen, and the view of the blue mountains, from which we were not far distant, made the scenery of this spot as bieutiful [sic] as anything of the kind I have ever witnessed.

For us, too, it’s a beautiful spring morning and the river is peaceful and the muddy banks high. You can smell the bricks baking at the local works and hear the drone of traffic on Reid Highway, but there is nobody else on the water. We pass some of Australia’s oldest vineyards – Houghton and Sandalford – and dozens of newer ones, part of the original allotments disbursed by Surveyor-General Roe. The dry winter has limited the run-off from the Swan/Avon catchment (the Avon, Canning and Helena rivers are the Swan’s three main tributaries), and while the water is brackish rather than saline, there is little flow to breach the incoming tide.

The tidal influence is felt right up to Ellen Brook, so the birdlife is similar to the lower estuary; there are shags and pelicans in large numbers, which suggests that there are plentiful fish but also that the river is more saline than usual. In a winter of heavy rain, practically the whole of the Swan River estuary is flushed out with fresh water and the more freshwater-intolerant fish are forced to migrate out into the ocean for a time. A neighbour of mine who works for the Swan River Trust told me that the Swan River bull sharks pup in the upper river during spring, and that one of their main food sources is birdlife. The pelicans and cormorants look unconcerned.

The shags move about like sticks thrown from tree to tree, or settle on pontoons and jetties to dry their wings. I’ve always been fascinated by the shag, the generic term for the four types of cormorant and one species of darter found on the Swan. When I was a child spear-fishing in the river, nervous of dark shadowy shapes, it was common to see a shag glide into a school of mullet or trum-peter beneath me, often many at the same time. Sometimes shags hunt communally, and because their feathers contain no protective oils (although strangely for this reason they look like the greasiest of birds) they spend a fair proportion of their time perched on rocks or branches with their sodden black wings comically draped in the sunshine, like skinny angels.

Novelist Seaforth Mackenzie wrote beautifully about this section of the upper river from his perspective as a boarder at Guildford Grammar, the same private boys’ school where my younger brother learnt everything he needed to survive some tough years in the army. The first time I read Mackenzie’s 1937 novel The Young Desire It, I identified with his narrator, a shy boy prone to spending time alone by the river. His budding sexuality is reflected in his observations of the waters, where the ‘air was warm and sweet with the rotting water-levels of winter floods. Snags thrust up above their brown reflections … drying and crusted with their own watery decay, but hard as iron beneath, and slippery to the swimmer’s naked foot.’

I didn’t go to a private boarding school, but the dislocation that Mackenzie’s narrator feels when removed from his mother’s rural property was something I understood. Our family had moved from the Pilbara, in the north of Western Australia, to Perth in 1976. Because of my father’s employment in the Royal Australian Air Force, and later in the mining game, my mother estimates that in my first ten years we moved some twenty-one times before we finally settled in Perth.

We were used to moving interstate and overseas, from air-force base to small country town, but this was the first time I remember feeling any degree of culture shock. In the city, kids wore socks and shoes rather than getting about barefoot. They spoke a strange coded language gleaned from a popular culture that was alien to me. The air was heavy and damp (my sister recalls the ‘uncomfortable feeling’ that she was unable to articulate at the time, as it was so alien to us, of ‘being cold’), and the suburbs stretched endlessly on our weekend drives up into the hills.

So the river was a haven for me. It was a place that reminded me of the one I’d left behind, where spiders and goannas and parrots and eagles had ruled the gullies, mud crabs and hermit crabs and mudskippers had populated the mangroves, and wild donkeys and kangaroos had filled the spaces now taken up by people. It was in the yellow sands and quarried limestone crags and bronzed shallows that I felt most at home as a child newly arrived from the desert. Here my brother and I dug out cave cubbies from the banks of sand. We hunted rabbits with bows and arrows, we speared cobbler, and we paddled out on surfboards into the broader river.

I can still remember the moment when I was suddenly happy to be in Perth, when I first felt like I belonged to my new home. It was an early summer morning on an incoming tide and I was alone in the water. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. Walking along the muddy foreshore, I’d seen the imprints of flathead in perfect moulds at low tide, the fan shape of their side-fins and the great weight of their spotted flanks, the broad-arrow indentation of their cavernous mouths at rest. I’d become fascinated by this lurking predator, as I would later become fascinated by the kingie, or mulloway, and later still sharks, finding as many books and speaking to as many fishermen and women as I could on the subject.

I’d caught a few flathead on a line from jetties but they were nowhere near the size I’d witnessed in lies left in the squelchy mud. Armed with a gidgee, I swam out into the current and drifted over the local sandbank at high tide, with its wave-rippled skin and sea-lettuce tumbleweed, anticipating the flathead lying in wait for the school-fish who fed in the shallows. And they were, camouflaged against the speckled mud, watchful as my shadow drifted across them. I was able to remain immobile except for my shivering, and let the current carry me – relaxed and concentrating at the same time. The large brown phyllorhiza punctata and the smaller white aurelia aurita jellyfish drifted with me and around me, my fellow travellers in the tidal current.

In her novel Black Mirror, Gail Jones describes the jellyfish as ‘fruit bowls pulsating above her, light caught semi-circular in their fleshy domes … she half expected to see a baby-face heave jellyfish-like into view’, while Robert Drewe in his novel The Drowner describes them undulating ‘below the surface as if swaying under glass. In their translucent but individually patterned globes the urgent faces of unborn babies press up against the ceiling.’ These images of gestation would have appealed to me as a child, fascinated by the strange mobility of an unboned creature in an amniotic brine. The jellyfish were sometimes so numerous in the shallows that you could swim through them and upon them – the tactile nudge and little shiver of pleasure and revulsion as they brushed against my belly, face and legs.

This was a time in my life when, to use author Brenda Walker’s expression, I lived within ‘a loose muscular happiness that [my] mind was going to have trouble catching up with’, except that it did, and too soon, leaving me with only the memory of the small epiphany I had that morning floating in the river: the sunlight burning my naked back, illuminating the algae-rich shallows; the gobbleguts, blowies and hardyheads accustomed to my presence. As a giant flathead spurted away into the darkness leaving a trail of smuts like a departing steam train, all of the sensual confusion of cold water and hot sun, and levitation and submersion, came together in a sudden recognition that I have never forgotten: the feeling of belonging to a place that did not belong to me, but only made an introverted kid feel more protective, even loving, of the river that carried him along on its soft skin.

About a kilometre downstream from Ellen Brook, the still surface of the river becomes covered in the delicate white flowers of the flooded gum, while beside us cicadas work up a racket and a whistling kite swoops over to take a look. It isn’t hard to imagine the river as a billabong, so still and quiet in the midday heat, or as a place where restless spirits reside. I was a boy brought up on the stories of May Gibbs, who lived in Perth as a young girl and teenager. Her gumnut babies were inspired by the fruits of the marri tree, and her Wicked Banksia Men were created when, as a child out walking in the Western Australian bush, she came across ‘a grove of banksia trees, and sitting on almost every branch were these ugly little, wicked men’.

For a boy newly arrived to Perth, swimming in this part of the river always unnerved me, especially treading water in the pools dark with leaf litter and laterite alluvium, the shaded banks and strange cold currents tugging at my feet, the unusual lack of buoyancy. My parents had all the illustrated Ainslie Roberts and Charles Mountford books on Aboriginal mythology, and I remember watching the Swan River frothing over rock pools within a forest of sloughing wind and granite boulders, sacred kingfishers swooping dragonflies over the tannic water, and being reminded of Roberts’ pictures of dreaming landscapes, with their dramatic images of mythological characters. There was something about the resin-smelling water and lemony sunlight and humid dampness of the forest floor that evoked a sense of the uncanny. This impression was accentuated on our way home through the town of Guildford and its surrounding suburbs, although the mythos belonged to a different culture and a different time.

Just as it was affecting to see the Swan River in the hills so different from its long flat lower reaches, it was always odd to pass through Guildford on the same journey and be reminded of the illustrations of Tarry Town in Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Guildford was so unlike the open country and spreading suburbs I knew further west: everything seemed smaller and older, more like a medieval market village. The air was cooler and even the sky lower. Shadows were darker. There was dampness. The homes seemed snug and their yards resembled the cottage gardens of an English county village. The narrow river passed beneath a small jarrah bridge. It wasn’t hard to imagine a headless horseman and to relocate the stories of English highwaymen that I so enjoyed.

My impressions of Guildford and nearby Bassendean were always fleeting, made on trips to the footy and passing through to the hills. I usually only met kids from the hills at youth camps or football carnivals, and I was always aware that they seemed tougher than lowlanders. They spoke of owning rifles and motorbikes, like country kids. Their playground wasn’t the ocean but the expanse of bush on the other side of the scarp. I was always jealous of their freedom, which reminded me of my time in the Pilbara.

In a Judah Waten short story, ‘To a Country Town’, first published in 1947, the narrator’s father is a disappointed migrant in ‘a very hard, inhospitable land for a Jew to live in’. In contrast to the myth he’d been sold before his arrival of ‘a country bathed in gold’, he reflects that in the hills of Perth, he’d discovered ‘such poverty … that it would make your hair stand on end’. This is the older persona of the Perth hills, an area more usually represented as a place of quiet beauty and solitude, a refuge for lowlanders looking to get away from the city, a spot for picnics (which it always was for us as kids) and weekenders. But Judah Waten’s family soon found a community in the hills, where the poverty and hardship created a working-class camaraderie that defined the local culture more than ethnicity or religion. It’s the kind of culture that shaped the man that celebrated economist Nugget Coombs would become, for example, and it’s expressed in the short stories of Katharine Susannah Prichard and the tough-minded paintings by former German prisoner-of-war camp inmate Guy Grey-Smith.

The hills have also existed as a respite for those who don’t quite fit into the lowland suburban culture of greater Perth, people who might want to do things differently: bikies, artists, hippies and tree-changers, among others. As a result, the tough kids from the hills I met on camps were always hard to reconcile with my naive picture of wildflower season in the national parks that ridge the scarp, just as it was always hard to reconcile my picture of the slow, shallow Swan River near Guildford with what I knew was a river prone to severe flooding.

We were taught in school that during the 1926 flood the Swan River broke its banks and spread five kilometres across the fertile floodplain of the Swan Valley, while downriver the same flood took out the original Fremantle Railway Bridge only moments after a train had passed over it. The first recorded flood was in 1830, when the river rose 6.1 metres above its normal level. The floods continued regularly right up to the 1960s, by which time the river had been properly ‘trained’ to course along dredged channels that originate on the scarp near Northam and Toodyay, north-east of Perth, down to its mouth at Fremantle.

In the early 1960s, when my father was a new arrival at the Pearce Air Force Base, he was washed away in one of these intermittent floods. The base is north of Perth and my father had been eager to get into the city for an appointment. Upon seeing the stalled traffic and the swollen river washing over the bridge, he asked a local truck driver whether his Volkswagen Beetle might make it across. The truck driver, obviously noticing that my crew-cut father with Victorian plates was a t’othersider, gamely suggested that he might ‘give it a go’. But as soon as the Beetle entered the waters, its wheels lifted and it was carried downriver. Water gushed into the car past the brake and clutch pedals, the car tipped forwards, and my father thought he was about to die.

Fortunately, the river deposited the car on a knoll in a paddock downstream before it could tumble underwater. When my father turned on the windscreen wipers, he saw that a horse was staring at him from only feet away. My father wound down the windows and opened the car doors and waited until all of the water had drained out, turned the ignition key, and miraculously started the car. He then drove out of the paddock, with the horse following him.

This flood was almost as bad as the 1926 flood. According to the records, the 1963 flood caused families in the Guildford area to be evacuated, and the river ran high and brackish for two months. The 280-kilometre-long Avon/Swan River has a catchment area of some 193 000 square kilometres, much of which derives from the salt-lake country on the scarp, and the Avon River in particular is quite saline, where the Canning is fresh.

If Guildford and the Swan Valley seemed ripe for me to populate with mythological figures, this was because of my passion for all things bushranger. One of the first books my mother gave me was an illustrated history of Australian bushrangers, and I loved the reckless life of the men and women on the run. This fascination only grew once I came across the figure of Joseph Bolitho Johns, or Moondyne Joe as he’s commonly known in Perth. He’s named after the river-valley region beyond the Perth hills where he spent much of his time.

Moondyne Joe probably wouldn’t have made the illustrated Australian bushrangers book, even in the unlikely event that the publishers had been interested in areas outside Victoria and New South Wales. Moondyne Joe never killed anyone. He never held up a stagecoach or waged a pitched gun battle with coppers. Nor was he ever really ‘a terror to the rich man’, although like many of my childhood heroes he did have a passion for fast horses.

Moondyne Joe was the subject of the first novel written about Western Australia, Moondyne: A Story of Convict Life in Western Australia, published in 1879 (although banned in Perth during his lifetime). However, it’s fair to say that the historical Moondyne Joe and the fictional Moondyne are wildly different. The novel was written by John Boyle O’Reilly, a man equally admired in Western Australian folklore as the subject of his novel. He’s remembered in Perth as a Fenian prisoner who escaped the Western Australian convict system to organise a rescue mission for his comrades. Their escape was celebrated in the banned song ‘The Catalpa’ that was still being sung a hundred years later; we learnt it at my local primary school, as did every Perth kid of my generation.

O’Reilly’s novel is the kind of colonial ‘lost world’ adventure later popularised by H. Rider Haggard. Moondyne is taken in by the local Aborigines, who make him their king and reveal to him a cave stuffed with gold. But wealth is not Moondyne’s real focus and he returns to Britain, where he becomes a successful penal reformer.

The historical Moondyne Joe’s adventures and achievements were far more modest, although it’s precisely their human scale that made him such a significant cultural figure to the inhabitants of Perth. Moondyne Joe’s crimes included stealing a horse, petty thieving while on the lam, and allegedly killing an ox. There were escaped convicts who shot police and died violently, but their names have been forgotten; another convict bushranger, Frank Hall, spent time with Nyungar people in the south-west but little is known about him now. Moondyne Joe’s real legacy was his contribution to the satirical urges of his Swan River compatriots and their feelings of resentment towards Governor John Hampton in particular.

Hampton arrived in Perth in 1862 with an already tarnished reputation. He was alleged to have profited from the misuse of convict labour in his previous posting in Tasmania, and he had initially defended the brutal commandant at Norfolk Island, John Price. In Robert Hughes’s account of the early history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, Hughes describes Hampton as ‘a dismally cynical opportunist’ whose practices were ‘odious and corrupt’.

According to historian Ian Elliot, the number of convict escapes rose significantly during Hampton’s harsh tenure in Perth. In one nine-month period between 1866 and 1867, ninety made their getaway, although all were soon recaptured and no doubt flogged. There were some 12 800 lashes of the cat-o-nine-tails delivered during the convict years; every one of them, according to Fenian prisoner Thomas McCarthy Fennell, tore the flesh until ‘ghastly flow the purple fluids from the mangled pulp’. During the construction of the Fremantle Bridge, so many men bolted that a large area of scrub was cleared nearby and extra guards were needed. The regular firing of a warning cannon at Fremantle Prison proved highly unpopular, because, according to The Perth Gazette, it played ‘sad havoc’ with the town windows.

Moondyne Joe, comfortable in the bush of the Avon Valley and the Perth hills, was able to elude capture longer than any other escaped convict. He was rumoured to be living with the Ballardong Nyungar and ranging between many of the landmarks that now bear his name. He once survived for two years on the run within Perth’s small community, who never gave him up despite the large reward. In doing so, Moondyne Joe showed how one might disrupt the disparity of power between a famously cruel, unpopular governor and a powerless and often chained illiterate labourer from Cornwall, who had been sentenced to transportation for possessing stolen cheese, bread and mutton. He embarked on a series of minor actions that drew popular support away from the rulers and towards the lowest caste in white society during that period: the convict.

Moondyne Joe’s exploits came at a time when, according to the polemic of one Fenian prisoner quoted in historian Simon Adams’ The Unforgiving Rope, ‘more real depravity, more shocking wicked-ness, more undisguised vice and immorality is to be witnessed at midday in the most public thoroughfares of Perth, with its population of 1500, than in any other city of fifty times its population, either in Europe or America’. If this is to be believed, the nostalgic dreams of the early settlers to re-create a vanishing English way of life had never been more distant, although the citizens of Perth circa 1862 were greatly entertained by their favourite bushranger.

You can hear the glee in the most famous of the satirical ditties sung around Perth at the time: ‘The governor’s son has got the pip, the governor’s got the measles, but Moondyne Joe has given ’em the slip, pop goes the weasel’. However, there was nothing funny about the special cell built for Moondyne Joe at Fremantle Prison on the orders of Governor Hampton. It was a lightless slot reinforced with jarrah sleepers and iron spikes, and to this day it’s a popular exhibit on the somewhat ghoulish Fremantle Prison tour that also takes in the death-row cells, the whipping frame and the hangman’s scaffold. Neither was there anything funny about the months Joe spent in this cell, nor the fact that, as reported in The Perth Gazette of 12 October 1862, Hampton had personally visited the prison for the express purpose of seeing Joe in chains. The governor had subsequently returned to his residence, the new Government House, ‘with his mind in its normal state of placidity’.

There is something comical, however, about Hampton’s hubristic goad that should Joe ever escape the custom-built cell, he would receive a pardon. This throwaway challenge is the pivot on which the legend of Moondyne Joe turns, because this is precisely what happened next. At risk of dying in his slot, Joe was allowed out of the cell, but only to break rocks in the sun. He did this very skilfully and with a surprising enthusiasm: the pile of limestone rubble built daily until finally it obscured Joe from the nearby guard. Joe had been slyly taking a pick to the prison wall. After constructing an effective dummy out of scavenged wire, a pick and his prison smock, he escaped semi-naked and eluded the authorities until he was finally caught trying to steal wine from Houghton vineyard. He was thrown back into Fremantle Prison, although the new governor, Frederick Weld, upon hearing of his predecessor’s promise, released Joe on parole.

Sadly, little is known about Joe’s later life, except that his brief good fortune soured after he married. He tried to make a go of gold prospecting, but his wife, Louisa Hearn, who had also done time with hard labour on numerous occasions at Fremantle Prison for disorderly conduct, vagrancy and running a brothel (the common fate of many poor women of the period), died at Southern Cross in 1893. She was probably the victim of one of the many typhoid epidemics that swept through the goldfields.

There is a poignant photograph of what was then called the Old Men’s Depot, on Mounts Bay Road east of the Old Swan Brewery. Taken some time in the late 1800s, the photograph captures the depot building in the background, at the foot of Mount Eliza. In the foreground, a number of old men mill around or sit on benches and look at the river. It’s a sad but tranquil scene, as many of the old men are ex-convicts, presumably institutionalised, seeing out their days on meagre charity. A quiet retirement at the Old Men’s Depot doesn’t appear to have interested Moondyne Joe, who escaped this institution as well upon being admitted there as an older man. By this point in his life Moondyne wasn’t ‘of a sound mind’, and perhaps the Depot reminded him of Fremantle Prison.

Moondyne Joe ended his days in 1900 at the place where so many working-class women were incarcerated for so many years, the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, just down the road from the Fremantle Prison. There were no friends or family at his funeral, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave at Fremantle Cemetery that today carries the motif of a pair of handcuffs, broken free at the chain.

I remember skirting the southern approaches of the Swan River at night, sleepy and warm beside my brother and sister in the backseat of our mother’s Volkswagen. The city across the water rose as cheerfully as the castle that bursts onto the screen before Disney movies, and I almost expected to see fireworks behind the cityscape as we crossed the Narrows Bridge, the patterned lights of the Swan Brewery depicting Captain Cook’s glowing HMS Endeavour or a sparkly cruise ship.

Later, when I was a teenager fishing on the river at night, the lights of the city still flowed in motile beams of red and gold and blue over the dark water. Sometimes, while prawning in the various bays neck-deep, with the tintinnids’ eerie chemical luminosity around my hands and feet, I’d look across to the city, and through my salt-smeary eyes I’d see the primary reds and greens of the illuminated buildings and sulphur-haloed freeway shimmering in colour. For a child of the suburbs, the city was never heard and it was never smelled; it was a purely visual experience, always out of reach. The fetor of the river and the silence of the night seemed to hold the city at bay in the distance.

Unlike in the bush, where the quiddity of things often startles and draws focus, there’s something dreamlike about the city beside the stillness of the river, with its backdrop of scarp and bluff. Author Elizabeth Jolley pointed this out in an image of the quiet city in the morning stillness, where ‘[a]cross the wide saucer of water the city lies in repose as if painted on a pale curtain … it has a quality of unreality as if no life with all the ensuing problems could unfold there.’

The mask that Perth shows the river has often concealed the true face of the city that lies behind. St Georges Terrace was once a street of famous views. It was the home of Government House, the dwellings of the gentry and the Palace Hotel, with what one Victorian commentator described as the ‘world’s most famous veranda’, because of its view over Perth Water. The low rise that barely protected the inhabitants from the smell of the stewing, algae-heated waters of Mounts Bay can still be observed as a minor ridge that descends again as it approaches the Causeway. In Robert Drewe’s novel The Drowner, the character Will describes this double city concealed behind the Terrace:

Jostling his way through the crowds along a narrow footpath of oyster shells and sand, Will saw how the early planners had actually created two towns within the one. There was the lovely town comprising the elegant and wealthy St George’s Terrace and Adelaide Terrace and their bisecting streets, with their macadamised road surfaces, Governor’s mansion, river views, shady Cape lilac trees and stately commercial buildings and residences. And the three streets of hotels and shops and boarding houses and small businesses running behind them seemed bustling and prosperous, if only because of the narrowness of the limestone roadways.

Perhaps this is why Rodney Hall, in his late-1980s travel memoir Home, in a chapter dedicated to ‘The Most Remote of Cities’, was able to write that ‘Perth people are friendly, this cannot be denied, and the pace is leisurely. Yet the city seems to have no heart, no shape, no character. In search of character, you should take the first available train to Fremantle.’ By this point in the story of Perth, St Georges Terrace, which had once been, as a local architect noted, ‘a street that you could spend your whole life on’, had become the site of a row of largely featureless office blocks, symptomatic of a ‘donut city’, one empty of life in its centre. Although as Drewe’s character Will suggests, there’s always life behind the now glittering glass-walled facade.

The power and wealth of the corporations resident on St Georges Terrace has magnified due to the latest boom, although the landscape still changes dramatically away from the Terrace. In the narrower Hay, Murray and Wellington streets, there has always been a more diverse human traffic. Here, you could argue that the atmosphere hasn’t changed much since the period described by Tim Winton in Cloudstreet:

Now the days were getting longer and the light was lasting, he’d walk up Hay Street in the evenings and hear the clock on the town hall toll the hour. He liked to walk in the warm five o’clock breeze better than the closepressed tram to the station. People would be hurrying along the pavements, calling, whistling, dropping things, skylarking. Pretty women would be spilling out of Bairds and Foys and Alberts. In Forrest Place, in the rank shade of the GPO, old diggers sat bathing in the breeze and swapping news pages. European fruit sellers, Balts and Italians, would be haranguing from the footpath with their sad faces weary as unmade beds, and along Wellington Street trolley buses would haul full loads of arms and legs up the hill. The sky would be fading blue. The station was sootrimmed and roaring with crowds.

The old diggers have gone from Forrest Place, whose seats have now been taken by office workers eating lunch or street kids with hard faces and sad eyes, as have the greengrocers that once abutted the now demolished Boans department store, although their calls live on in the hawkers cries of a bustling night market. Gone too are the desperately poor who used to inhabit the lodging houses and tenements of upper Hay and Murray streets, a stone’s throw from Parliament House. Entire families would share single rooms, and balconies were walled off and converted into crammed flats. Under the advice of Perth City Council, these tenements were done away with and their occupants were pushed out north and east of the city. Initially they went to the equally crammed tenements of East Perth, and to some extent Northbridge, or what was then called variously Northline, North Perth, the Latin Quarter and Little Italy, due to its long tradition of housing new immigrants. In the 1960s they were moved further afield to the new satellite suburbs of Balga, Nollamara and Girrawheen, where much of the initial public housing stock remains, as well as enduring pockets of disadvantage.

While there were some luxury apartments along Adelaide Terrace in an area traditionally inhabited by the wealthy, the link between tenement living and poverty meant it was very hard to convince councils to build high-density flat and apartment complexes anywhere near the city. The resulting lack of a mixed residential population in the CBD is part of the reason why, on the surface at least, Perth appears to be a highly legible city, a term writer and polymath George Seddon used to describe the accessible experience of Rottnest Island, meaning that it ‘can be easily comprehended, physically and intellectually’. Central Perth is a city of straight streets and right-angle turns that make getting around on foot relatively easy. There is little of the disorientation or social complexity experienced in a densely populated metropolis. Instead, as Alan Alexander indicates in his poem ‘Capital City’, ‘[b]y walking the streets I’m domesticated’. While domesticity of the kind Alexander is referring to here, one that suggests an uncomplicated happiness amid the ‘cultural rub, the vin ordinaire’ of the area behind the Terrace, is certainly not for those seeking edge and excitement, it does speak of the sense of remnant community that Alexander and many others found in the nearby streets during the 1980s.

Walking around the lanes and alleys behind the Terrace, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot more happening at street level in Perth these days. This is primarily due to the zoning interventions of Perth’s mayor, Lisa Scaffidi, the relaxing of once ludicrously restrictive licensing laws, and the fact that, for the first time in my memory at least, a generation of twenty-something residents have chosen to focus their creative energies on Perth rather than London, Tokyo, Sydney or Melbourne. It’s an observation supported by the recent statistic that Perth has proportionally the fastest-growing population of 25-to-29-year-olds in the country, by a factor of some 200 per cent, a majority of whom are choosing to live in inner-city areas.

Northbridge too has become a place that can repeatedly surprise, and for the same reasons. A residential area until well into the 1960s, Northbridge became home to a large Chinese, Greek and Italian population. Their presence is still strong in the many cafés and restaurants that thrived in the area, some of them converted from the original residential homes. Because the railway line separated the area from the CBD (although as of late 2013 this is changing), Northbridge has also been a beneficiary of neglect, protected from the wrecking balls of developers. A majority of its old buildings remain, as well as some of its sex shops and tattoo parlours, even if the sometimes sour heroin vibe that I remember from my teenage years has gone, as have many of the colourful characters who didn’t fit in anywhere else in Perth.

Throughout the twentieth century, Northbridge was also the beneficiary of a strong prohibition market that saw the area become the centre of the city’s vice and gaming economies. It began in the brothels on Roe Street and then later spread to William Street and the numerous gambling clubs around James Street, which were highly popular until Burswood Casino opened in the 1980s.

Of late the area feels rejuvenated, a result of the efforts of local government, business groups and artists to add texture to the once drab and empty Perth Cultural Centre precinct, in particular. The increasingly popular Winter Arts Season, the terrific Fringe World festival, the opening of numerous small bars and a general atmosphere of optimism about the place have added an extra layer over Northbridge’s tabloid notoriety, the result of its sometimes problematic status as an ‘entertainment precinct’, the kind of place that thousands of weekend suburban partiers descend upon to drink, dance and sometimes fight.

My favourite images of the Northbridge streets were taken during the 1990s by Guy Vinciguerra. His photographs capture that characteristic Perth atmosphere of silence and space as well as the odd grace notes of absurdity at night: a vending machine marooned in the middle of a car park, or the eerily clean lines and fluoro-lit recesses of a highway overpass. He also chronicles those human traces of a disappearing community: the hard stern faces of an Italian family, flowerpots mounted high on a brick wall, the cheery smiles and vulnerable eyes of junkies and streetwalkers and street people.

The sense of nostalgia but also celebration in Vinciguerra’s photographs is also a reminder that the truest, if most intangible, heritage of our city exists in our memories. The recent creation of a ‘Lost Perth’ community page on Facebook attracted more than 50 000 ‘Likes’ and four million individual views in its first week. A cavalcade of uploaded images soon followed, referencing all of those places and institutions now gone, including the old Perth markets on Wellington Street and the vast floors of Tom the Cheap and Boans, the latter with its ‘largest showrooms in the Commonwealth’ spread across two miles of carpet: a place of wonder to many children over the years. Something also obvious about the Lost Perth page and various other websites and blogs is that their generative emotion isn’t only nostalgia for what has gone, but also naked delight in the daggy: the sense of pride in the way people have always made a little go a long way when it comes to entertaining themselves in Perth.

Artist Jon Tarry has explored this understanding that an emotional landscape ghosts the built environment of a city, even in the absence of the buildings, parks and places that once inspired it. His exhibition In My Beginning is My End followed the 2011 demolition of the Perth Entertainment Centre and the construction of its replacement, the newly minted Perth Arena.

Opened in 1974, the Entertainment Centre had a seating capacity of 8200 and was one of the largest purpose-built theatres in the world. Up until the late 1990s it was the venue of choice for stadium rock events, and many of my friends and I slept out front to get early tickets for the sell-out shows of acts such as David Bowie and Devo. It was quite a distinctive structure when new, although over the years it became tired-looking and underutilised to the point that it lay dormant from 2002.

Tarry was given free access to photograph the demolition. Over the months he chronicled its progress, his Facebook page attraced more than 120 000 views as locals documented their shared history and memories associated with the space. It’s also worth mentioning that an open day for the Perth Arena attracted a crowd of 25 000 curious visitors, a degree of interest in a new building that seems unthinkable in other, larger cities.

Regardless of Perth’s new urban charms, the vision of the city at night and its relation to the river still hold my attention – there is a harmony of perspective that has changed little over the years. The Mounts Bay waters that once lapped at the feet of the village may have been reclaimed and the foreshore gradually filled with dredging spoil, so that the river is now some considerable distance from the city, but at night this impression is ameliorated with the reflection of the vertical cityscape played across the broad level of Perth Water.

Against this watery canvas, the ferry that transports passengers from Barrack Street Jetty to South Perth moves like a swift water-beetle between the twin bridges of the Causeway and the Narrows. Traffic purls on the interchanges east and west of the city centre, with the long curling wave of the Darling Ranges and the limestone bluff of Mount Eliza forming dark cuffs around the centre of light.

The glittering faces of the St Georges Terrace skyscrapers tower above the older Georgian and Victorian buildings of the Supreme Court and Government House, creating a layering effect. I suppose this is in keeping with the invisible layering beneath the river’s surface as well as in the air above. Every second or third morning in winter, a thick inversion layer of foggy cool air many hundreds of metres deep sits over the land. In the river, for large parts of the year, the halocline system that sees freshwater flowing seawards over trapped pockets of deoxygenated saltwater in the deeper channels means that the shallower waters nearer the shore are the most highly oxygenated. The fresh and salt waters mixed there by the wind are best able to sustain life.

The hunting ground of Yellagonga’s clan on the shallow and samphire-rich waters near Pelican Point and Midgegooroo’s equivalent on the southern waters near Alfred Cove are largely unchanged, still home to bird species such as the Banded Stilt and Hooded Plover, but much of the area closest to the city has been modified. In the nineteenth century, when Perth was an important port on the river, dredging work facilitated boat traffic between Coode and Mends streets and Barrack Street and the Claisebrook Canal, and retaining walls were built to reduce flooding and erosion. Mounts Bay disappeared altogether beneath the freeway interchanges that lead to the Narrows Bridge, and the swampy flats that once constituted a few loose islands near the Causeway were consolidated into Heirrison Island. As a result of these changes, the black swan (Cygnus atratus) observed by de Vlamingh in 1697, the species that gave the river its name, and was still numerous when Stirling and Frazer surveyed the river in 1827, describing a flock of some 500 birds on the wing, is now rarely seen in numbers, although there’s a large colony in the Peel inlet further south. The black swan is still reasonably common in the Manning Park wetlands south of Perth where I take my three children for walks. The children love its loud bugle when roused by the presence of dogs, or its soft crooning when comfortable paddling in the shallows.

The black swan was admired for its beauty and difference from its European counterpart, becoming one of the earliest symbols of antipodean singularity, but in the early years when food was scarce it was also readily eaten. As late as 1936, a recipe for ‘Black Swan, Roasted or Baked’ in Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery suggested that the bird should be cooked the same as goose: trussed, stuffed with mince and wrapped with bacon.

Prior to the building of the Narrows Bridge in 1958, bores drilled into the black alluvial mud on the river bottom discovered rich peaty deposits that revealed how deep the river channel was before the end of the last ice age. The walls of Mount Eliza flanked one side of a high gorge that flowed all the way out to what was then the river’s mouth beside Rottnest Island, ending in the now submerged Perth Canyon, an incredible thousand metres deep. As recently as 6000 years ago, the river that has flowed the same course for sixty million years was thirty metres deeper in many places, but it gradually silted up as the water levels rose and the river became more estuarine.

Of late, the upper Swan and Canning are being treated much like an enormous fish tank. The authorities have added hatchery fish and prawns to maintain stocks, while oxygenation plants run bubbling black pipes along great stretches of the riverbed in an effort to sustain marine life when harmful algae becomes prevalent.

Stirling chose Perth as the capital from three prospective sites. The other two were Point Heathcote, which is located to the south-east of the city on Melville Water, and the port of Fremantle. As a navy man who had bombed American ports in the conflict of 1812, Stirling wanted a city that was away from the artillery-vulnerable coastline. The reports differ, but it appears that Stirling favoured Perth over Point Heathcote because of the ready availability of water. Mount Eliza also commanded a great position from which to potentially bombard the French, although as the settlers had already discovered, to their dismay, the rock bar at the river mouth prevented the entry of anything except lighters or dinghies.

One important early source of fresh water was Mardalup, which the Europeans called Clause Creek, after the navy surgeon aboard the HMS Success, F.R. Clause. It was later known as Claise Brook, and the surrounding area became Claisebrook and is now Claisebrook Cove. In many respects, the utility of what started as a freshwater stream, became a polluted drain and is now an artificial stream reflects the development of the city that grew alongside it. Mardalup was an important camp for the Whadjuk, a place where they could catch gilgies, ducks and swans and other bird species, especially in the adjacent Tea-Tree Lagoon, mentioned by the early settlers for its placid beauty and fringe of giant banksia and zamia palms. These palms, which botanist Charles Frazer described in 1827 as being ten metres high, are a very slow growing species. They generally add about one to two centimetres a year, which puts the trees Frazer observed at somewhere between 700 and a thousand years old.

Both the French and the English surveying parties used the creek to draw water. The English, I imagine, were particularly glad to find the fresh stream, after it took an exhausting two and a half days to drag their boat and supplies over the Heirisson Island mudflats. It was at Mardalup that Charles Frazer was confronted by three armed Whadjuk men and bluntly told to leave the area, although Stirling merely records in his journal that ‘Mr Frazer discovered a freshwater lagoon, and I hit upon a Spring of delicious Water sufficient to supply all our wants.’

When Stirling returned two years later and chose Perth as the site for his capital, it was discovered that Claise Brook drained from a chain of lakes to the west of the site, reaching as far as Lake Monger, and that the water table was very high. A similar freshwater source was discovered near where Spring Street in the CBD terminates today, and it was harnessed to power the colony’s first mill. The Claisebrook area was used instead as an agricultural zone and as the site for the colony’s first cemetery, on the high ground above the spring.

Henry Lawson wrote one of the first detailed descriptions of the Claisebrook area in 1896, after he arrived in Perth en route to the goldfields with his young wife, Bertha, on their honeymoon. Despite Lawson’s status as a well-regarded writer, he and Bertha, who humped her own swag the twenty-three kilometres from Fremantle to Perth, were turned away from all the city’s boarding houses and hotels. The Lawsons were forced to spend some nights sleeping beneath the Barrack Street Bridge by the railway tracks, before moving to the sanctioned campsite alongside Claise Brook that housed thousands in makeshift tents. Lawson tells the story of how a miner camped there was dissuaded from digging a well, seeing as how the land was fertilised by the blood and bone of the dead in the East Perth cemetery.

Shortly after, Claise Brook was turned into a drain, to facilitate the easy movement of flood-waters, and a permanent abattoir was built on its banks. A mulberry farm came next, part of a failed attempt to establish a silk industry, and some of the area was turned into one of Perth’s first parks. However, the coming of the railway and the establishment of the nearby East Perth Gas Works and the East Perth Power Station soon disturbed the location where the gentlemen and women of the nearby town might promenade and picnic.

East Perth was to become the city’s main industrial area. The drain that still contained gilgies and the cove that contained plentiful crabs in the 1880s became an outlet for industrial effluent and a place to store the city’s sewage before it was pumped under the river to the filter beds on Burswood Island, from where overflow was piped directly into the river.

By the 1980s, when much of the original industry and manufacturing had moved out to designated industrial areas such as Osborne Park in the north, the state government decided to redevelop the East Perth and Claisebrook area into a higher density residential and office zone.

Precipitated by state and federal funding, as part of the Building Better Cities Program, the redevelopment of roughly 150 hectares of inner-city land was at that time the largest urban renewal project undertaken in Australia. Enormous quantities of contaminated soil were removed. Today Claisebrook Cove is open to the river. Apartment buildings, public artworks and cafés line the banks that funnel into the meandering brick-lined spring rising up through East Perth, still draining off the water table from a catchment area of some fifteen square kilometres. My eleven-year-old son, Max, loves the bricked and limestone edges of the stream and the cement faux-turtle shells that enable him to practise his parkour skills. He leaps between the upright and levelled spaces, participating in a stream-leaping play that no doubt dates back millennia.

East Perth is no longer the industrial suburb it once was, with its overcrowded slums and wine saloons. Writer and filmmaker Stephen Kinnane, a descendent of the Miriwoong people of the East Kimberley region, describes the social history of the area as being erased by the ‘neatly paved streets, faux Federation lighting, and three and or four-storey townhouses’. Kinnane’s 2003 book Shadow Lines is one of my favourite narratives about Perth. Despite its often tragic subject matter, it illustrates in every sentence what Perth author and publisher Terri-ann White meant when she began her own narrative, Finding Theodore and Brina, with the words ‘We learn landscape through love. The physical spaces and our own thresholds of pleasure merge and proffer all manner of things: sensations, stored expectations, moments with sharp edges.’

On the sharp edge of the curfew line, where after 1927 nightly police patrols were used to push out Aborigines still in the city after dark, East Perth was also home to many Nyungar and other Indigenous people who’d moved to Perth. Chief Protector of Aborigines A.O. Neville had the power to restrict Indigenous people’s access to the CBD unless they carried a ‘native pass’ to prove that they were gainfully employed there.

Prior to the introduction of the pass laws, Perth had been a place, according to Kinnane,

of meeting, of the crossing of railway lines, of rivers and creeks linked by corridors of black spaces. It was a place of alleys, of certain cafes and picture palaces that would serve Aboriginal people and others that would not. It was a town large enough to slip through if you had to, but small enough so that you could seek out your own kind.

This was a time when segregation of the races was taken very seriously. During World War II, a white woman in Perth was charged for merely talking in public with an African American. These kinds of cases, with their attendant rumours of miscegenation, were the staple fodder of The Mirror newspaper, but as Kinnane points out, the judge overseeing the charge made his point very strongly: ‘[t]he worst feature of this case is that people have seen you, a white woman, associating with a black soldier. If you are seen with a black man again you will go to prison.’ The Sunday Times newspaper reported a similar case under the headline ‘Women Talked to Negro’.

Amid this kind of absurdity, the emergence of the East Perth–based Coolbaroo League in 1947 appears nothing less than miraculous. The league was formed by two Yamatji returned servicemen, Jack and Bill Poland; a white returned serviceman, Geoff Harcus; and Helena Murphy from Port Hedland, whose progressive father Lawrence Clarke had formed the Euralian Club in 1934 to promote a similar culture of understanding and tolerance. With the support of Nyungar elders Bill Bodney, Thomas Bropho and Bertha Isaacs, together with younger activists Ronnie Kickett, Manfred Corunna, George Abdullah and George Harwood, the league chose the Coolbaroo, or magpie (kulbardi in Nyungar), as its emblem, suggestive of both the ‘mixed race’ status of many of its members and the first notions of a creed of reconciliation between white and black.

Without the permission of the Native Affairs Department, the Coolbaroo League held the first Coolbaroo Club dances in the basement of the offices of the Modern Women’s Club in central Perth (started by Katharine Susannah Prichard). However, because the building was within the curfew line, the dances were poorly attended. The next dances were held at the Pensioners Hall near the railway station in East Perth. The club, which was the subject of a documentary Kinnane made in 1996, soon became popular as a meeting place for progressive whites and Nyungar and other Indigenous people from across the state – many of whom were inmates released from the Moore River and Carrolup missions, where so many Stolen Generation children were taken. The league published a newspaper, the Westralian Aborigine, did its own fundraising and became a forerunner of many Aboriginal organisations that exist today. When the government finally rescinded the pass laws in 1954, the league was able to hold the club’s dances in the centre of the city after dark – at the Perth Town Hall.

The fear of large numbers of Aborigines congregating in Perth goes right back to the first days of the settlement, when the dispersed and poorly armed colonists expected to be overrun at any moment. The fact that the Coolbaroo Club was able to continue operating for some fifteen years in this climate indicates how effectively the organisation allayed white community fears, while also maintaining its identity as an Aboriginal entity and thereby resisting the assimilating pressures of the day. The ethos that allowed for this survival can be found in the name of one of the club’s regular musical acts, Kickett’s Kustard Kreek Killers; it satirised and subverted the Ku Klux Klan and the racist beliefs that strongly existed at the time, but also channelled them into a vehicle that gave pleasure.

Although East Perth is still home to many Indigenous organisations, the bulk of the broader population moved into the suburbs. For Kinnane, who grew up in East Perth, what is lost is not so much the built environment but the fact that ‘there was always someone to visit in old East Perth’.

Because Perth missed the gold rushes of Victoria and New South Wales in the 1850s and 1860s, there was never the concentration of workers in the inner-city suburbs that resulted in the ‘workers barrack’ terrace rows of inner Melbourne and Sydney. Perth’s gold rush happened in the 1890s, and by then the preferred building material was the highly transportable and easily erected weatherboard. Houses sprang up in large numbers in Victoria Park and Subiaco, suburbs almost entirely populated by a generation of Victorians who stayed.

In the inner city of the mid-twentieth-century, you could still find weatherboard dwellings in Northbridge, West Perth and East Perth. There were pubs in downtown Perth such as the Ozone and Criterion; the Adelphi and the Palace and Esplanade hotels, each different in style and clientele; and for night owls there were jazz clubs and coffee clubs in the alleys that ran off Hay and Murray streets.

St Georges Terrace, while always the financial centre of the city, was then still home to a retail mix that included tobacconists, newsagents, sandwich bars and cafés in large numbers, mostly because the pre-modernist buildings incorporated a layer of floor space down a level from the street. I can imagine my mother, aged sixteen, buying her magazines and sandwiches from one of these stores on her way to work. My most treasured image of her is a black and white photograph taken by a newspaper photographer on St Georges Terrace in the early 1960s. Finally free of school, she’s heading for her first day’s work as a clerk in the clearing room of the National Bank, wearing a tight skirt and sleeveless white blouse. Her hair is cut short and her smile is unguarded, radiantly happy.

Her mother had made the snappy outfit, at a time when many people in Perth made their own clothes, grew their own vegetables, kept chickens and, like my mother’s family, regularly harvested mussels and prawns from the river. Not only did my mother continue this ‘making and making do’ tradition by sewing and stitching many of our childhood clothes, she also cooked our jams and preserves, baked our bread, dried her own excess fruit on the tin roof of our house (the best dried figs in the world), and pickled her own olives. She also made her own cordials and bottled ginger beer, which would commonly blow up in summer out in our back shed. My mother remembers downtown Perth as a place of tea-rooms and jive-joints and hole-in-the-wall Italian fruitshake stands, but also as a place filled with beautiful fabric shops and popular tailors and dressmakers.

Photographs of St Georges Terrace taken as recently as the 1940s depict a street of three-, four- and five-storey buildings whose continuous but divergent facades are packed along the footpath. There are few stepped, raised or recessed entrances, and yet the street has something of the flavour of a sketch by Dr Seuss: wild variations in building height and architectural style, plus the tendency to mask the buildings’ brickwork with heavy stucco and concrete balusters, cornices and reeded columns, gothic arches and spires and mock battlements.

Much like contemporary corporate videos, paintings of the period tend to idealise the calm civic aspects of the Terrace, its ‘European flavour’, where a gentle light shines upon a serene vista of citizens at ease within the neat facades of High Victorian buildings. Architectural historian J.M. Freeland described the transition of the Terrace when he said that

[i]n 1892, Perth had been a primitive frontier town with all the rawness and lack of style of a pioneer settlement. By 1900, it had been dipped bodily into a bucket of pure Victoriana and taken out, dripping plaster and spiked with towers and cupolas in a bewildering variety of shapes, to dry.

The Terrace might have looked ‘European’, and therefore sophisticated, although one photograph taken in 1912, of the length of the Terrace between William and Barrack streets, is perhaps more revealing of the prevailing nature of the street. The buildings appear eccentric with their gingerbread brickwork and icing-white stucco stained with coal smuts. The pedestrians in their buggies and rickety automobiles are dressed like workers, in shirtsleeves and boots and utilitarian wide-brimmed hats. In this photograph the Terrace resembles what it actually was, a busy street built with gold-rush money out of local materials at the behest of mainly local businesses.

Perth’s second mining boom began in the 1960s with the lifting of the federal embargo on iron-ore exports, and this immediately began to make its mark on the built environment of St Georges Terrace in particular. The new-found confidence of a ‘state on the move’ saw a rush of new investment that required increased office space on the city’s most prestigious street. In the majority of cases, this meant the complete replacement of the buildings of the finde-siècle Terrace with staid office blocks. In other cases, a compromise was sought. The 1971 Howlett and Bailey redevelopment of the Cloisters site retained the convict-built and Richard Roach Jewell–designed secondary school for Bishop Hale (the site of the original Hale School, which is now in Wembley Downs), with its Gothic arcading and Tudor embellishments and beautiful brickwork. It was integrated with the twenty-storey heights of Mount Newman House, with its splayed block columns and bronze anodised aluminium windows.

According to Jenny Gregory, by the 1980s approximately six per cent of the Terrace’s older built fabric remained. This was primarily because most of the investment flooding into the city came from elsewhere, so development decisions about the suite of new buildings along the Terrace were made in London and Melbourne and Sydney and New York. These people would never live in Perth, and their decisions weren’t guided by what was best for the broader cityscape and social fabric. Instead they were guided by what was best for the bottom line – the downside of Perth’s status as a branch office city. The situation wasn’t helped in the 1980s by a Town Planning Committee on Perth City Council. According to academic and member of parliament Ian Alexander, who was on the committee at the time, it was dominated by people who had ‘substantial declared interests in projects being considered by that committee’.

It’s a well-documented and maddening fact that this period of opportunity during the 1980s was diminished by a brand of cowboy capitalism. As in many places around the world during the 1980s, this was a time of conspicuous consumption and punting on the stock market, but in Perth at least it was also a period of optimism and civic pride, especially after local tycoon Alan Bond bank-rolled Australia’s successful America’s Cup challenge in 1983. The win meant that the prestigious yacht race was held in the waters off Fremantle in 1987, and the state government embarked on a number of public infrastructure works in anticipation of the event. But Bond’s wealth was ultimately revealed to be a house of cards, and his good friend Laurie Connell’s Rothwells merchant bank (that had served its owner as a virtual ATM) failed despite a major bailout negotiated with state premier Brian Burke.

Like every city, Perth has its fair share of boosters and racketeers, although rapidly earned wealth combined with a provincial naiveté have perhaps attracted a larger number of hustlers in business suits than elsewhere. In any discussion of the policing, business and political culture of the 1970s and 1980s, there’s a sense that it’s precisely the city’s noirish contrast between light and dark, plain sight and shadow, that reflects the way shady business was done and power exercised – or to use an old crime fiction cliché, the brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.

In 1982, author and poet Dorothy Hewett wrote that in the case of Perth, ‘the corruption is partly hidden, the worm in the bud is secretive, and mainly bears only a silent witness’. Perth’s aura of manufactured innocence, one that presents itself as ‘naive, self-congratulatory and deeply conservative’, was in fact the ‘perfect field for corruption’. By the late 1980s, and the dealings that became known as WA Inc, the cronyism was very much out in the open. Bond and Connell were eventually imprisoned, and two consecutively serving premiers from both major parties, Ray O’Connor and Brian Burke, were jailed.

Until the 1960s, you could argue that there had always been more sensitivity shown regarding the development of the CBD’s built environment. This gentler transition and clearer line of evolution is perhaps best demonstrated in the delicate integration of the 1937 Art Deco Lawson Apartments just behind the Terrace, or in the ‘New York skyscraper’-styled Art Deco Gledden Building on the edge of the Hay Street Mall, or the functional but eye-catching International-style Council House on the Terrace (which is truly beautiful at night, under multi-coloured lights). The spirit of the 1980s, on the other hand, is most clearly illustrated by the tower Alan Bond built on the site of the old Palace Hotel.

At the corner of St Georges Terrace and William Street stands what is now known as 108 St Georges Terrace and was previously Bankwest Tower and Bond Tower. It was actually the site of Perth’s first licensed premises: the King’s Head public house licensed to William Dixon in 1830. By the early 1970s, the buildings on the three other corners of the junction had been demolished, including the beautiful Donnybrook-stone AMP building and David Jones (formerly Foy and Gibson’s, one of Perth’s oldest department stores). The widespread belief that the Palace Hotel was next brought a surge of support from period experts; the ‘Palace Guard’, an organisation that claimed 23 000 members; the Builders Labourers Federation, who put a green ban on the site; and even for a while Alan Bond himself, who at that time was a city councillor and member of the town planning committee.

Photographs of the Palace, the ‘last of the High Victorian Hotels in Australia’, built in the Free Federation Classical style, show the lustre of its coral-white facade and tuck-pointed brickwork. It was conceived in 1894 by an American entrepreneur, John De Baun, and designed to be the last word in luxury. Its interior included imported mosaic tiles, marble fireplaces and Italian barroom flooring, and every single one of its bricks was imported by ship from Melbourne.

When Alan Bond bought the building from the Commonwealth Bank in 1978, he was granted permission to build his Bond Tower of fifty storeys ‘consequent upon the retention of the Palace Hotel in perpetuity’. However, when Bond invited the R&I Bank, which was owned by the state government at a time when Brian Burke was premier, into a joint venture partnership to complete the tower, it was then decided that ‘in order that the development be economically viable’, the hotel needed to be demolished. The only exceptions were the facade and the foyer area, which now stand beneath the glass canopy of the tower.

Construction ended in 1988 and Bond occupied the top three floors of the high-rise, with the forty-ninth floor given over to a secure art gallery that housed Van Gogh’s Irises. When things turned sour for Bond he sold his half-ownership of the tower back to the people for 108 million dollars and vacated his penthouse, leaving the top three floors of the building empty for nearly a decade. When Saracen Mineral Holdings vacated their lease to this part of the building in 2009, it was discovered that Bond’s fiftieth-floor offices were still in their original condition, so that Bond’s desk, chair and boardroom table were invitingly advertised as part of the new lease.

According to Jenny Gregory, the widespread opposition to the demolition of the Palace Hotel, the kind of redevelopment that was happening all over Australia at the time, needs to be seen in the context of what she describes as Perth’s early awakening to the value of the city’s heritage that went beyond colonial-era buildings such as The Deanery, The Cloisters and the old prison (now housed within the walls of the Western Australian Museum). Gregory believes that before the same kind of opposition to unconsidered development was harnessed in Sydney and Brisbane, Perth residents, under the auspices of the National Trust, were prepared to actively engage in protecting the heritage of their older twentieth-century buildings and river landscapes, though often unsuccessfully.

Public protest regarding heritage in Perth really began with the advocacy of the Royal Western Australia Historical Society and the formation of the National Trust in 1959, partly as a result of the threat to the Pensioner Barracks at the head of St Georges Terrace. This vast three-storey red-brick Tudor edifice was designed by Richard Roach Jewell to deliberately resemble a castle, with twin entrance towers and mock battlements and overt Christian symbology.

In the time of Governor Hampton, the barracks were built by convicts to house those members of the Pensioner Guards sent to guard them. Later, the great engineer C.Y. O’Connor had his offices there, where the Port of Fremantle, the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme and the Mundaring Weir were all designed. It became clear in the 1950s that the automobile-oriented Stephenson-Hepburn Plan for the Metropolitan Region, commissioned to outline Perth’s development into the late twentieth-century, required the construction of the Mitchell Freeway, effectively bisecting the western end of the city; in turn, it became clear that the Barracks were likely to go.

The protest movement to save the Barracks came during the tenure of David Brand, Western Australia’s longest-serving premier. His name is synonymous with the iron-ore boom and the mantra of progress, at a time when Perth’s population jumped forty per cent in a decade. Like many Western Australian premiers, Brand was a moderate conservative who came from humble beginnings, educated to Year 7 level and brought up in the hardscrabble post-Depression years to identify with a core governmental role of attracting investment to the state. Together with his Minister for Industrial Development, Charles Court, another future premier and knight from a humble background (his father was a plumber), Brand established the Kwinana industrial area, sparked by the eighty-million-dollar Anglo-Iranian oil refinery and later the lifting of the federal government’s iron-ore export embargo that had been in operation since 1938. Court and Brand also played a role in the development of the divisive bauxite and wood-chipping industries in the south-west.

Neither the Brand nor the Court governments, which ruled Western Australia almost uninterruptedly through the 1960s and 1970s, were particularly impressed by the counter-cultural change sweeping the world during the period. They sensed that the new-found wealth of the state and the rapid growth in population and employment were under threat from those who questioned unfettered development. There has long been a tradition of public protest in the city centred upon The Esplanade and Forrest Place, with the latter particularly remembered for Vietnam antiwar demonstrations and the literal rubbishing of Gough Whitlam with cans and tomatoes by angry farmers in 1974. There was a major riot during the Depression on St Georges Terrace involving thousands of unemployed protestors, and unionists and workers subsequently rallied on The Esplanade. Trade unionist Paddy Troy famously got around the bureaucratic restrictions limiting protest on The Esplanade by speaking from a boat in Perth Water.

It was in the context of increasing union militancy in the 1970s that Premier Court and his government introduced the notorious Section 54B to the Western Australian Police Act. According to Jenny Gregory, strikes within the Perth metropolitan area escalated from between twenty-five to thirty-three a year in the mid-1960s to 436 a year by 1982. Section 54B ruled that any ‘crowd’ of more than three people that gathered ‘to discuss a matter of public interest must first have the written permission of the Police Commissioner’.

Such draconian measures to limit free speech and the right to protest were unnecessary in the less radicalised Perth of the mid-1960s. In part due to the success of the Brand Government’s economic policies, particularly in a city that lacked a strong industrial or manufacturing base, it’s probable that Perth wasn’t ready for the kind of cultural reform instigated by a charismatic or flamboyant leader in the mould of a Don Dunstan or a Gough Whitlam, and perhaps still isn’t. Which makes the metaphorical black eye that Brand sustained as a result of his plan to force the demolishment of the Barracks all the more remarkable.

In a rather Perth manner, perhaps, and one that reflected the strong links between conservative government and police enforcement throughout the Brand and Court years, in 1966 the police commissioner banned a planned motorised rally in support of the Barracks on the grounds that it would create traffic ‘blockages’ and ‘disturb people in church’. As Jenny Gregory points out, this might have been Australia’s first heritage rally. While the wings of the Barracks were ultimately removed, Brand then immediately referred to the need to pull down the remainder for the sake of ‘the demands of the car’. When members of his own government voted with the opposition to withdraw the demolition order, he was humiliatingly forced to accede.

If the Barracks and the Palace Hotel protests defined the struggle to save ‘Perth’s soul’ in the 1960s and 1970s respectively, it was the fight to stave off the redevelopment of the Old Swan Brewery that defined the generation of the 1980s. This was a far more complex dispute that brought to the fore the corruption of the WA Inc period, the issue of state versus federal responsibility for protecting sites of significant heritage, and, in particular, the newer discourse of Aboriginal land rights. My grandfather Ollie worked as a brewer at Swan for close to forty years, and the Emu Bitter longnecks that my father drank when I was a child – and that I liked to open every night with an Emu Bitter bottle-opener – came from Ollie’s generous brewery allowance.

My mother remembers visiting the brewery as a child with Ollie on Saturday mornings as he did his rounds. She would stare at the huge copper kettles that were two storeys tall, the stirring of the vats with big paddles, the cold area with lagged pipes on the walls (and the instructions never to ‘touch the pipes as you wouldn’t be able to remove your fingers and if pulled your skin would come off’). She followed her father up and down stairs and ladders, to the lofts with the smell of the hops, then over to the malt house across the road where the original stables were, with the wooden kegs all in rows on the ground level, and finally to the bottling plant.

As an indication of the lack of industrialisation in Western Australia at the time, and as a measure of the popularity of beer, it’s worth pointing out that in the early 1960s the Swan Brewery was the state’s single largest employer. George Seddon described the Joseph John Talbot Hobbs–designed industrial brewery as ‘a latterday castle-on-the-Rhine’, and generations of Perth children delighted in the lights that flashed across the building’s facade at night.

The Swan Brewery moved its operations first to the Emu Brewery around the corner on Spring Street in 1966 and then to Canning Vale in 1978 (and as of March 2013 to South Australia). The ‘castle-on-the-Rhine’ became an industrial ruin, set beside the increasingly busy Mounts Bay Road that tracks the broad river into the western suburbs. The site had been built upon and added to since 1838 when a steam-driven timber and flour mill operated there. It was subsequently used as a tannery and traveller’s restaurant until Swan Brewery acquired it in 1877.

Friends of mine who managed to gain entry to the abandoned buildings during the 1980s recall the novelty of an industrial ruin in a peaceful riverside setting, but also the spookiness of the pitch-black darkness in some of the rooms, the knowledge that street people lodged there at night and an atmosphere of haunted silence.

The brewery originally drew its freshwater from the spring that emerges at the foot of Mount Eliza. It’s still popular with people who come to fill drinking containers, believing that the water has healing properties. But the site of what is now called Kennedy’s Fountain was originally Gooninup, a campsite and ground of importance that the Whadjuk had used for millennia. For them it is a Nyitting (cold times), or dreaming, place, where the Wagyl, the serpent spirit who created the river, left the waters and ascended from the base of the limestone cliff up onto the area by the Pioneer Women’s Memorial in what is now Kings Park.

Nyungar man Barry McGuire recently described the Kings Park area to me from across the river, at Point Heathcote, which is an early stage in the ‘male ceremonies of coming into the Law’ that includes another stage at the foot of Mount Eliza. Here, young men were housed in a cave of great importance to the Whadjuk people – now bricked over – until they’d learnt ‘how to be within their community’. At Gooninup, stones of significance left by the Wagyl were maintained by the Whadjuk people, and sacred objects used in ceremonies were hidden in different places around the foot of the bluff.

Barry’s father spoke English as a third language, after Nyungar and Italian, and while we stared across Melville Water, Barry sang the stories of the places around Kings Park in language, then translated gently into English. He finished with the story of Yellagonga, who was at his Goodenup campsite (now Spring Street) when his people first heard the European paddles coming up the river, ‘whoosha-whoosha’. Barry told of the women ducking their heads in fear of the Wagyl, and only Yellagonga with the authority to stand on the riverbank and watch the newcomers arrive.

The importance of the Kings Park area is also something native-interpreter Francis Armstrong described in 1836, specifically the status of Gooninup as a ceremonial site and the home of the Wagyl’s eggs. So it makes sense that when the brewery was put on the market in 1978, many Nyungar saw this as an opportunity to have the site returned to its traditional owners. Instead, entrepreneur Yosse Goldberg bought the buildings, which he sold on to the state government a few years later.

Goldberg didn’t profit much from the deal, although he later made millions after Burke and the Minister for Minerals and Energy David Parker set him up to buy the Fremantle Gas and Coke Co and then sell it back to the government. Laurie Connell took his usual cut as a ‘consultant’. During the WA Inc Royal Commission in the early 1990s, it was discovered that as a result of the sale, Brian Burke’s ‘Leadership Fund’ had benefited to the tune of roughly half a million dollars in cash, some of which was kept in a calico bag in Burke’s office.

When the state government revealed its plans for the Old Brewery site in 1986, there was a public outcry at its size and ambition, not to mention renewed Nyungar protest against redevelopment. The area was quickly registered under the state Aboriginal Heritage Act to prevent further work, and a protest camp was set up in the car park opposite the brewery, with large banners spread across the cliff-face of Mount Eliza. Supporters of the project pointed out that the brewery was built partly on reclaimed land and therefore couldn’t affect the Nyitting site, while protestors wanted the land put aside for public use or returned to the Whadjuk people rather than have it fall into private hands.

A land rights protest in the heart of a modern city brought underlying tensions to the surface between so-called radical and moderate Nyungar leaders, between unions who supported the Nyungar and workers who wanted jobs, and between anthropologists who recognised the site’s Indigenous heritage and the pre-Mabo legislation in place at a state and federal level. Although the state government was clearly bent on pushing the development through, the Hawke federal government initially vetoed the project after experts found the site to be deserving of permanent protection under the federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act.

It’s not clear how the declaration of permanent protection under the Act was rescinded after the 1989 ALP state conference in Perth, with prime minister and ex-Perth boy Bob Hawke present, but shortly after the conference this is precisely what happened. Despite years of legal action, protests involving thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens, union bans and mass arrests, the redevelopment ultimately went ahead.

The Old Brewery complex now boasts apartments, a micro-brewery and niche dining options that claim to offer a ‘quintessential West Australian experience’, whatever that means. I was overseas for the entirety of the brewery dispute, but even my fond memories of my beloved grandfather’s stories – the characters who worked beside him over the years, the men lining up for their free middy of beer at every break, the challenges of keeping beer production going in a thirsty state – have been tempered by the stories of friends who protested and in some cases were arrested. There is now a subdued air over that once brightly lit section of the river that so entranced me as a child, and a sense of ambivalence that to me is unfortunately more suggestive of a ‘quintessential West Australian experience’.

The expanded ‘Old Brewery’ still faces the Swan River, connected by a walkway to Kennedy’s Fountain over the streaming traffic of Mounts Bay Road, and the diminished Barracks Arch still remains on the edge of the inner city, on a little cutaway at the head of St Georges Terrace. I suspect that the numerous people who don’t know the Arch’s longer story barely notice that it’s there, but it’s always a reminder to me of my childhood fascination with what I imagined were the remnants of a walled castle. It stands alongside the visual oddity of the 1939 First Church of Christ, Scientist building, which with its Deco lines, air of orphic mysticism and mausoleum solemnity used to remind me of the crypts of kings and queens I had seen in books, making me wonder who was interred there.

A short distance from the Church and the Arch lies London Court, a whole arcade dedicated to the Mock Tudor. My boyish imagination assumed London Court was a remnant of the medieval period, but it was built by mining tycoon Claude de Bernales in 1937. De Bernales was something of a tycoon’s tycoon, even if he started with nothing and ended with little. Credited with keeping the worst effects of the Depression away from Western Australia, and by extension the rest of the country, de Bernales both perfected a technique to extract gold from low-grade ore and managed to convince the federal government to reward the production of gold, whose price was then at record levels, with a substantial bonus. The son of a Basque father, the grandly named Major Manuel Edgar Albo de Bernales, and an American mother, Claude de Bernales studied in Germany before emigrating to Western Australia in 1897, aged twenty-one. With a fiver in his pocket, he started up as a machinery salesman and repairman in the goldfields. He’d cycle from mine to mine with a clean collar and fresh shirt in reserve, slowly buying up leases with his savings. He purchased a couple of foundries and, ahead of his time, also bought badly indebted companies for peanuts. He understood, according to historian John Laurence, that these companies ‘had such heavy overdrafts that the Bank of Western Australia could not afford to wipe them off their books’.

‘Immaculate Claude’, charismatic and handsome, introduced a touch of style into both the coarse mining game and staid Perth society, according to Ron Davidson. He certainly makes the modern mining CEO look like a bland corporate functionary, ‘dressed grandly; [in] spats, suede gloves and a blue velvet cloak’. He lived in what is now the Cottesloe Civic Centre, with a sweeping view over the ocean. He was a notorious seducer, with mirrored panels in his bedroom, and was able to attract substantial European investment for his various enterprises. James Mitchell, state premier from 1919 to 1924 and 1930 to 1933, once requested that he not be allowed to remain alone with de Bernales, ‘lest he sign away the state’. Like many flashy entrepreneurial types in Perth’s history, de Bernales over stretched and came dramatically undone; however, unlike most of the city’s other boom-bust merchants, de Bernales is still fondly remembered.

While London Court now seems somewhat cute, I was certainly captivated by the wares in the shops of the closely packed ‘medieval’ alley. Like so many children over the years, I waited expectantly for the hour to chime, so that St George might battle his dragon and the armoured knights might begin their tournament above the clock. I wasn’t aware that the child-friendly scale of London Court, with its statues of Sir Walter Raleigh and Dick Whittington, its mini-replica of Big Ben, and its plaster representations of unicorns and lions and copper ships, was the result of an error. According to Jenny Gregory, the Court was designed in Melbourne for a site ‘that was assumed to be dimensioned in feet, but was actually in links, so the whole building had to be scaled down’. A link is approximately two-thirds of a foot.

Further down the Terrace was the equally appealing and vaguely Tudorish Government House, where the Governor still resides. The Classical Revival–style building was constructed by convicts during the tenure of Governor Hampton and under the supervision of Colonel Edmund Henderson, who also designed Fremantle Prison. It is still set amid three acres of gardens. I liked to look across from the Supreme Court Gardens and admire in particular the capped turrets and gothic arches, which gave the building a martial flavour, although now I can also appreciate the bonded brickwork, the square mullioned windows and the views over the river. I used to imagine Hampton fuming inside, distracted by the exploits of Moondyne Joe, who was free from the hard labour of his convict peers laying down ‘Hampton’s cheeses’, thick transverse cuts of jarrah used as road-building material throughout the colony.

Perth was very poor during Hampton’s reign (because governors really did reign). It was so poor that Hampton gifted the city its first town hall, although like all civic projects during the period the work was done with convict labour. The land upon which it was built was near where Mrs Helen Dance had chopped into the first sheoak as part of the proclamation of the Foundation of Perth in 1829. Until the hall was completed in 1867, the area had remained an expanse of grey sand.

The Perth Town Hall was another building that caught my imagination as a child, with its medieval flavour and gothic touches, its Flemish bonded brickwork, its exposed jarrah beams inside. I was particularly attracted to it because of the traces left by the convicts, such as windows that were shaped like the broad arrows on the convict uniform. There was also the story that a hangman’s noose was disguised in the face of the town hall clock; I looked eagerly, but was never able to find it.

When I was driven into the city as a child, I would observe the Barracks Arch and the First Church of Christ, Scientist before arriving at The Cloisters, London Court, Government House and finally the Town Hall. Each seemed ancient and culturally adrift from the city that had grown around it, making these landmark places in my childhood feel like relics left over from a calamity of some kind, and I suppose there are many who would hold this to be true. No doubt I would have appreciated the recent addition on the Terrace of the Christian de Vietri and Marcus Canning sculpture Ascalon: all eighteen metres of St George’s seemingly diaphanous white silk cloak, billowing around the stainless steel lance thrust into the ground outside the 1888 cathedral named after him. From an adult’s perspective, though, it’s hard not to read the planted spear as yet another statement of violent possession.

After all, it wasn’t far from St George’s Cathedral that the corpse of Yagan’s father, Midgegooroo, was hung from a tree on the Terrace for several days in 1833. He’d been executed by a firing squad in front of a cheering crowd, despite the fact that there were Europeans who identified with the Whadjuk and were curious about Nyungar culture.

There were many examples of friendship and curiosity in the period that equal the relationships portrayed in Kim Scott’s depiction of the ‘friendly frontier’ at Albany in his 2010 novel That Deadman Dance. As Scott pointed out to me in a recent conversation, Perth also contains the largest number of Aboriginal place names of any Australian city (although not in the CBD), so that whether or not we’re aware of it, Perth citizens use Nyungar words on a daily basis. It’s evidence of the settlers’ reliance upon Whadjuk people for navigation throughout the colony in the early days: it made far more sense for a European traveller wandering along the sandy tracks between homesteads to hail a party of Whadjuk people and ask directions to Wanneroo, for example, rather than North Beach.

According to one letter-writer to The Perth Gazette in 1836, there was no need for the government to employ an official interpreter, simply because there were ‘many Europeans who can speak the native language fluently’. In some respects this was an intimate society, with Whadjuk adults and their children known to many colonists by name, and it can be assumed that the converse was equally true. However, the early familiarity also existed alongside a strong tradition of marginalising those white voices that considered the Whadjuk to be rightfully defending their territory from foreign invaders, or that demanded that they be afforded the same rights as any other.

Robert Menli Lyon, who arrived in the colony in 1829, was like many other male settlers both a Scot and an ex-soldier (although the details of his military service can’t be verified). He was soon enough in trouble, as one of the few settlers who recognised that the official version of events under James Stirling’s command was likely to be coloured by self-interest. Lyon made sure that his letters to Whitehall detailed what he saw as evidence of nepotism in the early years. He complained that all of the best land was allocated to Stirling and his military friends, who were indifferent absentee landlords (Stirling included), and that this was the main reason the colony was struggling to feed itself.

Lyon had been granted good land in the Upper Swan, but he had generously sold it to a late arrival to the colony and taken to life on the river as a boatman. He was a zealous Christian, and this, together with his admiration for Yagan as a new ‘William Wallace’, isolated him from the majority. The time of massacres was upon Perth, however. These were often blamed upon the ‘lower orders’, although it’s clear that in many cases soldiers participated.

Even the urbane Irishman George Fletcher Moore, explorer, farmer and recorder of the Whadjuk language, but also the colony’s judge, felt like taking up arms and putting them to use after he suffered the loss of some swine. He generally writes with affection for the Whadjuk people with whom he travelled on occasion and conversed in faltering Nyungar. However, this friendliness didn’t temper the harsh sentences he gave different Nyungar men when they came before him in court.

Robert Menli Lyon put himself forward as peacemaker following the first arrest of Yagan, for the spearing murder of Erin Entwhistle. The man was a victim of payback after a servant on the same farm shot one of Yagan’s friends for stealing potatoes. The murder of Entwhistle is significant because it also provides one of the first descriptions of the active role Nyungar women might play in their society. They had initially kept themselves away from Europeans, something thought to be a result of earlier depredations by sealers and whalers. Entwhistle hid his two sons under a nearby bed, from where they observed their father’s murder. Yagan and Midgegooroo speared the prostrate man while ‘a woman rather tall and wanting her front teeth, and who, I have been told by Midgegooroo himself is his wife, broke my father’s legs and cut his head to pieces with an axe,’ stated one of Entwhistle’s sons, Ralph. The boys, now orphans, were forced to become beggars in the Perth streets, and the younger of the two, Enion, is said to have died of starvation.

The crime was serious, although for Yagan it was not a crime but an obligation. Lyon argued in the Perth courthouse that Yagan should be treated as a prisoner of war rather than as a common criminal, and he convinced the authorities to allow him to convert Yagan and thereby pacify the local Nyungar population. Yagan was clearly a physically and intellectually impressive character, able to joke with his jailers at the Roundhouse Prison in Fremantle before his exile to Carnac Island, south of Fremantle. There Lyon lived with Yagan for two months, and the Scot began compiling a vocabulary of the Nyungar language and the names of the clans and territories of the Perth area.

Made to wear western clothes and pray, Yagan chose to escape by dinghy – despite the fact that he’d only been in a boat once – and returned to Perth. When his brother Domjum was murdered in Fremantle, Yagan and his father fatally speared Tom and John Velvick on the Kelmscott-to- Fremantle track. The Velvick brothers, one of whom had been speared more than a hundred times, had a reputation earned when some Nyungar had come to the aid of a Muslim man, Samud Alil, after an unprovoked attack led by the drunken Velvicks and a group of about twenty other whites outside a Perth tavern. The assailants had then turned on the Nyungar and viciously beat them with wooden poles.

A price was put on the heads of Midgegooroo and Yagan. Midgegooroo was captured and executed without trial. Yagan, after travelling around Perth to solicit the advice of his many white friends, was betrayed by the young Keats brothers in the Upper Swan, one of whom shot him when his guard was down. He was decapitated and skinned of the distinctive cicatrice on his right shoulder and back. His head was taken to a nearby house where it was sketched by George Fletcher Moore, who had earlier written in his diary that ‘The truth is everyone wishes him taken but no-one likes to be his captor. There is something in his daring that one is forced to admire.’

Moore had suggested compensating the Whadjuk people for their loss of land and he knew Yagan personally. This didn’t stop him making sketches of Yagan’s severed head and, on hearing that another had claimed the head, writing in his diary that ‘I should have been glad to get it myself.’ The following day he made one of the strangest diary entries imaginable:

I have rudely sketched this beautiful ‘caput mortum’ of Yagan. He wore a fine twisted cord round his forehead. I have been in a singular mood tonight, my thoughts running into or rather working in the manner of musical voluntaries. I sang one which gave me great pleasure by its strength, beauty and expression. Now, do not laugh at me for this …

Throughout the period, Robert Menli Lyon had been busy writing, complaining about attacks on Yellagonga and his people and about the idea of allocating rations to the Nyungar on a reserve outside of town. His rather Swiftian suggestion was that perhaps the real reason behind the reserve was so that Europeans could hunt the Nyungar at their leisure, in the equivalent of a game park.

After a number of massacres, according to historian Tom Austen, Lyon wrote directly to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Goderich, in London, and spoke to hostile audiences in the Perth streets, before and after massacres took place. At one gathering, writes historian Henry Reynolds, Lyon gave ‘one of the most distinguished humanitarian speeches delivered in colonial Australia’. But it wasn’t enough, and the hostility wore him down. Lyon left the colony in 1834. He moved to Mauritius, to take up a position lecturing in the humanities, and later to Sydney, although he continued writing about what he’d seen in Perth well into his seventies.

Yagan’s statue stands before the city on Heirisson Island, surrounded by the shallow river. The current head looks oddly European on its elongated neck – the first two were cut off and stolen. Yagan lived his life beside and on the Swan River, where he learnt to swim and fish. His father’s country, Beeliar, encompassed the southern side of the river from Fremantle through to the Canning River, although Yagan was ultimately murdered while seeking refuge in the Upper Swan, where for most of the year the river is narrow and quiet. The Upper Swan is also where Yagan was finally put to rest in 2010, after the retrieval of his skull from Everton Cemetery in north Liverpool, Britain, where it had been buried in a job-lot with a Maori head and an Egyptian mummy. Whadjuk elders led a private ceremony in the memorial park that now bears his name.