The sight was now, therefore, anxiously strained towards the shore in order that their eyes might satisfy them and decide their ultimate fate. And what did they see? A fine river, the verdant banks of which refreshed their anxious gaze? No! Sand! In every direction as far as their eyes could reach, a brilliant white sand the children called snow and wondered why the trees were green!
Jane Roberts, Two Years at Sea, 1829
Sand, everywhere. The same colour as the bleached sky. A few diminutive settlers crouch in it, like children at play. Mary Ann Friend’s hand-coloured lithograph ‘View at Swan River’, ‘taken on the spot’ and drawn on stone, is the earliest surviving representation of the Swan River Colony produced by a trained artist. She painted her husband Matthew Curling Friend’s encampment in March 1830, soon after their arrival at the colony. The Friends, like everyone else, are camped on the beach or in the swales of the dunes.
Matthew Friend was captain of the Wanstead, moored in the Gage Roads channel off Fremantle, and the Friends spent only a few months in the colony. Perhaps because of Mary Ann’s ready means of escape, her picture of the area initially feels light-hearted, not coloured by the gloom of others. Where colonists described their first impressions of the scene at Fremantle as one of ‘complete wretchedness’, Mary Ann wrote in her diary that it had a pretty appearance. The prevalence of white canvas tents made the settlement strongly resemble a ‘Country Fair’.
Friend’s perception was soon to change as the reality of her situation became apparent. Not only were the flies and mosquitoes and rats plentiful, the natives frightening, and the heat and hunger terrible, but she also hints at the troubles that were to come. She felt that Stirling had granted himself and his cronies the best land, and she feared that the colony would starve. She also mentions problems associated with a servant class who were no longer cowed, and the odd detail that because of the sand even Governor Stirling’s beautiful wife Ellen was getting around in her bare feet. Friend’s complaints are always outweighed by her optimism, however, and her early descriptions of the landscape and the colonists’ attempts at making do are entertaining, particularly their diet of kangaroo tart, parakeet pie, bush quail, and stewed and pickled samphire.
Friend’s painting has the naive immediacy of a postcard. The tone is soft and the light gauzy, lacking the fierce blue that presages a blinding hot March day. In the middle distance, within the four corners of stunted and broken vegetation used to frame the campsite, a small clump of balga tree and zamia palm are sketched in the foreground, with what looks to be a dead tuart and live marri filling out the background corners. The stumps of severed trees are littered about, and the campsite consists of a couple of hoochies and lean-tos belonging to Friend’s servants, as well as an odd cube that turns out to be the home of a horse that died of bruising on the journey over.
The ‘horse house’ (which Friend jokingly described as her ‘cottage ornee’) was also nearly lost, with two men inside it. During an attempt to bridge the rock bar at the river’s mouth, the horse house had tumbled into the waves, drifting ‘five miles above the town. Every time the men who were inside tried to reach the door it turned over. They were like squirrels in a cage.’
The idea that an ex-officer of the Royal Navy and his wife inhabited the equivalent of a horse float, and that in this they considered themselves lucky, was the message seized upon in Britain when the lithograph was reproduced for the wider public. This discouraged most potential settlers from migrating to Perth, as did mail from the colony that recounted the disastrous failure of Thomas Peel’s settlement at Woodman Point, just south of Fremantle. Starvation and disease killed off one in eight of his colonists.
There are four people in the centre of the painting, one of them a young woman in a bonnet and long dress. All of them are huddled beneath the feathery shade of a juvenile sheoak, itself shaped by the prevailing winds. A boy is barely visible; he peeks from behind the trunk of the sheoak, shaded by both branch and fly as though afraid of the sun. The horse hut is a cube made of smaller cubes where the battens show through, alien in its linear geometry; everything else, including the settlers, is bent and crouched.
Only one man leans casually against a rail that looks like salvage. He is the interesting figure, looking entirely at ease in his new environment. It is almost as though the painting is hinting at the temperament that will be required to feel comfortable in the new environment – the acceptance of the light and silence coming across the vast emptied spaces behind them. In this I think the painting functions as both ironic critique and optimistic portrait. The people in the composition appear marooned. Sand fills the foreground of the painting and the sky is sand-coloured, rising over them like a great pale wave. The trees in the new environment are unlike the trees at home, and most of them are already hacked down for firewood.
If Friend’s sketch manages to capture any sense of optimism, this was a minority perspective. Time and again the early narratives refer to the sand as unexpected, and the tone of these descriptions is static – the settlers are waiting, doing time, bogged literally and metaphorically. Images of sand are used to suggest not only the infertility of the soil but also the failed pregnancy of the idea behind the colony. The biblical reference to building on the rock and not upon the sand was in the forefront of many minds.
The quartermaster of the HMS Beagle described Fremantle as so insignificant that all of its sand could pass through an hourglass in the passage of a day, and even George Fletcher Moore, one of the colony’s most energetic supporters, summed up his impression of the port town as a
barren looking district of sandy coast; the shrubs cut down for firewood, the herbage trodden bare, a few wooden houses among ragged looking tents and contrivances for habitations, one poor hotel, a poor public house into which everyone crowded; our colonists a few cheerless, dissatisfied people with gloomy looks, plodding their way through the sand from hut to hut to drink grog and grumble out their discontents to each other.
This kind of negative characterisation of the nascent colony led to very bad press in Britain, best summed up in the sketch of the ‘Flourishing State of the Swan River Thing’. The cartoon, published in England in 1830, captures the listlessness and despair of the hapless colonists over on the other side of the world. Five dishevelled and clearly depressed figures sprawl over on the sand before a jerry-built tavern and a shipwreck. They are glowering at one another, wondering what the hell went wrong.
The truth was just as alarming. The shipwreck in the background of the cartoon was that of the Marquis of Anglesea, which at that time was being used variously as the governor’s residence and a storehouse. Later it became a prison hulk for colonists arrested for assault and disorder. It was under these conditions that architect and civil engineer Henry Reveley was instructed to build Perth’s first civic structure: the Roundhouse Prison at Arthur Head. Like many buildings in Fremantle, its limestone walls were constructed from stone quarried on site. Reveley, who once saved Percy Shelley from drowning in Italy (but wasn’t there to save him the next time), designed the prison to resemble a minor Benthamite panopticon, sitting solidly over the whalers tunnel that links Bathers Beach to the town.
I ride my bicycle most mornings past the Roundhouse Prison, where Nyungar men were held before being exiled to Rottnest Island. In 1834 the Pinjarup people crept nightly to the walls to whisper encouragement to their leader, Calyute, before his sentence of sixty lashes for stealing flour was carried out. Beside the bicycle track, somewhere in the soft white sand of the dunes beneath the prison walls, lie the remains of the first European legally executed in the colony: fifteen-year-old John Gavin, sentenced in 1844 to hang for murder. Gavin had been incarcerated at Parkhurst Reformatory on the Isle of Wight, but he and other boys were sent to the colony in 1842 in an effort to satisfy those agitating for convict labour. My four-year-old son, Luka, likes to watch the Roundhouse Prison cannon being fired (it happens at one o’clock every afternoon), although it’s impossible for me to descend the steep limestone stairs back to the street without recalling Gavin’s pitiful end, carried down the same stairs to the makeshift gallows.
Ironically the former prison offers the best view of Fremantle. On my most recent visit, I was carrying Luka on my shoulders through the old cells when I overheard an English tourist looking at a nineteenth-century panorama of the area, taken from Arthur Head. ‘I didn’t know it snowed in Perth,’ she whispered to her husband, who joined her to peer at the photograph. While the image does look like the town is covered in drifts of snow, banked into every corner and gutter, it’s actually the finest windblown sand, swept off the beaches by the southerly winds.
Once completed, the new Roundhouse Prison was quickly put to use. In one year alone, according to historian Geoffrey Bolton, ‘it was estimated that one quarter of the male population of Fremantle had been run in for drunkenness, and there was a good deal of petty theft and that was because people were pretty hard up’. This prevalence of crime wasn’t something that diminished over the decades, either. Later in the nineteenth-century, the crime rate in Perth was said to be seven times greater than in Adelaide: the result of poverty and the high price of imported food.
Until hangings were taken from the streets, essentially because it was felt that the citizens’ enjoyment of them was becoming unhealthy, capital punishment was a public spectacle. George Seddon describes the entire cohort of Perth Boys School taken out of class in 1847 to witness the hanging of convicted murderer James Malcolm. As was the usual practice, the execution was conducted on the site where the crime took place: ‘The school was marched to witness the spectacle, which took place on the Guildford Road. When the boys were nearing the Causeway, they were overtaken by a cart carrying the condemned man sitting on his coffin.’
The medieval imagery is telling. Britain might have been undergoing the greatest industrialisation seen in any country to that time, but in Perth the society of free men and women and their servants maintained many of the practices being phased out in England: the use of gibbeting and the stocks in punishment, serfdom for contracted workers, and a largely barter economy made necessary by an absolute reliance on agriculture and fishing.
The Swan River Colony was struggling, in part because the colonists hadn’t yet learnt to read the land. That skill was something that came much later, when they discovered that the presence of certain kinds of trees indicated fertile soil. The open tuart forest that stretched along the coastline of Perth behind the first aeolian (shaped by the wind) limestone swale wasn’t good soil, which was the reason most colonists clung to the river-banks of the Swan and Canning, and then later the swamps that fill the gaps between the limestone ridges that rise inland. While on Carnac Island, Robert Menli Lyon recorded Yagan’s description of the three long bands of geological formation running north-south along the lowland plain that in turn influence the surface vegetation. The three distinct bands were named by Yagan as firstly Booyeembarra, or limestone country, characterised by tuart and balga tree; secondly Gandoo, or what is now known as the Bassendean Sands formation, characterised by jarrah and banksia woodlands; and finally Warget, the more fertile alluvial Pinjarra formation nearest to the Darling Scarp, with its marri, wandoo and flooded gum. This description of the landscape seemed to surprise Lyon, who felt that Yagan’s understanding of ‘the country will show that these savages are not destitute of geological knowledge’.
Lyon’s surprise at the Whadjuk understanding of their country hints at the lost opportunities that were to follow, as the settlers went about effacing the knowledge of the Perth area that had taken millennia to develop. The situation in the first years was so desperate that Stirling sent the Parmelia to Java in 1829 for provisions, and later a government schooner went to Mauritius for resupply.
Perhaps the best that can be said of Perth’s early failure to thrive is that it served as a lesson to subsequent colonisers. One of the colony’s chief critics was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an agitator for the model of ‘systematic colonisation’ that was soon to find expression in the settlement of Adelaide. Wakefield regarded the Perth model as an object lesson in how not to conceive a colony: mistakenly offering generous land grants to masters who would struggle to hold their servants and labourers when so much cheap land was available. The theme of Perth’s difficulties was also taken up in Das Kapital by Karl Marx, who used the venture as an example of the need of capitalism to exploit all aspects of the means of production, especially labour, or otherwise fail.
One of the most common complaints in the colony was ophthalmia, an eye inflammation caused by Vitamin A deficiency. The only cure was a diet rich in vegetables and dairy products, largely unavailable due to the death of livestock (Mary Ann Friend observed the ‘common’ sight of dead cows on the windswept beaches) and the failure of local gardens to thrive without fertiliser in the limestone soil. Symptoms were described by one settler as ‘agony beyond anything; a sensation of scalding water poured on the eyeballs’. The settlers called it ‘sandy blight’ and believed it was caused by the sudden transition from the milder conditions at home to those encountered on the bright beaches. A diet of dried meat, biscuit and beer meant increased sensitivity to the fierce coastal light and a corresponding night blindness.
Nothing reminds me of my Perth childhood in the days before skin-cancer awareness more than the blinding light at the beach on a hot summer’s day. As a heavily freckled child with red hair and blue-green eyes, without sunglasses or a hat, I didn’t stand a chance against the raking sun off the ocean, even when wearing that characteristic Perth squint and sheltering hand. But I was a water baby and always outdoors. One of the things that initially drew me to skindiving was the contrast between my blindness out of the water and the richness of colour to be found under the glittering surface. The neon green of the sea-lettuce and the olive kelp and sea-grass on the sandy beds within the limestone reefs were a balm to my eyes. I remember diving through the cool shadows under ledges where colourful wrasse and red-lipped morwong peered. I speared crayfish with my gidgee and carried them clacking above my head to the shore, one eye on the waves that scrolled in from the deeper water.
I spent so much of my childhood and teenage years underwater that it’s not an exaggeration to say that, like Tim Winton, ‘The sea got me through my adolescence.’ Surfing and diving were an escape from boredom, but it was always more than that. As Winton writes, ‘Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting … a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed in the long moment.’
We were nerveless kids, my friends and I, uncontaminated by the fear of sharks that for many Perth swimmers has suffused these past years with a sense of menace. The ocean may have been burnished with silver, but being absorbed in the long moment beneath the cool surface meant release from the hormonal confusion to be found back on land. It was also about the intensity of the experience and an awareness of what was in the water with me, beyond the crystal facets of the reef pools: the schools of herring flashing against the darker water, the numerous shipwrecks on the reefs further out. I knew there was a vast ship graveyard over near Rottnest Island. But nobody had told me that the dozens of ships were deliberately scuttled over the course of many years, having been retired from service. Nor had anyone told me that they didn’t contain the souls of thousands of drowned sailors, an image that spoke to me of the transgression of the boundaries between solid and liquid, stone and water, land and sea – whose comingling is in fact a natural feature of the Perth environment.
Perth’s windswept limestone coast is not generally considered a romantic landscape. Ron Davidson’s witty and erudite 2007 book Fremantle Impressions contains a recent description of the fragile clarity of Perth’s late afternoon light against the industrial structures that dot the harbour: the gantry cranes, derricks, hawsers and gas silos. The story, told by jockey and Melbourne Cup winner J.J. Miller to art dealer and ex-dockworker Larry Foley, concerns the initial impressions of the area by figurative painter Robert Dickerson. Dickerson was in the west on a painting expedition, and Miller invited him to the Fremantle beach to show him where racehorses used to train. ‘Dickerson looks across at the tanks and pipes and industrial depots scattered among the North Fremantle dunes. “This is Jeffrey Smart country,” he remarks to JJ, who gets the joke.’
The observation was made in jest, and yet there’s truth to it, in the light reflected by the shining steel of an industrial landscape and the aeolian limestone ribs that emerge from the coastal sands. There’s that double effect of the scalpel-sharp light and the general impression of space and silence and stillness – the strange marriage of a realist vision with an absurdist tone. It’s an atmosphere common to many first impressions of the city, and something exemplified in this passage from one of my favourite contemporary novels about Perth, Josephine Wilson’s Cusp:
In the parks and on the verges and in the front yards of suburbia, misdirected sprinklers stoically pumped black streams of rusty bore water out onto the sticky tarmac of Western Australian roads, sending steam up into the cloudless blue of yet another summer day. Willy-wagtails made the most of it, flicking their pert tails in the fine mist, while tiny black lizards darted for cover beneath a fragile head of blue hydrangeas.
A fat bobtail woke from its stupor and sluggishly headed across Canning Highway into four lanes of oncoming traffic.
… ‘What was that? Did I hit a bump?’
Robert Drewe’s historical novel The Drowner suggests a similar mix of the absurd and the sublime when his character Will declares that ‘[t]his is a landscape of such stark space and beauty that reason can only try to defy it.’ There is a secretive side to Perth that has everything to do with this aura of openness and beauty; it’s the feeling that the city doesn’t reveal itself without effort, forcing us to look closer. Such a register of space and silence in a modern metropolis is unusual, perhaps, and yet my own sense of Perth as a child was that the city’s spaces were rarely neutral.
Because my three children are relatively young, and because I spend so much time with them, it’s natural that my experience of the city often revisits my experiences as a child. Down on the beach after sunset, I watch them settle as the colours on the horizon fade and they begin to sense the night’s quiet ghosting, inhabiting the darkness in a way that’s really only possible in a city like Perth. It’s a landscape with presence, but balanced with an expansiveness that is perfectly suited to dreamers, especially those who draw nourishment from Drewe’s ‘stark space and beauty’.
The air is salty above the dunes that over the millennia have hardened into limestone hills upon which most Perth residents have built a home. But the air is also dry, and even the days of rain in winter are usually interspersed with hours of brilliant sunshine. Most winter storms come in the form of squalls that nip and sting and race over the land rather than settling in to drench. This is rust country, but of the creeping variety, and the fact that the atmosphere is most often dry means that abandoned buildings remain perfectly preserved, just like in the dehumidified desert interior.
The summer heat kills off the wild oats and other weeds that might intrude on the human landscape, and the paucity of water slows the growth of trees. It’s rare that moss or mould takes hold on the bare walls of abandoned factories or industrial structures. It’s this aridity and clarity of definition that reflects something essential of Perth, in the sense that what is built in this city feels strangely eternal when clothed in light.
One much-loved example of a building that stands relatively unmarked decades after its retirement is the South Fremantle Power Station, four kilometres south of Fremantle. When I was a child, the nearby industrial area was home to a foul-smelling tannery and an abattoir where teenage boys from Fremantle were employed straight after leaving school. (Many of the young women went to the Mills & Ware biscuit factory on South Terrace.)
The power station was built in the coastal dunes because the location was close to train lines carrying coal from Collie, south-west of Perth. Next to the power station was the old Robb Jetty, where the sheep and cattle driven from the stations in the hinterland arrived to be slaughtered at the abattoir. The cattle from the northern stations were forced to swim ashore to get rid of ticks; on occasions they broke free of their pens and stormed the streets of South Fremantle, posing a threat to children and the elderly, before being rounded up by mostly Aboriginal stockmen. The longevity of this cattle trade has been memorialised in an art-installation cattle run, made of steel, in the dunes near the power station. I go fishing there with my friend Mark and my eldest son, and to get to the beach we’re forced to take the cattle run down from the car park.
The power station was commissioned in 1948, at a time when Perth’s power shortages meant that electricity was rationed: one hour on, one hour off. From a distance, the towering stepped Art Deco structure can appear like either a Chernobyl ruin or a graceful remnant from a time when even industrial buildings had style. The building has been gutted of the gleaming turbines, boilers and tangles of pipes that once hummed with steam and fire, while vandals have knocked out the thousands of panelled windows. Somehow this dereliction only enhances the forlorn grandeur of the building for those passing by on the Old Mandurah Road.
On the day the power station closed, in July 1985, the workers, many of whom were housed in the nearby suburb of Hilton Park, described it as a ‘happy place’. This was primarily because of its position by the ocean and its fifty-foot-high windows streaming with natural light. One technician, Ray Mydoe, who’d come out from England in 1950 to help install the turbines and worked right through until the station’s closure, decided that he was now going to retire because ‘I don’t want to work anywhere else. This was the only place in the world for me.’
The abandoned station has been fenced off for many years, but that’s never really worked to keep out the street artists, skateboarders, ravers and homeless people. I’ve wandered the halls and balconies and stared out from the roof on a number of occasions. Despite the growing sense of decay inside, and the smell of urine, booze and rubbish, I’ve always walked away feeling strangely uplifted by my visit.
There are parts of the station that I don’t enter, namely the dark pungent rooms of the office section. These are beyond spooky, giving off a whiff of danger that catches in my chest as I step quietly over the rubble and broken glass in the corridors. There are supposed to be bloodstained walls and the remains of a crime scene in some of the pitch-black rooms, one of a number of murders that are rumoured to have taken place in the building over the years.
I haven’t been able to corroborate the stories of suicide and bloodshed, although on my most recent visit, in March 2013, I was reminded again of the sense that Perth’s vital aspects are often concealed beneath either a beguiling surface charm or a layer of unpromising material. In this case, it’s the barrier of a fence-line that must be walked until an entrance can be made, the facade of an industrial ruin, an atmosphere of danger, and then the revelation of entering the cavernous hall. The gentle sea breeze catches in the tattered plastic scrims that once covered the cathedral-like windows, while the soft light plays over the hundreds of giant works of street art. There’s a sense of being in a vast gallery, a basilica or a cave adorned with paintings whose meanings are long forgotten.
The power station has been used as a location in more than one film, notably Ron Elliott’s 1998 Fremantle crime thriller Justice. With its cavernous halls, broken windows and fluorescent guts, it’s one of the few interiors in the city that captures the run-down urban vibe so closely related to stories of crime and desperation. It was also used as a backdrop to American band Fear Factory’s film clip for ‘Cyberwaste’ in 2004.
One other film that stages a violent scene inside the power station is the 2004 fight-film Aussie Park Boyz, which was written and directed by lead actor Nunzio la Bianca. This so-bad-that-it’s-good self-funded effort didn’t manage to secure a cinematic release in Australia but was a cult success overseas. In between set-piece brawls featuring rival ethnic gangs, the film lovingly details the Italian rituals of home life in the semi-industrial spiritual homeland of the Aussie Park Boyz, Osborne Park. While the power station, Fremantle Prison and a grungy northern suburbs pub feel authentic as venues for la Bianca to display his macho prowess, not even his best efforts can redeem the film when the locations are moved outside. The story suffers a fatal decompression and all intensity vanishes. The characters appear like schoolchildren capering about on a film set, miniaturised by the vast empty background of silent bush and industrial light.
The 2009 feature Two Fists, One Heart, which its writer Rai Fazio based on his own experiences, had a similar theme of tough Italian Australian kids demanding respect, but it benefited from a bigger budget and superior acting. In its representation of outer Perth suburbia, all dry verges and sun-baked brick and tile, the migrant virtues of hard work and family manifest themselves in vegetable gardens and laden tables. The film manages to retain the integrity of its setting, in its depiction of both the suburbs as they are and the human scale of the relationships and the conflict. The fighting takes place mano e mano, and there is no attempt to make of Perth something that it isn’t – big, dark and dangerous. Instead it focuses on the populated building sites and beaches and river, and the small clubs and busy footpaths of Northbridge, before returning to the backyards and kitchens and empty streets of the suburbs.
Some sixty years after Mary Ann Friend painted her sketch of marooned settlers and wrote how ‘we expected to find land but only found sand’, and around the time ‘sandgroper’ came to describe Perth residents, tracking through the sand like the eponymous tunnelling grasshopper-like insect, men toiled in waist-deep water and near-total darkness some sixty feet below the surface of Fremantle Prison. These prisoners worked wet and barefoot in chains for six years to complete the series of tunnels designed to supply Fremantle residents with fresh drinking water. The first mining boom was on and the port town was thriving, although typhoid had become a problem. The prison had its own water source, but now it was thought necessary to construct a deeper reserve to store and distribute water to the town. The water was pumped to the surface by hand, a horrific job that left one man dead from exhaustion (this man’s death in his twenties was recorded as being due to natural causes) and several others seriously injured.
It’s possible to journey through these tunnels today, in imitation punts. The tunnels run north to south outside the eastern wall of the prison, roughly parallel to Hampton Road. As in all limestone caves, the air is odourless as the porous stone soaks up every smell, and the darkness is enveloping once head-torches are extinguished. It’s interesting to spend a few minutes in this kind of darkness, where even looking with open eyes supplies no visual stimulus; the mind begins to involuntarily produce images, shapes that coalesce and drift, illuminated from within. It’s easy to see why prisoners kept in this total darkness for longer than a few days went mad.
It was common enough for children of my generation to hunt out limestone caves with torches – and, if you were serious, helmets and overalls that wouldn’t get snagged when you shimmied through tight entrances between adjoining caves. Some of these caves were engineered, such as those at Rottnest Island and at Buckland Hill in Mosman Park. Others were natural, caused by the slow dripping of a dilute carbolic acid over the years. The acid ate away the limestone but crystallised into stalactites and stalagmites the colour of wedding cake icing and the texture of the smooth whorls inside a sea shell. Just as they do in the tunnels beneath Fremantle Prison, the glittering roots of jarrah hang down, each hair on every delicate root holding a teardrop of water.
The roots work their way through the stone by secreting an acid drip that creates a tunnel of its own, allowing the root to follow. Often there are solution pipes caused by the roots of larger trees that have died and rotted away, forming glistering periscopes up through the stone to the bright surface. This is just as well, because the air in most caves is laden with carbon dioxide, and it’s dangerous to be underground for longer than an hour. Once, as a teenager, in a giant cave some hundred feet below the surface, I crept away from my party and found a quiet chamber. I lay on my back, turned off my torch and felt the weight of the stone above me, the stillness of the air, the muffled sounds of my friends in the distance. I felt so comfortable that I fell asleep and my friends only found me after a frantic search. I’ve always felt as comfortable underground as I do beneath the surface of the water, a feeling of peace that has everything to do with the narrowing of stimulation to what can be seen, and felt on the skin, the focus on breath, the sensual loci of the body. Such moments in a cave really do feel, as in Nicholas Hasluck’s poem ‘Anchor’, that you are wading ‘knee-deep in darkness’ and that the ‘fragile ceiling is propped up by silence’. In the absence of stimulation you realise that the absence has a powerful presence: the weight of rock above you, the pressing of the darkness against your body, the air that hasn’t been disturbed for millennia.
But my son Max, who is eleven and doesn’t have the same history of caving, is unaccustomed to the absence of light as we work our way along the prison tunnel. As our fingers push off the chalky walls, it’s like we’re floating in darkness. Despite his excitement, he’s also a little spooked, relieved when we near a small culvert in the tunnel and paddle over to where the others in the group are waiting. This culvert was where the guard sat on duty while the prisoners worked. At the end of the guard’s shift, a wading prisoner would tow him to the exit ladder in a plated steel currach so he wouldn’t get his feet wet. We shine our torch on a cement plaque on the wall. The inscription simply reads, ‘Excavations for Fremantle water supply done by prison labour, June 1898, signed by ER Evans, warder.’
The plaque has little significance until you learn the background story. Mr Evans was the warden who supervised the prisoners over six years of eight-hour days and six-day weeks. Once the tunnels were complete, he approached the superintendent of the prison and asked that he be allowed to acknowledge the work of the prisoners in some small way. After all, before the coming of water piped down from the Perth hills, this work had assured Fremantle residents of a supply of fresh drinking water into the future. Many of the men had ruined their lungs due to silicosis, or Potter’s rot.
Evans was alone in wanting to record the labours of the men, however, and the superintendent refused his request. Undeterred, Evans risked his job, stole some cement from the prison stores and made the plaque himself, in the farthest corner of the farthest tunnel, twenty metres down in the stone. The plaque remained there in undisturbed darkness for some hundred years until its accidental discovery late last century. Evans’ respect for the men is made explicit by the inscription. It’s also telling that Evans signed his name as ‘warder’, a slang term for warden that points to the respect being reciprocal. It’s the equivalent of a corrections officer today allowing himself to be called a screw.
I think it’s fitting that the depth at which Evans made his forbidden plaque is precisely where the sedimentary limestone, characterised by shell and sea-urchin grit, touches upon the tamala limestone, whose aeolian origins are far more ancient. It is also where the water table sits, with minor variations depending upon the season. At this point the texture and porosity of the stone changes, becomes denser and smoother. It’s like the difference between chalk and bone, consolidated by time and wind and leaching water – a combination of the elements that’s suggestive of the broader surface landscape.
From an aeroplane, the plain on which Perth is built appears perfectly flat, but this false perspective changes at ground level. Just like the ocean from which the land emerges, whose broad-backed swells are most obvious from a position on the water, the stone hills roll in great westerly swells across the plain. These broad wave-sets of stone were shaped by the very same wind that sculpts the ocean into waves, ending in the ridge of Mount Eliza that’s the westernmost point. There is continuity across the land and the sea, between stone and water. The swells of stone undulate in the same wavelike ridges out into the ocean, forming the north–south limestone reefs of the Parmelia and Success Banks – against which so many ships have been wrecked – ending with the line of Garden, Carnac and Rottnest islands, the continental shelf then dropping away.
Perth is one of the world’s windiest cities. When it’s still, you really notice it. The south-westerly ‘Fremantle Doctor’ sweeps off the ocean after the hot convection that pulses off the inland desert when the easterly blows. The salt in the wind settles on the land and the stunted coastal heath resembles the flowering seagrass that forms its sub-aqueous reflection across the sandy beaches, made of shell and the white grains of quartz and milky feldspar, carried down by the river from the scarp, deposited in siliceous blooms by longshore currents along the coastline.
Whenever I drive past the popular North Cottesloe beach, not far north of Fremantle, I’m always reminded of a friend of mine. After his girlfriend dumped him, he quit his job on a Sydney building site, packed enough to fit in a milk crate and struck out for Perth on his bicycle, an old thing that was ill-equipped for the 4000 kilometres of travails ahead. It was a picaresque journey with plenty of odd events and characters met along the way. On the Nullarbor he collapsed with sunstroke and was rescued by a passing truckie, who dropped him off at the next truck stop to rehydrate. From there he continued on, white sand and aquamarine shallows blocking out the creaking pedals and straining chain while the red desert and then stubbled dust horizons of the wheatbelt receded behind him. He rode into the city on a hot morning with the easterly at his back, cycled through the western suburbs, parked his bike, wandered down the beach and fell into the waves. As a cure for heartbreak, I am told, it was a total success.
The centrality of the beach to Perth’s sense of itself is something of a cliché, but that’s of no concern to the tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands, who, like my friend, take to the waters to cheer themselves up. The sprawl of Perth is so great that it’s approximately the same size as Tokyo or Los Angeles and many times the size of Greater London, and the length of the city on its north-south axis means that it contains many dozens of beaches. Every beach has its own personality and moods. Every beach is a focus for different communities who gather there to picnic and play and by turns stupefy themselves in the sun before invigorating their bodies in the cool water.
My own local, South Beach, is not as beautiful as the northern beaches in that the sand is a grey-white. It certainly has its charms, though, not the least being that it’s walking distance from my fibro shack in South Fremantle. In the days when it was known as Brighton, it was also something of a resort. The early twentieth-century foreshore sustained a built environment that included a roller-skating rink, a picture theatre, a merry-go-round and a shark-proof swimming pool. The opening day of the Brighton summer season once attracted a crowd of 35 000 people.
Now it’s just another beach. There is still a grassy foreshore behind dunes laced with islands of bonsai-looking Rottnest tea-tree, but it’s on the sand that the crowds gather. Only the dogs are segregated, with their own beaches on either side of the main shoreline. Like every Perth beach, on summer days the water is clear and the sand is so hot underfoot that it can burn the skin. But unlike most Perth beaches, the swell is barely noticeable and it’s rare to see the offshore pontoon pulling on its leash.
I can vividly remember the feeling of community I experienced as a child on the beach and also in the men’s change-rooms along the coastline, showering with my brother and father. It struck me as remarkable that strangers in large numbers could be more at ease around one another while completely naked than when fully clothed. No status symbols or attempts at posturing. Easy conversation, earthy laughter, no shyness or awkward silence – something that I’ve only seen elsewhere in the sento of Japan, where public nudity has a longer tradition.
Perhaps I felt so comfortable in the beach environment because I was a member of what Robert Drewe has called the ‘sand people’, something that unfortunately had a lot to do with my complexion – and I still carry the tattooed inscriptions of Perth’s sometimes venomous rays on my skin. As Drewe outlined in The Shark Net with a mix of fondness and revulsion the skin-peeling exploits of his own generation, it was still common enough for the Gen-X kids of my era to be permanently sunburnt for six months of the year. In winter my hair reverted from bleached wheat to carrot orange, and the colour of my constantly shedding skin faded to reveal a blotting of dark freckles that over the years coalesced into a pale tan. With eyes irritated by sand and wind, hair thick with salt, my friends and I would compete to see who could remove in a single ruby chip a perfect mould of the ends of our noses, or the twin jewelled scabs off the tops of our ears, or long sheets of papyrus skin off our shoulders and chests.
The beach has always been a place where people mix. The experience of warmth and light, cold and submersion, seems to sublimate the tribalism found inland into a pleasurable drowsiness or a physical charge brought on by the cool water, or a simple appreciation for the horizon of sky and sea, or even a tingling awareness of the presence of danger. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1937 novel Intimate Strangers charts the effect of the dawning beach culture upon Perth’s youth, as a place to literally and figuratively undress, and get away from the Protestant mores that regulated behaviour inland. Passages of stuffy dialogue that could have come directly from the diaries of the class-conscious settlers of the previous century contrast with the sensuality the main characters experience at the beach: ‘It was one of those idle imperishable days of which there are so few in a lifetime. Greg was lit up by it, a little unsteady with sun-dozing, the surge of the sea, the youth and beauty of this girl he worshipped …’
Sunlight unifies the characters in this novel and illuminates their secrets. Prichard, like so many Perth writers after her, lovingly describes the effect of the sun setting over the ocean as it lights upon the domestic realm:
Sunset, flame and amber, painted the edge of the sky: the islands were blotted dark against it: a hook of shags drifted inland. Windows of small wooden houses along the cliff took the blaze of the sunset as if they were on fire inside. Elodie watched the flame die in the sky, fade to saffron, and lie there in long flat streaks.
In Prichard’s novel the domestic is integrated into the social, and the most persuasive of the characters is a handsome Italian fisherman, sun-lover, worker and fearless political agitator. This dark-skinned energetic swimmer moves easily between the different worlds, an outsider who stands in strong contrast to the insular suburban matrons and patrons who are blind to the effects of the developing economic storm.
Many of Tim Winton’s characters are outsiders too. It’s a reminder of the fact that for the greater part of the twentieth century Perth’s beachside suburbs were often marginal places, despite the best efforts of the developers who parcelled up the land and sold it to young families who couldn’t afford to buy near the train lines. There are some terrific photographs of motorbike races taking place in 1930s North Beach (precursors of the illegal Scarborough drags of the 1960s and 1970s), with cheering crowds holding their hats against the surging wind. The hills around are patched with jerry-built corrugated iron shacks, gimcrack garden beds, limestone streets, and dust clouds chasing the daredevil bikers, a visual reminder that to live by the coast in those days you either had to be poor or a real sun-lover. There was no train line and no tram, only irregular buses that drummed over the jarrah-plank roads, carrying locals and day-trippers and, increasingly, surfers.
My home suburb of South Fremantle feels most of all like a coastal village, a bit run-down and half-asleep, which is exactly how I like it. My house is built on loose beach sand, and only salt-tolerant plants such as pigface, cushion bush, dune sheoak and cockies tongue grow well. George Seddon wrote a beautiful piece about gardening in the limestone soils of his home a few hundred metres to the north. In it, he pointed out something else I love about Fremantle: the obvious harmony of perspective in a town whose buildings are largely built out of the stone on which they rest. Seddon’s limestone home was built on a limestone hill halfway up to the rim of the stone chalice that encloses the port city. From the hillside you can still smell the salt and saltbush and baking limestone on the wind, the sound of ships entering the port with brute foghorn blasts, their flanks so high and wide that it looks like a wall of the city is scrolling back.
Recently I bodysurfed a huge swell at nearby Leighton Beach with my brother and our eldest sons. The swell was unexpected and we didn’t have boards, but it was so powerful and the foam was so deep and the dumpings so violent that when we caught our waves the exhilaration was intense enough to remind us of being puny children again. We were riding the cold frothy banks of water as our father and mother had taught us, as my grandfather had taught my mother and her siblings while my grandmother, who never learnt to swim, waded in the shallows.
Calling himself a ‘littoralist’, Tim Winton has often captured the ocean’s hyperreal brilliance, its importance to swimmers and surfers as a place of renewal, as a site where the possible is made visible, a place of meditation and forgetting, but often married to a sense of danger important to the rites of passage of so many Perth teenagers for so many years. Those immediately recognisable marginal characters who crop up in Winton’s narratives of the coast, described in his memoir Land’s Edge as those who ‘feel forgotten, neglected, put upon, and yet proud to be far away, on the edge’, and those ill-at-ease with encroaching suburban homogeneity, have been driven north, to the quasilegal squatters camps and ‘squat little towns with their fish-deco architecture’ that dot the northern coastline. Yet the local beaches remain both a place of community and a place where it’s possible, with a turn of the head, to ‘have the mariner’s sensation of being merely a speck’.
As a swimmer and surfer, I always preferred the northern beaches of Scarborough and Trigg in particular, where the limestone protrudes above the dunes and the waves are larger. Now that I have three young children, however, we rarely travel far to swim. We occasionally cross the river to Leighton or Cottesloe, where the white sand squeaks underfoot and the champagne foam in the shallows tingles the legs and fizzes over the shoreline and makes children giddy with delight. Mid-morning, before the sun passes overhead and shears off the ocean, the cirrus clouds above the horizon often resemble passages of perfect cursive script written in soft white lines against the bluest page. This is the picture of a Perth in harmony with the stillness and space and silence that is its truest personality, the only prick of drama being the spotter plane of the shark patrol crawling over the sky.
George Seddon, in Swan Song, describes a similar atmosphere in relation to Rottnest Island. For Seddon, Rottnest is the location that most fully realises the self-image of Perth’s citizens as relaxed and egalitarian, tranquilised by sun and clean salt air, at ease with the pedestrian pace of the barefoot transition between shaded veranda and sun-bright beach, devoted to the simple pleasures of family, food and swimming. Calls to develop Rottnest with luxury accommodation are always met with resistance, just as proposals to build higher than a few storeys on the Perth coastline are regularly and decisively rejected. The beach is in this respect a sanctuary, defended as a timeless space, a place of memories and memories in the making.
The shark-spotter plane passes over my local beach in South Fremantle too, although like a dragonfly that has been hovering it soon quirts further south, where the beaches are whiter and the contrast of dark shape against white sand is clearer. Summer is the time of parties and barbecues, of breakfasts at outdoor café tables and drinks in beer gardens and pub courtyards. What draws many to my local beach is not its natural beauty but that it serves the same social function as the above. So many from my local community gather at the local beach to swim and sprawl and natter that it often has the atmosphere of a street party, an integration of the suburban park or urban space and private yard, a place where local people come together.
Fremantle is always a place where to walk down the street is to inevitably meet friends, but this experience is even more focused at the beach. At any one time half the kids from the local schools and their parents and grandparents might be present on the bank of grey-white sand, catching up and passing the time in easy conversation. With the heat and stupefaction and groups of friends lazing around, it feels as if we are somehow inhabiting a mirage outside of time, literally in the sense that the light is shimmering and distorted by the heat convection off the sand, and figuratively as an artist’s mythic representation of what might define community in the coastal suburbs of Perth.
One of my favourite albums when I was a kid was Dave Warner’s Mug’s Game, which came out in 1978, when I was twelve. The record is a sometimes fond and sometimes savage piss-take of Perth in the 1970s, and I knew it word for word, especially the parts that related to the beach culture of local teenagers. The chorus of the thirteen-minute title track details the futile pleasures of Perth’s nightlife, while three monologues ridicule the city’s inexplicably sexually appealing male stereotypes. It was the picture of the brain-dead surfie, Zongo, that resonated most:
A typical Australian beach, I’m struggling out of the surf, panting heavily for I’m overweight.
Two young nubile women on the beach:
‘Oooh, isn’t he spunky!’
‘Which one? That one in the lurex?’
‘No, not HIM!’
‘That one over there with the earring in his ear and the bleached blonde hair.’
‘That’s Zongo, let’s go over and talk to him.’
‘Okay.’
‘Hi Zongo!’
‘Hi girls!’
‘How are you, Zongo?’
‘Far out!’
‘What have you been doing with yourself lately,
Zongo?’
‘I’ve just been having an insane time … Hey, look there’s Rory! Rory couldn’t get a wave if he tried!’
(stupid laugh)
‘I’ve been having an insane time, last night I went out to the driveins to see Kung Fu Fighting and we drank two bottles of tequila and got really smashed. Insane!’
‘Ohh, isn’t he spunky!’
I was too young in the 70s to see Warner’s band, From the Suburbs, but I saw him doing stand-up when I was in my mid-teens before he was banned for being too explicit.
I was also too young to see Perth’s early punk bands The Scientists, The Victims, The Manikins and The Cheap Nasties, more’s the pity. Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy’s edited Vagabond Holes and Bleddyn Butcher’s Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids give a great picture of Perth’s live music scene in the 70s and early 80s. Although it was limited to a few venues hosting original acts in ‘cover band city’, the scene produced luminaries such as Dom Mariani (The Stems), Martyn Casey (The Triffids, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grinderman), Dave Faulkner (Hoodoo Gurus), the Farriss brothers (INXS), the Snarski brothers Mark (Chad’s Tree) and Rob (Chad’s Tree, The Blackeyed Susans), David McComb, Robert McComb, Alsy MacDonald and Jill Birt (The Triffids), Kim Salmon (The Scientists, Beasts of Bourbon) and the legendary drummer James Baker (The Scientists, Hoodoo Gurus, Beasts of Bourbon).
It wasn’t until I was living in London in my late teens that I heard either The Scientists or The Triffids, played to me by an Irish friend. He knew I was into The Birthday Party and The Pop Group, which seemed to suit the ambience of our grimy Wandsworth squat. While I immediately loved the swampy sounds of The Scientists, I’ll never forget the first time I heard The Triffids’ ‘Estuary Bed’. Reminded of the limestone coast that I’d abandoned, I think it was the first time I ever experienced nostalgia, and it was certainly the first moment I felt a twinge of longing for home. Hearing the descriptions of my Perth childhood captured so quietly, I wondered if perhaps my ‘old skin’ wasn’t shed after all.
When I look back on it, listening to The Triffids’ album Born Sandy Devotional for the first time was also something of a ‘growing up’ moment for me, aged nineteen on the other side of the planet. It triggered a new awareness that ambivalence might be turned into something other than ridicule – into art, in this case. The sound was, as described by Butcher, ‘both spacious and claustrophobic’, exactly how I’d felt as a teenager in a city where it seemed that the brightness was always turned up but the volume turned down. As Niall Lucy asked, how had The Triffids managed to overcome the problem of all Perth artists, whatever the form, that is, ‘how to lower your voice and still be heard above the noise?’ Perhaps, I wondered, by tuning into the ambivalence made explicit in the promo video for their song ‘Spanish Blue’, with its imagery of hanging out and mucking around that had a clear undercurrent of restlessness: ‘Nothing happens here, nothing gets done, but you get to like it, you get to like the beating of the sun, the washing of the sun …’ The Triffids’ frontman David McComb later suggested something of the sort in an interview with Lucy when he claimed that ‘I find no emotion real, in any art form, unless it’s present with its opposite.’
It wasn’t only ambivalence but also a sense of possibility that made me leave Perth. After that first pang of homesickness, I wondered whether my mixed feelings about my hometown might one day lead to my return (after ten years mostly bumming around, as it turned out). As a teenager who’d lived in more places across four different continents than I’d experienced years on the planet, I wondered whether a home that suggested itself in an art of contradictions, drawn to the darkness on the edge of town but also the fragile clarity of a child’s feelings, was something that I needed more than noise, crowds and concrete.
From the late 1980s, with the break-up of The Stems and The Triffids, it was no surprise to see a new generation turn Perth’s isolation and lack of expectation into a freedom to experiment and develop organically, channelling a lack of ready culture into the necessity to create their own. This is true of all Perth art forms, but it’s perhaps most obvious in the success of its musicians. Plenty of acts over the past twenty years have gone on to national – and often international – success, often without having to leave their Perth base: Ammonia, Jebediah, The John Butler Trio, Eskimo Joe, Little Birdy, The Sleepy Jackson, The Panics, Kill Devil Hills, Gyroscope, Karnivool, End of Fashion, Birds of Tokyo, Schvendes, Pendulum and more recently Abbe May, Drapht, San Cisco, Pond and Tame Impala (I could go on).
It means a lot, of course, to have local culture that speaks to your own place and your own time. At a recent party on a warm summer evening, a woman sitting next to me mentioned how during the latest heatwave she’d taken to going to bed early, lying beneath her ceiling fan, and listening to The Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional and The Black Swan over and over again, in particular the song ‘Too Hot to Move, Too Hot to Think’, both as a panacea and a reminder that tenderness has been found, even in the sometimes brutal summer heat.
Robert Drewe’s short story ‘The Water Person and the Tree Person’ expresses something of the way I feel about the limestone coast of Perth, its importance to a sense of place and civic identity. Part of Drewe’s broad thesis is that to be a Perth child is to develop an awareness of the natural world that verges on the uncanny, imparted by osmosis as much as by teaching and learning. The main character, Andy Melrose, feels as though his wife is belittling him by stating that he is a water person while she is a tree person. Melrose, as a product of a state whose key economic indicators at the time are ‘timber and whaling and asbestos’, feels increasingly distanced from his wife, ‘product of a middle-class Melbourne garden suburb of autumnal tones … and the manicured cold-weather flora of Europe’. Although the couple live in Perth, she is an academic whose urbane friends ridicule his daily swim and suspiciously ‘manly’ ability to change a car tyre. He can’t help feeling defensive about the fact that he’s a product of his environment, just as she is of hers:
What did she expect? Unlike her, he’d grown up on this limestone coast, with the roaring forties blowing sand into his ears and the smell of estuary algae in his nostrils every night as he fell asleep. Ever since, the landscape in his mind’s eye was a crumbly moonscape of a coastline, a glaring beached desert fringed by those two big and wondrous oases, the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.
Melrose suspects that his wife’s love of the bush is just ‘literary-political correctness’, a fictional landscape of the denatured urban mind, while his is a sense of attachment felt in the body.
The limestone coast has its freedoms but also its dangers, and my local beach is not all peace and light. I once witnessed a brawl that involved upwards of fifty people, the result of a family feud, and there is occasionally violent drunkenness in the evenings. Homeless men and women used to sleep in the hollows within the acacia, melaleuca and hakea bushes that cover the dunes, and parents don’t let their children stray there. Mark Reid’s poem ‘Ode to South Beach’ captures the beach’s sometimes mood of sulkiness and decay when he describes its ‘miserly west coast wash’ and ‘rabbity scrub’ as he walks the dog:
I am walking the dog beach, old Manners
arse up snout down on the trail
of vermin or the corpses of sea creatures.
I am giddy with aroma, brine,
the stench of pickled things tossed
from the ocean’s window.
There is a Shaun Tan painting that perfectly catches this beachside id, beyond the usual depictions of its beauty and significance to local swimmers, walkers, surfers and multitude ‘fools on the hill’ – the focus on the jade-coloured reefs and the cobalt waters and volcanic sunsets. In Tan’s North Beach, only a sliver of brilliant blue ocean is visible, hemmed in on all sides by groynes covered in the ‘pickled things’ of Reid’s poem, set against a human-sculpted vertical bank and a darkened snip of sky. There are railings and stairs and road signs, powerlines and grey concrete buildings. The constructed overwhelms the natural. There is none of the space and comfort we associate with the beach – a few limestone bones that I always connect with the northern beaches poke through but most have been concreted over. A lone swimmer dries himself with a towel, facing inland, in line with the unusual perspective of the painting, a place where the light is muted and the perspective diminished.
A second Shaun Tan painting, West Coast Highway, reinforces the theme of North Beach. There is the same absence of people, the same fragment of ocean tucked in a corner behind a foreground almost completely carpeted with bitumen, the same tired-looking coastal heath and a muted grey sky. The same signs and railings and kerbs and powerlines. The ubiquitous burn-outs feature this time, black smears of carbonised rubber. And yet the light is gentle and the mood is unmistakably Perth. The light and the absence of people give the painting an eternal quality. There are no weeds; there is nothing to disturb the picture going forward into time. Watching the Oscar-winning animated short film The Lost Thing, based on Tan’s story of the same name, I was struck by how much the setting, despite its fantastical imagery, reminded me of Perth.
Tan now lives in Melbourne, but there is something about his paintings of suburban life that expresses my own childhood in the suburbs of Perth. Perhaps it’s the children negotiating the quietness and stillness of empty streets and parks and paths, always illuminated and crisply alive, even when the lines are blurred and the theme is darker. There is one picture in particular: ‘Our Expedition: Cliff’ from Tan’s book Tales from Outer Suburbia. In this pastel crayon drawing there is no natural environment left at all. Manicured suburbia stretches right to the limits of the vertical cliff edge, which is itself constructed of large blocks, above the level of the clouds. The light is warm and generous, and the shadows of the two children who sit comfortably on the edge of the world are long. It’s the kind of light that’s often a relief after the fierce light of a hot summer’s day. It brings out the best in the Perth landscape, just as the soft clear light and clean air of winter brings Perth into the crispest focus, drawing out all of the colours and textures of a cityscape usually bleached by the sun. Concrete pipes pour waste out into the sky, birds hover at the children’s feet. Fences, signs, powerlines. The children are confident, at ease; they are observing their world, much like the sole young man in Mary Ann Friend’s painting some 180 years earlier, gazing hopefully out into the future. The children each carry a small knapsack. They too are on an expedition, set down at the edge of the world, but there is no sign that they feel thwarted.
On warm nights when the sea breeze is gentle, my son Max and I wait in the car park at our local beach for the sunset to fade from glossy red to a faint saffron glaze over the ocean horizon. On other nights the sunset mingles all the gaudy colours of a fruit bowl, a canvas of blood orange and tangerine zest, fading to a thin watermelon red, leaving a lemony haze in its wake. On other occasions the sunset captures the alchemical drama of a blacksmith’s workshop, all fire and heat and steam as the glowing orb submerges in water, giving off an angry crimson mist that hangs in the air for nearly an hour. It’s hard to do justice to the sunsets over the Indian Ocean with words, although many have tried. The first example I’m aware of was written by a painter, Louisa Clifton, in March 1840:
The colouring as the sun began to decline became exquisitely soft and radiant, the hills robed in the brightest lakes and blues, the sky reflecting every colour in the rainbow, and yet so softly that every tint completely melted into one another. I cannot easily cease to remember the first Australian sunset.
It’s at this point that my son and I don our old sandshoes and check our gidgees, waiting until the beach is empty before we enter the water in the final moments of dusk. The ocean takes on a slippery celluloid quality, as it does just before dawn, when like a darkroom image coming into focus the murky shapes beneath the surface become distinct, stray photons illuminating the water from within, the sun not yet on the eastern horizon. It was then that my friends and I used to enter the water to go spear-fishing, having ached through the sleepless night with the special excitement that was reserved for dawn surfing, or dawn skindiving. There would be insufficient light to see by and only the cheering sound of my friend Fergus singing through his snorkel, his breathing rapid with the cold and dread of the darker water ahead, coming slowly into light.
Max and I turn on our torches and begin to mark the catfish, or cobbler as they’re locally known, that are already at the waterline, bowled over by the bigger waves but nosing into the shallows to feed. By day secretive and hidden in the weed-beds, by night the cobbler are fearless, often stranded on the beach between waves. They swim between our legs, their slimy skin always sending a bolt of shock though me. Unlike Max, who so far has been lucky, I know how painful it is to step on the cobbler’s barbs, and the memory of the fierce agony can be felt from my toes to my fingertips. We wade through the chop looking for a single large fish for the plate. As much as anything the hunt is an exercise in teaching my son patience and restraint – fathers having taught their sons to gidgee catfish in this area and in roughly the same fashion for tens of thousands of years. Finally, we see the broad sandy flank and swirly ribbons of a larger fish and the spear is sent home.
Max beheads and guts the fish while I watch over the ocean: the sulphur lights of the port to my right, the winking lights marking the Gage Roads channel further out, the bright caustic bloom over Kwinana to the south. The suburbs there are named after settler ships: Parmelia, Rockingham, Success, Orelia, Medina. This is the season for shark attacks, and despite the fact that I made peace with my fear of them long ago, I am strangely unsettled by a recent article in the paper that described a twenty-foot tagged female white pointer cruising longshore through the night, from Safety Bay in the south to Quinns Rocks in the north, back and forth, down and back.
Further south is where I fish with my friend Mark. We’ve been fishing here for years, more for the company and sunset than the catch. Sometimes the tailor are on, sometimes skippy and tarwhine and always herring. For a while there we caught and released an old Port Jackson shark every time we cast a line. Once a great black seal the size of a small car waddled up behind my back, so that when I turned it was waiting with big friendly eyes. It sat and watched us for a while before surfing off into the waves. Our tradition is to always put the first fish back, because of some forgotten superstition, no matter that on occasions it’s the only fish for the night. Something that adds emotional weight to this superstition is the bronze statue that stands in the waves: a horseman turning his blank face over his shoulder, casting his eyes back to the port where his wife and children lie sleeping, his horse raising its head in fear.
Tony Jones’s statue memorialising the engineer C.Y. O’Connor is my favourite in Perth, despite the tragic subject matter. The statue is part of the living environment rather than a static image lodged in a public place, and its horseman sits stirrup deep or soused to the neck depending on the tide. He rides in the waves at roughly the place where on the morning of 10 March 1902 O’Connor removed and pocketed his dentures before he put the barrel of a .38 revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The statue is just out of our casting range, although it sits there in the darkness, catching the blinking illumination of the channel markers. One night at a nearby beachside rave I stripped down and swam out to have a closer look. The moonlight illuminated the horse’s flared nostrils and panicked eyes, animated by confusion and fear of the gunshot, while the horseman faces the port perfectly calm, expressionless – he is already at peace, on his way elsewhere. Once a year, on his birthday, O’Connor’s descendents swim out to the statue and perform a small private ceremony while sprinkling bougainvillea flowers and treading water, much like surfers do to celebrate the lives of their shark-eaten friends, at the very location where blood mingled with water.
O’Connor’s body was found by a boy next to the Robb Jetty site and what is now the remains of the scuttled Wyola. The boy worked in the nearby lime kilns and raised the alarm. By the time help arrived in the form of the local constabulary the body had drifted into deeper water, from where it was retrieved. In her short story ‘The Prospect of Grace’, Amanda Curtin describes how ‘Constable Honner recovered the body and examined the scene, reporting that O’Connor’s horse had entered the water at a canter. The tracks came out again near the jetty, which was splashed with wet sand “as if the horse had got a fright.” There were no footprints.’
O’Connor was the son of Irish parents who’d sold their farm during the potato famine to feed starving locals, and he retained a strong Irish accent to the end. He was widely revered in Perth as the man who not only created the modern port of Fremantle, which is still functioning effectively after more than a century of use, but also brought water to Perth after the creation of the dams and weirs in the catchments of the Helena River. Most ambitious of all was O’Connor’s engineering of the pipeline that carried water across the desert to Coolgardie/Kalgoorlie, to an inland community where water was more expensive than beer, across 600 kilometres of country with a daytime temperature range of 0°C to 50°C. The Coolgardie pipeline was an unrivalled feat of engineering for the time, although O’Connor didn’t live to see its completion.
A tragic figure, O’Connor is a subject made for literary representation. Drewe describes his mythic qualities in The Drowner:
The Chief is a formidable sight cantering on his grey hunter out of the dawn mist. Through the shallows and across the spit, scattering swans before him. A thin and straight-backed six-footer, all his control coming from his hips, the early sunrays shooting off his spray, he looks something of a centaur.
O’Connor was a tall and lanky man with a grey beard, strong nose and heavy black eyebrows. His darkly intelligent eyes were set in a kindly face. Premier John Forrest head hunted him from a posting in New Zealand and made him chief engineer whose purview included ‘harbours, railways, everything’. His was a well-paid public servant’s position that coincided with a time when the colonial government finally had the energy and means to commence major infrastructure works. O’Connor’s daughter Kathleen, one of the progenitors of modernist painting in Australia, said that her father was such a hard worker and so absorbed in his various projects that he barely realised they’d moved countries.
In John Forrest, O’Connor had an equally energetic premier beside him. If Forrest had been born in the eastern states, he would be far better known as an explorer and surveyor, along with his reputation as one of the fathers of Federation. As a younger man he had explored some of the remotest desert points in the Western Australian compass, but perhaps of most significance for the state’s future was his survey of the overland route to Adelaide that only Edward John Eyre had travelled before him. Forrest trekked in a small party with Nyungar guides and dreamed that the same journey might one day be made by train. The idea of the Indian–Pacific train route was such a central demand of Forrest’s at the meetings to decide upon Federation that had the other states not agreed to the plan Western Australia might well have remained independent.
Forrest was initially opposed to Federation and although he legislated for the right of women to vote, his motives were political. He hoped that by allowing the wives and daughters of the landowning class to vote, the voice of the more radical and largely male population of the goldfields might be diluted. As a result, in 1899 Western Australia became only the fourth colony in the world where women had suffrage, behind New Zealand, South Australia and South Africa.
The colony had only recently become selfgoverning in 1890, and it was under Forrest, by now a stout, bearded and bull-necked man, that the state progressed from fully autocratic to partially democratic. Forrest belonged to the generation born of the first settlers, many of whom fulfilled their parents’ best hopes regarding their accumulation of land, wealth and status, as well as their worst fears, specifically with regards to their often casual barbarism towards Aborigines on the northern frontier. Not only did Forrest claim to have shot several desert Aborigines in self-defence, but his biographer, F.K. Crowley, said that Forrest’s humble origins as the son of an indentured servant and his eventual success created in him ‘social snobbery, laissez-faire capitalism, sentimental royalism, patriotic Anglicanism, benevolent imperialism and racial superiority’.
As premier, Forrest was fortunate enough to preside over the city’s first gold boom, when the state’s population swelled and Perth grew rapidly away from its river base. He was a great abettor of O’Connor’s various projects, protecting him from interference and broadly encouraging the realisation of his ambitions. O’Connor is often regarded as a victim of his own success: his earlier projects had come in under budget and on time, making the problems associated with the Coolgardie pipeline appear worse. But the vacuum left by Forrest’s departure for the national legislature, which resulted in four changes of state government within a single year, created the conditions that left O’Connor exposed to the criticism of parliamentarians and the ridicule of sections of the press. While there are apocryphal stories of O’Connor losing his temper and stamping on his hat, his daughters described him as a generous man who often fed strangers at his table and gave money to the numerous poor, and he was also a clearly sensitive man with an artist’s absorption in his projects. But as an engineer, he was no naif, and he knew where he stood in the altered political climate.
At a recent lecture given in O’Connor’s memory by his great-grandson Mike Lefroy and academic Martyn Webb, I was able to look at his original suicide letter. It’s a tragic expression of pain and frustration, as might be expected, with an odd final flourish that indicates an engineer’s enduring pragmatism. Having described how ‘I feel my brain is suffering … I have lost control of my thoughts’, O’Connor ends the letter with the tacked-on imperative, ‘Put the wing walls on the Helena Weir at once!’
While it emerged subsequently that one of O’Connor’s deputies was trading land on the projected route of the Coolgardie pipeline, by all indications it was the vicious attacks on O’Connor’s reputation that most affected him. They were led by The Sunday Times’ Frederick Vosper, a t’otherside firebrand who’d been imprisoned in Queensland for encouraging striking shearers to shoot their oppressors, and Irishman John Winthrop Hackett, a parliamentarian and newspaperman who went on to found the University of Western Australia as the first free university in the British Empire. Vosper described O’Connor as a ‘shire engineer from New Zealand [who] has absolutely flourished on palm-grease … Mr O’Connor is a palm-greased humbug’, and this combined with the three official enquiries into the pipeline’s progress is considered to have been the source of O’Connor’s migraines, anxiety and insomnia, which eventually led to his suicide while of ‘a rational mind’.
The reaction was immediate and heartfelt. Flags flew at half-mast across the city, and the following day all public offices were closed. Workers at the site of the Fremantle harbour project and Mundaring Weir were given leave to attend O’Connor’s funeral, the largest in the state at that time. More than a thousand people waited outside O’Connor’s home in East Fremantle, and many thousands more flocked to see the funeral cortege as it progressed slowly towards Fremantle Cemetery, with the acting premier and the chief justice as pall-bearers.
However, according to Martyn Webb, the University of Western Australia’s Emeritus Professor in Geography, it wasn’t the Coolgardie pipeline that was O’Connor’s pride and joy – it was the Fremantle port, which he had ‘in good spirits’ showed visitors around the day before his suicide. There, a Pietro Porcelli statue stands in O’Connor’s likeness, raised high on a narrow plinth, while basreliefs of the Mundaring Weir and Fremantle Port lie at his feet. Less than a minute’s walk from my studio, Porcelli’s representation of O’Connor faces towards the hills, although it once faced the opposite direction, seawards across the protective arms of the port walls. The commerce of the port has played out beneath this statue since its unveiling by John Forrest in 1911.
From where O’Connor’s gaze now looks pensively downriver, his chin on his fist, dressed like a worker in overcoat and boots, he would have witnessed strikers dropping chunks of mortar from the Fremantle Traffic Bridge onto the premier’s boat on Bloody Sunday, 4 May 1919; when striking dockworkers threatened to riot, then the gunshot and killing of striker Tom Edwards by police; and the reading of the riot act while the coffin of John Forrest, who’d died en route to England in 1918 to accept his knighthood, waited to be unloaded from a nearby steamer. He would have observed all of the comings and goings of the hundreds and thousands of migrants who arrived at the nearby Victoria Quay, some of them like Judah Waten’s character in the short story ‘Looking for a Hus-band’, observing the Fremantle docks ‘fiery even in the shade. Only the gulls splashing and flapping their wings in the water lay cool and unperturbed … and everywhere harsh voices sounded.’
Many of the new migrants in the early twentieth century were met by A.O. Neville, the first head of the newly minted government department for ‘Immigration, Tourism and General Information’. Neville, whose name is now associated primarily with the assimilation policies of the 1920s to the 1940s, was initially stationed in his little Information Bureau office by the port. From 1910 he and his colleagues boarded the Lady Forrest and greeted, in person, many of the 10 000 annual arrivals, presenting them with a letter of welcome and a card detailing the rates of pay for workers in country regions. This was part of a government-inspired and Neville-directed policy of spruiking the arid eastern wheatbelt as a place where largely unskilled urban Britons might, with the help of a booklet describing how to sow their first crop, make a go of hardscrabble farming. In one year, 91 000 brochures and postcards were distributed overseas, leading tens of thousands to pack up their belongings and emigrate. The stated aim was for the state to have a population of one million. This of course all took place during the time of the White Australia policy. Prior to 1901, many of the ships that entered the port bore Afghans and their camels. They camped out on the foreshore and in the nearby dunes, beside the woolsheds and the wheatsheds, fragrant piles of sandalwood heaped for export and the stacks of jarrah bound for Britain. Jarrah sleepers were used across Britain’s extensive rail network, and many of the thoroughfares of London, Paris and Berlin were under-laid with jarrah and karri blocks, some to this day.
Perhaps in the quieter moments at night, when the stars are clear and the wind is blowing, O’Connor can see the ghosting of the past behind the living port and hear the chants of those elders whom Nyungar people believe sung O’Connor to his early death, as punishment for breaking the rock bar at the mouth of the river, and disturbing the Wagyl, or serpent spirit, who lives there. At low tide the bowed bridge of smooth limestone that looked like a serpent’s back allowed Whadjuk men to cross the Derbarl Yerrigan, the Swan River, swimming the last short distance across to Man-jaree, or what is now known as Bathers Beach on the southern bank at Walyalup, or Fremantle.
The limestone rock bar was also a great place to spear fish, because the narrow channel carried all of the marine life that entered and exited the river. O’Connor’s port required the rock bar to be removed, which was done by drilling into the hard travertine limestone and laying charges. Dozens of men drilled down from shaky wooden platforms that extended across the river mouth. The rock bar acted as a partial weir before it was removed, but its destruction consolidated Perth’s viability as a city. Until then, the natural deep-water harbour in Albany meant that mail and tourists were landed there, more than 400 kilometres south-east of Perth, and then transported to Perth overland. Most other shipping passed through Albany instead of Perth for the same reason. The blasting away of the rock bar opened the Swan River to the Indian Ocean, and therefore the city of Perth to the wider world, and in doing so changed the nature of the city forever.