‘The drive of much of our technology is to obliterate distinctions of place … My hope is that Perth will become more parochial and that planning for it will become minutely topical: more so, and not less … every small hill and valley, every limestone outcrop repays attention on a sand-plain.’
George Seddon, Swan Song
Standing on the crest of the Darling Scarp overlooking the Swan Coastal Plain, it’s easy to get the impression that the height and mass and broad obstacle that the CBD represents is somehow more permanent than the encircling suburbs and their mostly single-storey homes nestled within trees. From this position, the suburbs appear much like camps on the margins of the city centre, tucked into bushland, spreading across the lowland plain as far as the eye can see. And yet this perspective is false, if only because it’s the structures in the CBD that have been built and torn down, sometimes many times over, whereas the buildings that people choose to dwell in have mostly endured.
Many of the city’s suburban buildings were constructed during the 1960s and 1970s, amid the great influx of British, Italian and Slav tradesmen whose skills translated into some of the best-made homes in Australia. They were often double-brick houses rather than brick veneer, with mostly Italian and Slav grano-workers doing the limestone trenching, footings and foundations and English tradesmen the bricklaying, carpentry, plastering and painting. These houses were built to last, and the rapid suburban growth on the lowland plain and the influx of migrants also had the effect of elevating a lot of Australian builders and tradesmen into positions of authority: supervisors, foremen and small-business owners.
In the city centre, very few of the original nineteenth-century brick buildings remain, and you need to take a stroll down narrow Howard Street towards the river to feel what it must have been like. On the fringes of the city and across the suburbs, very little is left of the already minimal pre-1950s industrial landscape. Unlike many of the Victorian-era office buildings that were stuccoed to within an inch of their lives, the older industrial buildings rarely attempted to conceal the labour that went into their construction: every brick laid by hand, every tile, and the frame of every window. These rare buildings, such as the now retired Midland Railway Workshops, are some of my favourites. They have a texture; they catch the grime and show their age, but they also use cathedral-like windows and natural light to flood their great interiors.
Perth is a city where the bulk of the built environment has been constructed over the past fifty years. There’s a general absence of this kind of texture and history, particularly among the city’s newer buildings, with their tilt-up walls and traceless glass facades, and the feeling that they’ve been made by machines and assembled rather than built.
A large number of Perth’s suburban buildings are less than fifty years old, too. That is time enough for the trees around them to grow tall, though, and Perth suburbs really only come into themselves once they are clothed in trees.
It’s in the suburbs that a majority of life is lived, albeit largely without performance, without witness and mostly without record. The suburbs are Perth’s quiet places, but this silence can have many qualities. For some, who don’t take it for granted, it can be a source of peacefulness, even of spiritual satisfaction. For others, it can generate frustration, the sense that life is passing them by, brought on by the feeling, as described by Shaun Tan, of being ‘somewhere and nowhere at the same time’. And yet the suburbs are also where Perth’s most vibrant enclaves can be found, places such as Leederville, Scarborough and Bassendean, Victoria Park and North Fremantle, Mount Lawley and Subiaco. The bars, pubs and restaurants of these areas attract both locals and visitors, but fewer of the suburban kids looking for kicks who descend upon the nightclub precincts of Fremantle and Northbridge at night.
It’s hard to imagine a city where the suburban pace of life is so closely linked to the gentle oscillation of the seasons and therefore the truest personality of the plain. Even in the unloveliest of suburbs, the sky arches from horizon to horizon, the sun passes unhurriedly across the usually blue sky, the stars and moon are clear at night. And many Perth residents choose to holiday somewhere even more relaxed and silent, where there are even fewer people, or at least likeminded ones, places such as Rottnest Island, or the surf breaks up and down the coast, or the quiet camp-grounds of the karri forests or the beaches of the Great Southern.
Outside of the CBD, any attempt to build higher than a few storeys is usually met with fierce resistance. The issue isn’t the amount of land that the buildings require, but that they eat into the sky, making the city feel smaller, less open to the horizon. It’s almost as though to be a resident of lowland Perth is to carry the openness of the plain within ourselves, and to yearn in its absence. When I read of the young Western Australian soldiers in Brenda Walker’s novel The Wing of Night, trapped between the Mediterranean and the limestone ridges of the Peloponnesian scarp, it didn’t seem at all unlikely that a newspaperman finds them ‘longing for the coming fight’, homesick, as they are, ‘for the open country behind the Turkish trenches’.
It usually takes extremity to disturb the seemingly tranquil air that sits over the land: riotous parties and car chases, fights between suburban gangs, and meth labs going up in flames. Perth’s suburbs are sprawled enough so that it’s easy to ignore what happens over the horizon – out of sight and out of mind.
At a break during a recent public lecture at the Alexander Library in Northbridge, I overheard one well-heeled woman tell her friend how she’d gotten ‘lost in Armadale’ as she started out on a trip to the south-west. Genuinely disturbed, she muttered, ‘It’s like a different country out there! Lucky I had my GPS!’ Her friend consoled her with a pat of her hand, but I didn’t sneer as I once might have. Only a few years previously I’d spent an afternoon in Armadale trying to track down a friend who’d just been released from jail, to pass on a message. When I found him, he told me about the speed dealers in the house two doors up who kept him awake all night with their fighting, their kids out on the streets. Even worse, some of the other local kids had found out about his wife’s terminal cancer and kept breaking in to steal her morphine. He felt more like a prisoner than ever, he told me, and I felt ashamed to recognise how alien the poverty that characterised his state-housing neighbourhood seemed, after two decades living mostly in Fremantle. It occurred to me, too, that over the previous years I’d been to Melbourne and Sydney more often than Armadale, or Midland, or Kwinana, or plenty of other places in Perth that I usually only visit when my son plays football there or I’m interviewing people for a story.
In my own immediate neighbourhood it’s the presence of so many children that breaks down the sense that each house is a fortress of privacy separated by fence, verge and street. Their noise, disorder and fence-hopping play is also a demand for community, and I’m often reminded of the migrant’s courage of a friend of mine’s parents, Phil and Wendy, who live in Gosnells, a suburb in the south-east of Perth. Along with nearby Kelmscott, it has retained its sense of being one of the earliest of Perth’s riverside villages. My friend’s family were ‘ten pound Poms’ who came out to Perth in the 1960s and initially lived in the migrant camp at Point Walter. They had decided to leave Nottingham, move to the world’s most isolated city and never look back. They bought their first suburban Thornlie home at a time when their mortgage repayment was $10 a week out of Phil’s potential bricklayer salary of $200 a week – far more than a teacher or nurse or bank clerk earned then. For this reason, Phil has always thought of Perth as a worker’s paradise.
Now in their eighties, Phil and Wendy are still an indispensible part of the multicultural street’s community, and they still open their home to the neighbourhood kids, who over the decades and generations have always turned to them for companionship and advice. Like everywhere else in Australia, Perth’s suburbs are full of people like them, who came to make a home in a quiet street but also helped create a stable community, a place that few people are interested in, perhaps, but which for the past fifty years has been the centre of their world.
At a barbecue recently in Fremantle I chatted with a builder and ‘eco-property’ developer who was over from England to renovate his sister’s new suburban home. In England, he’s only able to receive council permission to build on the condition that every house is identical to every other house, down to the letterbox and doorknob. He found it surprising to learn that so many Perth residents over the years have been allowed to build a home of their own, free of council interference, one that reflects their budget and personal taste, even when others might find that taste questionable.
It’s certainly true that architectural profusion appears to be the only constant in Perth’s suburbs. The price of Perth real estate may have everything to do with location, and easy access to the beaches and city, but while the streets in the richer suburbs may be leafier, the houses larger, the gardens better tended and the cars more expensive, by and large the only regularity is the irregularity of the streetscapes, the same parched parks and bore-stained walls, the same alternating ‘Marseille’ terra-cotta and corrugated iron roofing.
The most substantial difference between the newer suburbs and the old is due to the fact that when the older suburbs were conceived there wasn’t the machinery to grade the individual blocks, or to infill each subdivision to make sure that it rose above the water table. As a result, what is appealing about the older suburbs isn’t that they are leafier, and therefore cooler in summer, but that the blocks rise and fall upon the crests and swales of the hardened limestone dunes that roll inland across the plain. Each house and street conforms to its original and cambered landscape, and often some of the original flora remains. Newer suburbs are generally bulldozed and re-contoured with powerful machinery according to a design predicated upon the level, taking out all of the native bush in one sweep. The broader vista of unremitting flatness only emphasises the sameness of the housing stock, the stunted imported vegetation and the same predictable suburban retail franchises.
Both in its absence and abundance, water defines life in Perth today. The reliably generous winter rains that give Perth its Mediterranean climate, and its higher annual rainfall than either Melbourne or Hobart, have been in decline for decades. The low-pressure systems that spin like mop-heads off the roaring forties in winter are no longer making it as far north, leaving Perth’s dams increasingly empty. Two desalination plants are operating but there is still more demand than capacity, placing greater strain on aquifers such as the Gnangara Mound that have always been called upon in times of need.
Perth was originally a watery place, defined by the ocean on one side and the river flowing widely through, regularly flooded due to the high water table and the wetlands that filled and ran over. These wetlands were not only a valuable food source for the Nyungar, supplying gilgie and turtle, birdlife and yam, but were also identified by Europeans as islands of fertility in the sandy expanse of the coastal plain. Western logic understandably identified the land that supported the tallest trees as the most fertile, but this was shown to be incorrect. In fact, the tuart, jarrah and marri woodlands flourish best in marginal soils, and market gardeners, often Chinese, who were unable to secure riverfront land in the 1890s began instead to cultivate the soils of the numerous lakes and swamps that form part of the broader Perth wetlands.
There has been a lot written about the coastline as it relates to Perth’s sense of itself, as both a margin and space for reflection, but the absence of the wetlands in this picture suggests something else about their place in the city’s consciousness. Once covering twenty-five per cent of the Perth area, the string of swamps that run north–south along the coastal plain are all that remains after eighty per cent of the wetlands have been reclaimed. Large areas of the CBD and Fremantle are built on reclaimed land. Central Perth was the site of a string of lakes, of which only a few remain, and Fremantle was built on a promontory topped by Arthur Head, behind which a brackish wetland ran in a string up its stony white spine. As a result, the water table sits very high. Freshwater springs still flow beneath Perth’s streets, and in both the CBD and Fremantle many buildings are fitted with pumps to clear basements of water.
The suburbs of Perth expanded away from the rivers and train lines early in the twentieth century. Town clerk William E. Bold’s plan to create a series of garden suburbs that would function as commuter dormitories took in first the old lime kiln area around what is now Floreat Park and City Beach, and many of the intermittent swamps were either filled or encircled. If Robert Drewe is correct that Perth residents of his generation regard the beach in a nostalgic light because so many had their first sexual experience there, then perhaps the memories associated with the numerous swamps are more significant to childhood, an age that could yet find wonder and mystery in what were often degraded and rubbish-strewn points in the developing suburbs.
Of no interest to vandals, too creepy a place for sexual liaisons, too sandy for joggers, too scribbly for picnickers, the swamps were perfect for children. The peaty smell of rot and decay, the tea-coloured water, and the reeds and banksia and gnarled paperbarks that resemble exhausted old men give the swamps an ethereal atmosphere, suitable for all kinds of fantasy. The presence of cannibalised car wrecks, old campfires and paperbark lean-tos only reinforce the swamps as a place of refuge, the kind of place parents never visited.
When my mother was a child, it was still the case that even in the heart of suburban Perth, vacant blocks remained mostly in their natural state: quarteracre islands where balga, wattle and hakea stood upon a carpet of wildflowers such as hardenbergia and boronia, kangaroo-paw, blue leschenaultia, orange cat’s paw and often the donkey orchid. This was so when I first moved to Attadale, in Perth’s southern suburbs, as a child. It was a newly developing suburb that held numerous patches of remnant bush blazing with colour and harbouring blue-tongue lizards, mopoke owls and feral cats that were all wisely chary of kids. Perhaps they remembered the children of my mother’s generation, who often lit bonfires in the vacant blocks, some of which got out of hand.
In winter, the swamps often reclaimed the nearby land as the water table rose and the wetlands glided in silver sheets across parks and roads and into yards and alleys. I remember being fascinated by this as a child, despite being accustomed to the long dry Perth summers and the sudden winter downpours. We depended upon those winter storms to irrigate our gardens. To my ears they contained all the drama of the foundry, with rain hammering on the rooftop and sheet lightning illuminating gouts of silver coursing down lengths of chain into forty-four gallon drums – and yet I was always startled by the capacity of the land to swell and silently bring forth water from its hidden stores.
One story that describes the importance of the wetlands to children is Tim Winton’s ‘Aquifer’. It is set in the kind of new suburb I associate most with my childhood, all building sites and newly watered-in lawns, edging out into the poor banksia scrublands. The narrator is a boy just as I remember myself: solitary but never lonely, happiest in whatever remnant bush he can find (although I was lucky enough to have parents who allowed me to wander, unlike the narrator). On one level, ‘Aquifer’ is about the passage of memory through time, the laying down of memory like sediment that speaks of belonging to the city. In the suburban Perth streets, the citizens perform the public rituals of claiming the new neighbourhood: regular maintenance of the house and car, keeping up the garden and lawns. The narrator, now an adult, learns that a child’s bones have been found at the site of the original swamp, recently dried up because of the falling water table. This brings back memories, but although he returns to the swamp, now a crime scene, he does not share them with the police. They are private memories, to do with him and the wetland, and the presence of the police and media is like the intrusion of adults into what was the child’s domain. The bones belong to the English boy the narrator watched paddling around the swamp on an upturned car bonnet, only to capsize and disappear forever. The body wasn’t found, and the narrator had never informed the community of what had happened. And yet the narrator was haunted by the fact that in his eventual decomposition, the English boy would become liquid, part of the aquifer on which the swamp drew and upon which the citizens of Perth increasingly relied for their drinking water. Like Joe Lynch in Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells, the English boy has become part of the physical and metaphysical landscape, moving through the aquifer as the water seeps and runs, is drawn and flushed and dripped and evaporated and returned to its source, its mythic origins still present in the silent and secretive ‘waste-land’ that the new city has long forgotten.
The wetlands of Perth have always felt to me like a secretive landscape amid the dry unconsolidated plain, but even in their dampness they have suffered the same fate as much of the bushland that surrounds Perth – the regular burning that mysteriously seems to accompany school holidays. The Nyungar were expert at firing the land to promote the growth of pasture attractive to kangaroos, so that the first settlers described seas of grassland flowing around deliberately preserved islands of forest. Unfortunately, the repetitive burning of much of the bush inside the Perth area has damaged what used to be a feature associated with the landscape in winter and spring: the coming of the wildflowers. Wildflower season is still popular, but generally Perth residents need to travel to the national parks in the Darling Scarp or visit the wildflower beds in Kings Park to witness what is one of nature’s finest spectacles – the bringing forth of carpets of delicate flowers of the brightest tints from the most barren of soils.
If English author D.H. Lawrence had witnessed this spring ignition of the forest floor, the main character in his 1923 novel Kangaroo, Richard Somers, may not have viewed the burnt bush near Perth as something so metaphysically threatening, ‘so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses partly charred by bush fires, and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was deathly still … biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end …’ Despite Lawrence’s feelings of awe amid the silence and stillness of the wandoo forest, had he stayed for spring and seen the wildflowers of Perth then he might have attributed to the bush a sense of fertility and humour, too: a large part of the joy of walking through knee-high flowers is the improbable riot of colour, a laughing reply to perceptions of the Perth bush as drab, inhospitable and humourless.
When I think of Lawrence’s character and his ‘roused spirit of the bush’, I am always reminded of the ‘wrongness’ of everything in Perth described by the newly arrived George Seddon. This alienation from his new home became something that he sought to comprehend, and he embarked upon studies in local botany, geography, history and geology. He was known affectionately around Fremantle as ‘Professor of Everything’, an acknowledgment of his erudition as well as his contribution to an evolution in the way Perth residents have come to view their environment. Peteris Ciemitis’s wonderful 2006 watercolour portrait of Seddon, Making Sense of Place #4, hangs in Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery and was a finalist in the Archibald Prize. It captures Seddon’s piercing intelligence and wise-owl stare. His aged face contains all the colours and textures of an aerial map of the Perth landscape: the dark riverine lines and weathered blushes of red and blue stained by a golden light.
Seddon, who was born in Victoria and later worked in Europe and North America, arrived in Perth from Canada in 1956. His first impressions of the local bush were unkind, although not uncommon. He called the jarrah ‘a grotesque parody of a tree, gaunt, misshapen, usually with a few dead limbs, fire-blackened trunk and hardly enough leaves to shade a small ant’. This is not too unlike a description of the jarrah, marri and tuart woodland from 1844, when settler Eliza Brown said that the trees were ‘not handsome. It is seldom we meet with a perfect tree, they nearly all show a great number of naked branches and the trunks are in most instances blackened in consequence of the native fires …’ But Seddon, a man who realised upon his arrival that he was not Australian but Victorian, liked the city of Perth and its people, and so he stayed. However, it was his discomfort at the oddness of the Perth landscape (or moonscape, as others have described it) that precipitated his detailed and eloquent ‘experience of the environment’, something related in his four main books about Perth: Swan River Landscapes, Sense of Place, A City and its Setting and Swansong. This transition from a common early experience of distance to one of attachment essentially involved a change of focus, ‘a learning to see’ that required a perceptual shift away from the grander scenery that Seddon was accustomed to in Victoria and Canada, towards a focus upon smaller details, the secret life of Perth that ultimately provided him with sufficient nutrition to feel at home, newly warmed to its sense of place, a term that he might well have coined.
This is a process that I’ve seen duplicated in others, especially my New Zealander wife Bella. Accustomed to the striking mountains and rolling green canvas of her homeland, she initially felt locked out by Perth’s dry air, bright coastal light and the lack of obvious scenery on the plain. She too acclimatised herself by learning to garden in the limestone soils. Soon she was attracted to the tough charms of the banksia and balga tree – the former whose leaves are like serrated swords, and the latter with its prehistoric aura, hard-earned flowers on long fibrous stems – and the sudden miracle of the dun-coloured scrubland flowering in spring.
I can remember the first time I saw the cover of Peter Cowan’s 1965 collection of short stories, The Empty Street. I was in a second-hand bookstore, skiving off from my job as a supermarket trolley boy. I had never heard of Peter Cowan and didn’t realise he was from Perth, but there was something about the painting on the cover that both fascinated and repelled me. It reminded me of being a bare-legged boy in the white-hot streets of my hometown. When I came across the book ten years later, in the library attached to the Australian Embassy in Tokyo, where I often travelled on days off to get a fix of Australian literature, I recognised the cover immediately, and the feelings I’d had about it as a teenager and the images it had provoked came flooding back.
I sat down in one of the library’s comfy chairs and immediately began to read, but I found I had to keep pausing to stare back at the staring boy who is the subject of the Robert Dickerson painting on the cover. I later discovered that the painting isn’t of a Perth street, but that Cowan had requested Dickerson illustrate his book and had specifically asked for that painting on the cover. In any case, the hot glare that seemed to radiate off the painting despite the dullness of a Tokyo winter’s day reminded me of Perth at midday in summer: the heat, silence and oppressive stillness, everything conspiring against movement. The boy is alone in the empty street that is composed of geometrically conforming lines, and even the sky is cut out into a single blocky shape, although everything is pale and sand coloured. The faces of the houses that front the sandy street are windowless and doorless, and high white walls block all of the yards. There are no gardens or footpaths or curbs. The child’s one black eye stares out angrily at the viewer and the other is covered by shielding fingers, almost as if the sunlight hurts him. Robert Drewe, in The Drowner, describes the effect of the sky on the human figure in the summer heat of Perth: ‘The sky was not a neutral ceiling for the landscape. It was a force. It pressed low on the low hills, forcing them to make a horizon with the river.’ The empty street also appears spacious but oppressively close, and the boy seems marooned, much like one of the characters in Cowan’s short story collection, ‘alien as if they had never taken root in their environment, denied by the white bare rock’.
The protagonist of The Empty Street’s eponymous short story is psychologically riven, by day a white-collar drone and by night a murderer of suburban women. The narrative charts the murderous effects upon an apparently sensitive male of the dull suburban life that he’s submitted himself to, a realm of thwarted desire that only finds true expression towards the end of the story when the character, as in so many Perth narratives of the twentieth century, escapes to the beauty of the hills, where he helps tend a nursery garden before his arrest. Unlike many other Cowan stories, however, where his characters come together in fleeting moments of blunt honesty and sexual communion before the silence and space of the suburbs untether them, ‘The Empty Street’ is all about concealment and what the muted spaces of Perth’s flatland suburbs can mean to those who are vulnerable.
While ‘The Empty Street’ isn’t Cowan’s best-known work, it’s perhaps his most fully elaborated text that plays on the theme of a Perth suburban gothic, something also explored in some of The Triffids’ lyrics and Shaun Tan’s paintings. The idea of a surface beauty floating mirage-like upon an undercurrent of aggression, and weirdness, is epitomised in Dorothy Hewett’s poem ‘Sanctuary’, from her 1975 collection Rapunzel in Suburbia:
This nervous hollow city is built on sand, looped with wires, circled with shaven trees.
The bleeding pigeons tumble outside the windows, the children wring their necks.
Much of The Empty Street is set at night, when odd things happen in the suburbs, surreal moments that seem disconnected from the diurnal life of the streets but appear ignited by the dreams of the sleepers around. The return of the repressed, perhaps, leaching outside the boundaries of the picket fences and hedges and clinker-brick walls onto the narrow ribbons of black road.
Once, when a friend and I were returning from a party on a Fremantle backstreet, a driverless white HT Kingswood rolled over the crest of the hill, building up speed until it passed us and then crashed into a gnarled old peppermint tree and was silent. There was nobody around and nobody was roused. Another time I walked the same street at night and came upon a row of wheelie bins that had been set on fire, the hissing orange flames forming contorted holograms in the breeze. Again, nobody was roused. This was the hour when my beloved EJ Holden had been stolen a few years previously, just minutes after I’d arrived home from a party. At the sound of the hotwired ignition I’d raced out into the street, only to see the tail-lights float off into the gloom. I found the EJ the next morning, trashed and charred in the coastal dunes near the South Fremantle Power Station, alongside dozens of other wrecks. Only the alternator had been stolen.
I’m also aware of a friend of my brother’s, a country kid who got drunk one night and walked the suburban streets, shooting out the streetlights with a .22 rifle, forgetting that he was in the city. Fortunately for him, and by now innocently looking for some company, he’d wandered over to say hello to a man sitting quietly on his front porch. The man was an off-duty policeman who’d just finished the nightshift and tackled him to the ground, restraining but protecting him from the black-clad Tactical Response Group who soon arrived in numbers.
The early hours are also the time most people associate with the crimes of Eric Edgar Cooke, the last man hanged in Western Australia. Between 1959 and 1963, Cooke murdered eight people and wounded fourteen more. The tabloid version was that Cooke was a night-time prowler, a pervert and house-breaker turned monster. He certainly terrorised the western suburbs over the course of four years, and his crimes have taken on a mythic status. He is often described in the media as the man single-handedly responsible for stealing Perth’s ‘innocence’, at a time when many left their houses unlocked and their car keys in the ignition. Yet, by all accounts, to know Cooke was to like him, unaware of his secret passion for inhabiting the darkness.
Cooke’s crimes have been directly or indirectly represented by writers such as Tim Winton, Peter Cowan, Robert Drewe and Dave Warner, although it was Perth journalist Estelle Blackburn whose research into Cooke’s crimes exonerated two men who’d served time for murders that Cooke committed, and admitted to committing, and brought to light the extent of his random violence against women. Her 1998 book Broken Lives is heartbreaking reading. The title refers not only to the men Blackburn helped exonerate, and to Cooke’s blameless wife and children, but also to the numerous women who survived Cooke’s attacks and have lived quietly with their fear ever since. The strong sense begins to emerge that in a spread-out city where the streets are claimed by sometimes violent men, the stories of Cooke’s female victims and their experiences of another side of Perth’s quiet streets would never have come to light if Blackburn hadn’t given them voice. The fact that Cooke’s crimes began only a handful of years after the National Film Board produced its now sweetly nostalgic Postcard from Perth, a cheerful celluloid picture of a city at peace with itself, hints at the complex layering of the silence in Perth’s suburban streets and the sense that amid the quiet respiration of the sleeping city there lurks a presence that watches and waits.
Debi Marshall’s 2007 book The Devil’s Garden analyses the ‘Claremont Killings’, which, according to Marshall, were the subject of the ‘most expensive and longest running case in Australian history’. The forensic descriptions that detail the murder of two young Perth women and the disappearance of a third in the mid-1990s are chilling, as is the fact that during this decade some twenty women were abducted or went missing, never to be seen again. In the year leading up to the death of Jane Rimmer in 1996, the first of the two murder victims, there were two abductions and violent sexual assaults in the Claremont area, one of which, according to local newspaper owner Bret Christian, was never properly investigated and was later never linked to the Claremont murders.
But there is one story that is most chilling of all, as described by Con Bayens, who headed up Operation Bounty in 2000. The police operation was designed to clear street-walkers and kerbcrawlers out of Northbridge and Highgate, and it documented roughly 200 men a night being serviced by 350 prostitutes in the area. At one point Bayens, on patrol, saw a car that resembled an unmarked police service Holden parked in a side street. Assuming that the car was part of a drug squad operation, he acted only when he saw a sex worker enter the Holden. The driver was tall and impressive, and carried himself with the authority of a policeman, except that he was a civilian, who’d done a taxi-driver training course. In the boot of the man’s car, Bayens found a kit consisting of ‘zip ties, a balaclava, gaffer tape and scissors’. Worst of all, ‘the boot was fully lined with plastic, top and bottom’. But the man couldn’t be charged with anything and was let go. And nor was he thought significant to the ongoing investigation of the Claremont Killings, then focused on another individual. Which means that he is probably still out there on Perth’s streets, driving around the quiet suburbs once darkness falls.
Perth was always a ‘spread’ city, with early settlements hugging the riverine and oceanic shore-lines, but it wasn’t until after World War II that it really started to sprawl. Government rationing of petrol and building materials ended, car ownership rocketed far beyond the estimates set forth in the 1955 Stephenson-Hepburn Plan for the Metropolitan Region, and the near full-employment conditions that endured for decades meant that for the first time home ownership was possible for the majority. Many of the migrants and workers who had inhabited the inner-city suburbs of East, North and West Perth headed for the newly subdivided lots to the immediate north of the city.
It was suggested as early as 1904 that the best way to encourage the ‘wage earning class’ out of the ‘rookeries and all tumbledown, unhealthy and decaying dwellings’ was to push suburbs out into the bush, linked to the city by way of tram and rail. Allotments in the earliest suburbs had provided land, but other infrastructure and especially roads had to be funded by raising taxes from the homeowners of the immediate area. Clearing and building was often done by the locals, and the jarrah-plank roads that spread out of the city were often sourced, milled and laid by local workers and paid for by public subscription.
Perth is something of an unusual city in that, initially at least, the directions in which the city has grown haven’t involved the replacing of arable land with housing stock. The riverine floodplain and foreshore market-gardens of the kind described so lovingly by T.A.G. Hungerford were never built upon, and until the coming of heavy machinery nor were the wetlands that were sources of fruit and vegetables well into the twentieth century. The important vineyards, orchards and market gardens in the Swan Valley, which to this day remains the wine-growing area closest to any Australian capital city, and the orchards in the hills and the Spearwood sands farmland along the south-eastern foothills also remained largely untouched by suburbia, mainly because it was vital to early administrators that Perth reduce its reliance on imported food. Perth’s geographical isolation meant that until quite recently fruit and vegetables could never be bought out of season. This taught people to be self-sufficient – even in the richest suburbs, most people grew small amounts of their own fruit and vegetables.
One important exception to this setting aside of arable land was the dairy country just to the north, in what is now Osborne Park. In 1903, the areas north of the city remained bushland. According to one account, ‘[l]looking across Beaufort Street … from the site of the Mount Lawley subway, there was not a house to be seen.’ But Perth’s population grew some 700 per cent in fifteen years, and housing stock needed to be found. Osborne Park was named after William Osborne, who was a butcher and abattoir owner. He owned much of the land alongside the newly constructed Wanneroo Road (made of jarrah planks nailed down onto jarrah sleepers, to avoid buggy, and later automobile, wheels catching in the sand), and he initially got into trouble with the Perth Road Board for complaining about the unsolicited logging of tuart and jarrah on his land. Once subdivided, the area became popular with market gardeners and dairy farms (there were sixteen dairies operating in 1913), although at four miles from the city centre it was thought too far for many seeking land. There are photographs that document the arrival of the road and the building of the enormous Osborne Park Hotel in 1903, an island of white walls and shining roof. They give a good indication of the early endeavours to suburbanise areas away from the river, showing men and women wading around in the ankle-deep sand.
The ‘build it and they will come’ approach was clearly successful, then as now. Posters from the period mirror the real-estate spin employed today, and because many of the company owners had positions on the Road Board, they were able to direct extensions of the plank road out to their subdivisions in North Beach (‘Perth’s favourite watering place!’), or to ‘Park Estate’ and the optimistically named ‘North Perth Extended’ and ‘Subiaco North’ estates in Scarborough (‘owing to the superior surfing at Scarborough, those engaged in this exhilarating past-time have “discovered” this new beach’), to Sorrento Estate and many more. Some subdivisions were clearly better planned and resourced than others, and there’s a marked difference in the character of these early designs that can still be felt today. The part-owner of the Mount Lawley development, R.T. Robinson, as a member of the Road Board and a King’s Counsellor, was able to bring a tramline extension to his new garden suburb. He also brought gas lighting, which was ignited in the evenings and extinguished in the mornings by a man who got about on a bicycle carrying a long tapering pole, like a medieval jouster. The suburb of Doubleview, so named because of its high position and therefore double aspect over the ocean and the Darling Scarp inland, was once characterised by the presence of much of its native bush, unlike other subdivisions of the era.
Some of the earliest suburbs, those of Floreat Park and City Beach, were shaped by the vision of William Bold, the prominent town clerk influenced by the automobile-centric garden cities he’d encountered in the United States, with their wide and beautiful boulevards. It took some time for his vision to be translated, however. Early residents of the two suburbs, living on land that had been used previously for extracting lime, complained of being isolated and forgotten. According to historian Jenny Gregory, one resident as late as the 1950s suggested renaming Floreat Park ‘Noanulla – no shop, no footpaths, no sewerage … very little transport.’
Which is not to say that the architects and bureaucrats of Perth as ‘City Beautiful’ didn’t care. As elsewhere, there is a well-documented history of the early twentieth-century humanist struggle to create a planned city whose design would improve the quality of life of its residents. Councillors, architects and planners such as Bold, Harold Boas, George Temple Poole and later Paul Ritter were influential and clearly cared a great deal about Perth’s future. As often seems to be the case in Perth, though, their best-intentioned plans rarely made it to fruition, stymied along the way by internecine feuding between councils and government departments, and the naysaying of the ‘pragmatic’. For example, there was a plan suggested in 1900 to submerge the train line that bisected the inner city, replacing the surface area with a pedestrian space allowing freedom of movement between central Perth and Northbridge. This plan is only now being realised, some 113 years later. The fixed-rail public transport branch-lines mooted to link the developing suburbs to the city were largely never built and are only recently back on the political agenda.
After World War II, the state government was heavily involved in development, initially using mainly prefabricated housing materials. The northern suburb of Innaloo, which was originally known as Njookenbooroo, and populated with largely European migrants (one described it as a ‘real never-never land, with only a few weatherboard shacks dotted around’), was one of the first to be developed, after Joondanna and Glendalough. It was followed by a public housing estate in Scarborough, although the largest project involved the building of the city of Mirrabooka, home to Nollamara and Balga, where nearly 5000 public housing units were quickly developed.
With Perth’s recent growth in population, access to public housing has become more difficult than ever, although it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t thus. As early as 1947, mention was made of the tough conditions in some state residences in Scarborough. Many of the one-bedroom flats built there housed recently returned servicemen and their families, some with as many as thirteen children. One man in the flats known as ‘the Alley’, designed to be temporary accommodation, was told that he had no prospect of being allotted a state house because he didn’t have enough children – there were only five in his family.
As Richard Weller, who was until 2013 the Winthrop Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Western Australia, points out, it’s an inexplicable fact that despite the wealth generated by the recent mining boom ‘homelessness rates in Western Australia … are significantly higher than in other states.’ This has a lot to do with the sad statistic that, according to the Community Housing Coalition WA, the state has one of the highest second home ownership rates in the world, but because of negative gearing and capital gains nearly one in ten properties across the state lie empty, simply because many of these landlords don’t need the income. Meanwhile, just like in the 1890s when tent cities sprang up all over the place, with an estimated 1500 new arrivals every week, more and more people are forced to live in caravans, tents and cars.
Perth is not a city commonly associated with high-density housing projects, although there are some enduring and well-loved precedents. Architects Harold Krantz and Robert Sheldon focused their apartment-building outside of the city centre to make the most of the cheaper land. They were responsible over a period of four decades in the mid-twentieth century for building more flats than anyone else in Perth, often some thousand a year, from high towers to three-storey walk-up swollen houses. Although many Krantz and Sheldon buildings have been torn down, others remain and are some of the most distinctive buildings in Perth. The duo was described as introducing a continental European aesthetic into the Perth building market, and a modernism whose minimum standards now seem generous.
Krantz and Sheldon took a cautious but innovative approach to building. Aiming to produce housing that workers could afford, they chose not to become a publicly listed developer and instead funded their projects by subscription, in some cases designed to attract the investment of Jewish émigrés looking for a home in Perth. In the words of Harold’s son David, ‘We turned the clock back and tried to use traditional methods and traditional materials in better ways.’ According to Harold, this method of employing a European functionalism within what the University of Western Australia’s School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts dean Simon Anderson calls their ‘monumentalisation of the vernacular’ is why ‘they do not get old fashioned as quickly as a lot of styles do’.
Harold Krantz started out working for his influential uncle Harold Boas in the 1920s before setting up his own practice. He worked with Margaret Pitt Morison and John Oldham before he was joined in 1939 by Robert Sheldon, a Viennese Jew who’d escaped from Austria after the Anschluss. Their practice was later to employ dozens of architects newly arrived from Europe, many of whom, such as Jeffrey Howlett and Iwan Iwanoff, went on to design some of Perth’s most distinctive buildings. Harold and his wife Dorothy were also great supporters of the theatre in Perth. Krantz designed the Playhouse Theatre in Pier Street (demolished in 2012) near where he’d met Dorothy, an actor in many local productions.
The bulk of Krantz and Sheldon’s buildings that remain are dotted around the edges of the inner city and throughout the older suburbs. Their best-known building is probably the Mount Eliza at the edge of Kings Park, nicknamed ‘The Thermos Flask’ because of its circular structure and finned extrusions, but my favourites are the humble walk-up red-brick apartment blocks. To me, they are distinctively Perth, somewhat run-down but often clothed in the cool shadows of gum trees. There is something about the Art Deco lettering and the blend of stucco, cement, brick and grille-work that reminds me of hot childhood summers and the imagined peacefulness behind the curved white balconies that resemble that staple form of my childhood – the curved hand shielding against a fierce sun. I think I was drawn early to these comfortable-looking buildings because of the atmosphere of nostalgia that I sensed around them, capturing both the faded glamour of old Los Angeles and a lightness of touch that contrasted with the brutalist lines of the 1970s structures going up on St Georges Terrace.
I still get a kick out of picturing Elizabeth Jolley high up in Krantz and Sheldon’s Windsor Towers in South Perth (as described in Brian Dibble’s terrific biography, Doing Life), a twenty-one-storey slip-form concrete structure commissioned by Alan Bond in 1969. Jolley worked there as a cleaning lady but also used the time to pen her outsider novels, looking down over the city where her clients were at work.
If Harold Krantz’s aim was to move beyond the traditional Australian dependence upon the terrace and the villa, and in doing so create a minimum population density and hopefully a more vibrant social landscape, the vastness of Perth’s suburban sprawl has always worked against this. As early as 1899, Perth’s inhabitants were reported to be ‘dispersed over a wide area rather than their concentration within comparatively narrow limits’. Today, with a projected population increase of thirty per cent over the next decade, and an anticipated population of four million by 2050 (from the 1.8 million resident in Greater Perth), state governments are slowly rethinking the long-held bipartisan view that public transport infrastructure is a cost and car ownership an investment in economic growth. In Richard Weller’s book Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City, some of the statistics are telling. Not only has economic growth in Perth rivalled that of China over the past years, but combined with the city’s anticipated growth, the most radical according to Weller that has been seen in an Australian city to date, it’s also the case that ‘[a]pproximately 70% of Perth’s new residential development still occurs at or beyond the boundaries of currently developed areas’.
This continued sprawl will not only continue eating into woodlands but will exacerbate Perth’s dependence on the automobile, in a city that already has the fourth highest car ownership ratio to population in the world, in what is ‘one of the most sprawled (120km long) cities on earth’. The idea that Perth is a paradise for many of its migrants has a long history, but due to climate change – Perth has had four of its hottest years on record in the past five years – the suspicion that it’s a fool’s paradise is something altogether more recent. Tim Flannery’s comment that Perth might well become the twenty-first century’s first ghost metropolis is well known, although it was made at a time before the desalination plants came online. It’s clear that in the future Perth residents will become more dependent upon what Tim Winton calls our new habit of ‘drinking the ocean’.
The post-war boom in Perth that led to a rapid doubling of population gave rise to the creation of the northern suburbs, but more recently much of the new suburban growth is taking place in the north-eastern and south-eastern corridors. For the first time in Perth’s history, much of the new development is replacing arable land that has been used to grow food for the city. With the population set to double by 2050, Weller’s point is that ‘the entire infrastructure of the city will have to double. Everything that was built in 179 years will have to be built in forty.’ In Boomtown 2050 he makes a case for different types of development, pointing out that the ‘business as usual’ model will simply mean that ‘Perth will become a 170km long city, a flatland of suburban sprawl covering more than 200,000 hectares of land.’
Each of the different scenarios Weller proposes involves the development of high-density housing, from suburban infill to apartment towers lining the arterial highways, the coastline, the scarp. All are a response to the central question: where will we fit another two and half million people over the next few decades? The NIMBY attitude that has developed in the city, much of it as a response to what was regarded as the desecration of Victorian-era Perth, coupled with a traditional lack of political enthusiasm for public transport and the ancient Perth prejudice towards ‘flats’, is unlikely to change in the near future, meaning that the business-as-usual model of suburban development is likely to continue, resulting in the intensified clearing of bushland that is both ancient and highly bio-diverse.
As Weller points out, much of the costs of suburban sprawl are hidden. It’s a remarkable irony that the aristocratic dreams sold to the earliest European settlers, where a family might own a house and a sizable acreage of land, has been realised in the suburbs of Perth, although the farmland and energy resources and labour required to maintain the suburban landowner’s house and lifestyle are hidden from view. Weller estimates that to sustain an individual in Perth’s current housing stock ‘takes 14.5 hectares of land, seven times the world average. Western Australians, Saudi Arabians and Singaporeans share the increasingly dishonourable status of being the most unsustainable people on the planet.’
It’s perhaps telling that K.A. Bedford’s 2008 Aurealis Award-winning sci-fi novel Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait describes a 2027 Perth little different from the current city, only amplified. The comic novel’s protagonist, ‘Spider’ Webb, lives and works in Malaga, still a battlers’ suburb. His workshop is one of a number of ‘countless, ugly, concrete tilt-up structures built in Malaga over the past few decades’, nearby one of a number of ‘sprawling northern enclaves, all … monster homes and malls so big they had their own weather, permanent residents and airfields on their roofs … ’