Perth

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Destination/Perth
Joy and pain
A TRAVELER INDULGES IN SOME OF PERTH’S CURRENT PLEASURES
AND COMES FACE-TO-FACE WITH SOME OF ITS PAST PAINS
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS CHRIS VAN RYN
I ENCOUNTER MY first murder
victim. On the top of the skull
is a distinct groove, about six
centimetres long. The skeleton is
missing its right foot and the right
shoulder blade is broken. The skull
returns my gaze with a gaping grin.
This man, aged about 35, fell victim
to a blade with enough force to
cut into solid bone. His skeleton
was excavated in 1963 and is now
splayed out under glass just inside
the entry to the Fremantle WA
Maritime Museum.
The man’s story is a subset of the
story of the shipwreck of the Batavia
off the coast of Western Australia
in 1629. Those who survived were
subjected to the infamous mutiny
and massacre that took place on
nearby Beacon Island.
Fremantle is a short ferry ride
across the Swan River from Perth
central. It has some noteworthy
bookends: the first place the
colonists landed in 1829, and the
port where the last load of convicts
was jettisoned in Australia.
It is a town for walking:
prepossessing, with boutique shops
and eclectic hospitality housed in
quaint historic dwellings. I find
a large warehouse, bustling with
people who congregate at long
wooden tables, like a boarding
school lunchroom – a tapa’s eatery
called Bread in Common. There
is a low hum of amalgamated
conversations, words colliding in
mid-air.
I walk past a long, open kitchen.
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There are baskets of fresh green
sprouting grasses and rows of
wooden boards with chunks of
cheese, and hanging from the
ceiling are dried herbs and garlics
and red peppers. The chefs are
actors in a play, moving backwards
and forwards – frenetic yet
organized.
I’m ushered to the middle of
a long bench and squeeze in next
to groups either side. The social
boundaries defined by separate
tables are absent. By mid-tapa
I’m deep in conversation with my
neighbours, sentences linking like
words in a crossword puzzle.
“So you’re writing about
Perth?”
“Hmm, right,” I mumble
through my mouthful.
“How do you like it?”
“Very much. It’s bustling with
funky cafés and restaurants and
yet it feels… like a country town.
But you’re inside it, day to day.
What do you think of Perth?”
“Perth... is easy living. Life
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Today the prison cells are used as tourist
accommodation. Rottnest is both present
paradise and past pain.
is pretty relaxed here,” the guy
opposite says, as he leans over and
helps himself to one of my tapas.
There’s a consensus of nods.
I say, “But something I’ve found
interesting is that almost every day
I’ve come across some historical
reference to the treatment of the
Aborigines.”
“Maybe the thinking is, if it’s
out in the open it will somehow
right itself,” says a woman at my
shoulder. She looks at me sideways.
“So...what references have you
seen?”
“Well, for example, the dotted
red line.”
“Eh?”
I was circumnavigating a
construction site when I discovered
it. I was walking to Elizabeth
Quay, having just arrived. The
evening was like a soft whisper, the
colour undecided, with lights just
beginning to glow, and the Swan
River was serene and flat with an
occasional long, lazy ripple trailing
behind a black swan. The glass
spire on the Bell Tower glowed an
aquarium green and the copper
facade emanated a Florentine
warmth. I couldn’t see the Swan
Bells but I knew they rang at the
time Captain Cook left England,
marking the voyage that discovered
Australia: several hundred years of
historical ringing cocooned in a
modern millennial skin.
A snaking pedestrian bridge,
reaching over the water, has two
dramatic supports like gigantic
bows pulled taut. I stopped
mid-span to listen to a busking
guitarist and then headed to the
nearby building site. A poster
announced the construction of the
Ritz Carlton Hotel, together with
exclusive apartments and shops.
Renderings depicted four huge
towers – modern glass oval-shaped
architecture like something you’d
expect in Dubai, shimmering and
beckoning, with tourist-enticing
luxury and style. Tourism is Perth’s
new cash crop, a post-mining
economic contingency plan, and
Elizabeth Quay is the heart for the
restless pulse of tourists.
I saw another poster stuck to the
hoarding: a survey map showing
central Perth in about 1900, with
rows of neat little rectangles, each
a building surrounded by roads
and the harbour, and then this
– covering several blocks was a
dotted red line. It read: Prohibited
Area, 1927–1954. For nearly 30
years, the very location where I
stood was an area forbidden to
Aborigines. I was left with this odd
incongruity between the public
announcement of this mal du siècle
and the rise of the Ritz.
Fluttering pink petals surround
tiny buttons of red mounted atop
lime green stems that sway to the
warm breeze in Kings Park, Perth’s
central-city nature haven. If I were
an artist, this would be my palette.
Kings Park comprises manicured
gardens and wild vegetation, the
wind meshing the colours into
a wash of pastel pink, or lemon
yellow... the list goes on. The place
is full of meandering people,
each seeking their own catharsis
through nature.
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How to get there etc
Getting there: Air New Zealand
flies directly to Perth from
Auckland and Christchurch.
Accommodation: In central
Perth, the Terrace Hotel
offers stunning boutique
accommodation in a restored
historic building. Check out the
unusual artworks, and the very
good restaurant. In Fremantle
the Hougoumont is a small
modern hotel with a history of
the ship scattered throughout.
There’s no restaurant but plenty
of nearby eateries.
Must do: Book a walking and bar
tour with Two Feet & A Heart
Beat and find out everything
you’ll ever want to know
about Perth and its bars and
restaurants, twofeet.com.au
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Wild flowers. Freshly mown
grass. Tree bark. Raked earth.
Garden scents. I amble over a
high arching bridge – a dramatic
curvaceous construction spanning
a gully – and the quintessential
Australian scent of eucalyptus
wafts upwards. The views stretch
towards the harbour. Actually, it’s
more waterfront than harbour, on
account of the fact that in parts it’s
only four metres deep.
If I were a sculptor, here is
where I would find inspiration. I
am looking for a “sculpture”, one
that has traveled 3000 kilometres to
get here. It once stood in a location
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now covered with tarmac and
whizzing cars. Its form is distinctly
prehistoric – a throwback, as it
were. It is a boab tree, a cousin
to the baobabs of Madagascar,
that bizarre-looking tree with
its bulbous trunk and root-like
canopy. The specimen I see here
is divided in two, joined at the hip
like conjoined twins. In 2008, after
750 years in the same home, it was
served an eviction notice in favour
of a motorway and relocated to
Kings Park.
Wadjemup. I step off the ferry
onto a Greek island that got lost
and ended up anchoring off the
coast of Fremantle: a panorama
with diverse wildlife and enticing
lagoons of white sand and startling
Mediterranean-blue waters, caused
by leaching limestone. Some
500,000 visitors annually know
this place as Rottnest, derived from
rat nest, the rather unfortunate
name given by the Dutch, who
dimwittedly mistook quokkas,
those cute soft toy-like nocturnal
marsupials that little kids want
to take to bed, for giant rats. An
estimated 8000 quokkas reside on
the island.
I am here to indulge in nature,
to see the magnificent regal osprey,
that monogamous raptor that
returns yearly to its giant nest,
and the gulls that persistently
battle warm gusts of wind on stony
outcrops... I’m sorry. I know it’s an
interruption to this romp through
an island paradise, but I’m also here
to see Rottnest’s underbelly.
In a small museum hangs an
extraordinary series of faded sepiatoned
images. A quick glance and you
can see immediately this isn’t good.
Groups of linked together, chainedby-the-neck
Aborigines, each with a
padlock just under their chin. They
are lean and tall and stand strikingly
erect. In one way they are regal but
at the same time they appear blank,
impassive, empty vessels. Each wears
a loincloth. Some have swollen
bellies like malnourished children,
lined with a series of patterned
scars. Theirs is another culture,
one that operated by different rules
than the colonizers, and for this
they are prisoners. Rottnest, once
an Aboriginal prison, housed 3500
prisoners. Several hundred of them
died and are buried on the island.
Today the prison cells are used as
tourist accommodation. Rottnest is
both present paradise and past pain.
And for the Aborigines, perhaps it
was little more than a rat nest.
I’m perched at a long wooden
bar in Varnish on King, a suave
joint in a basement on King Street,
part of Perth’s burgeoning culture of
specialty bourbon bars. In front of
me is a sampling of four bourbons.
“Start with the George Dickel No
12, with speck,” says the bar lady.
“Enjoy.”
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Indeed I do. Feeling mellow, and with
a gentle glow emanating from the midsection
– part-bourbon, part-travel euphoria
– I slip into the Perth evening, feeling sure
this would not be the last time I’d meet Mr
Dickel... or Perth.
82 thisnzlife.co.nz
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