There Will Be Halfway Points

My time in Perth marked an important point during my trip: I have been in Australia for about as much time as I have left here.

The way I felt during my time in Perth was similar to how I felt while in Adelaide for the first time: bored and anxious. Much like Adelaide, Perth is like a giant suburb, and unless you have specific business to do it can be quite dull. Nice to look at, but boring and lacking things to jump in to. And I was anxious because I was fairly travelled out by the time I arrived, and was eager to find my next (and final) job to settle down at after exploring the city. That didn’t really work out, and so I was only one-foot-in with Perth the entire time I was there.

My arrival in Perth was a bit different: I rolled into town in my campervan via a REAL highway south of the city’s center by the airport. I didn’t have any trouble returning the vehicle, and for just $3.40 I was able to catch an ancient bus into the center of town. It was HOT. In fact, the entire time I was here in Perth was close to 100 degrees, and sunny. Similar to Adelaide, Melbourne, and other cities in the south of Australia, due to the lack of an ozone layer, some days the sun can be pleasant while other days, it can be scorching.

I didn’t really have a great map of Perth (a common problem throughout this entire trip down under), but I was lucky to find my hostel in the Northbridge section of town, Britannia on Williams. I quickly discovered Northbridge is like the Lower East Side of Perth with its ample number of bars and quasi-trendy restaurants. My room on the first floor reminded me a lot of my old room on Second Street back in New York…you get really good at sleeping through people and police cars screeching on the street below.

After my long trip cross-country, I had an appetite for exactly nothing besides air conditioning and internet on a full-sized screen. I found both at the nearby State Library, where I sat until 8p before hitting Coles for some food. Back at my hostel, I found the only air-conditioned room in the building, the lounge, where the movie “Walk Hard” was on TV. Hahaha it was actually pretty funny.

A Boring Week Off

The City of Perth is quite boring. The oppressive weather didn’t help matters much, as it kept me looking for things to do inside, or at least on the hunt for shade while wandering outdoors.

I can talk about a few highlights, however, and leave out most of the ordinary stuff.

The Western Australian Gallery of Art

This institution was in the midst of reorganizing itself to be sorted according to chronology rather than origin or genre of art. I was able to get on to a tour of indigenous art, where a guide took us around to see some important and/or interesting pieces from around Australia. She was nice and obviously knew her stuff. After that it didn’t take long to see the rest of the stuff they had out, and one could tell that Perth is not unfairly left off lists that rank the world’s top art and culture hubs.

As a side note: the art gallery along with the State Library, the Museum of Western Australia, a contemporary art gallery, State Theater, and a technical college are all huddled around an open public square that connects this so-called “Culture Center Precinct” to the nearby central train station and the Perth Center Mall where all the large department stores and retail lie. It’s actually a really convenient way to get between these hubs of a traditional city, perhaps similar to what Hartford would like to achieve someday. However, it does create a sense of removal from the rest of the surrounding city. Much of the area northeast of this CBD area does not have physical connections to it, and at night when all of its elements shut down, it acts as a big scary no-man’s land that becomes hard to circumvent. It also doesn’t incorporate any of the city’s other hubs, such as the waterfront, port, or major parks. I would say it is Perth’s best and worst feature.

Just outside the State Library in the public square was a large TV screen much like the one in Melbourne’s Federation Square. I discovered that they were showing the Australian Open live there, and a ton of people had gathered. The tennis was on nearly the whole time I was in Perth, so I got caught up in watching it many times along the way.

King’s Park

This park, overlooking the Swan River from a hill just southwest of the city center, was set aside by early city planner John Forrest and was meant to mimic European public parks, or at least give parks in Sydney and Melbourne a little competition. It turned out, like so many things in Australia, to be completed just halfway in this manor (this part is now called the Botanic Gardens). It was decided to leave the rest of the park, which is larger than Central Park in Manhattan, as natural bush and escarpment. This fits nicely in modern times with the park’s mission to have the botanical elements of the park be thoroughly Western Australian.

I arrived at the park early to join one of the Botanical Garden’s guided tours at 10a. Tour guide Barbara took a larger-than-expected group of us around to see some of the park’s plants (nearly all native to WA) and man-made features. Barbara did an excellent job of pointing out the former, including a very memorable tree. This 700 year old “bottle tree,” or a tree that has a unique shape and water-retaining properties to help it survive in Australia’s dry outback, recently found itself in the way of a new highway bridge that was to be constructed thousands of miles north of Perth. It was determined that, if saving the tree was a given, it would be easier to relocate IT than the bridge. So, a few years ago, it was dug up, and placed on a massive flatbed truck. Just as if it were the Olympic torch, it went on tour through WA to reach Perth, receiving a warm reception at country towns and closing the highway along the way. Can you imagine?

We were told there would be more to see botanically if we had been there during spring, as they have tons of wildflowers. Oh well. I will also never forget the grass: everywhere it grew, it was as immaculate as a golf course would be. Barbara told us it a variety of grass brought in from South Africa that was capable of withstanding the significant crowds of people the park attracts for events such as Shakespeare in the Park, concerts, exercise classes, and holiday celebrations. It also supposedly takes 15 full-time employees to maintain.

The park has two very significant attractions beyond its flora and fauna: the Lotterywest Federation Walkway and WA’s official war memorial. Lotterywest is WA’s official private lottery, and with so many Australians keen on gambling, it is a very wealthy organization. Though it is a little ambiguous whether Lotterywest is very charitable or bound by law to donate, it seems to sponsor a large amount of things around the city of Perth. One of them is the Federation Walkway, a large iron and glass ramp that lets people walk over tree tops for views of the river, the city, and the nearby Swan River Brewing Company’s former factory. We looked over to South Perth, where Barbara said residents of recently built luxury waterfront homes are poisoning trees that grow in the park between them and the river for improved views of the city skyline. Really?

The views there were only rivaled by those that may be had around the war memorial. Originally erected in the 1920s to memorialize fallen soldiers of the “Great War,” today it has a place for the heroes of all the conflicts participated in by Australia. It was incredibly special and incredible spot for such a monument.

This park was among the best public parks I have ever seen, and as a result I spent nearly all of the scorching, sunny day there before heading back to town.

The Perth Mint

Oddly enough, and in contrast to nearly all other city’s with mints of their own, this destination topped several “what to do in Perth” lists that I consulted. That spoke to the lack of other interesting things to do in Perth, despite it being in fact, pretty cool. For a hefty $15, you are taken on a guided tour around the compound, which was in service from the mid-1800s ethrough the 1970s.

In response to the amazing amount of gold being found in the eastern portion of what was then called the Swan River Colony, and the ensuing population rise in Perth/Fremantle Port, the Premier of the colony informed British Parliament that it had two choices: pay to export the gold and ship them back gold sovereign coins, or charter a branch of the Royal Mint in Perth. They chose the latter, and thus Perth joined Melbourne and Sydney as one of the few cities outside London to actually print British money.

The highlight of the tour, besides my guide’s well-rehearsed snarky comments about Swan River Colonists of the 1800s, was seeing a real gold bar being smelted and poured. Gold bars of the type that are stored in vaults of banks and the US’ Federal Reserve are meticulously manufactured for inter-bank trading. Not all countries have mints that are internationally recognized to create such gold bars, which surprised me but I guess I had never thought of it. Bank gold is also mandated to be 99.9% pure gold, as that is the lowest level of impurity that can be chemically removed from gold during the smelting process.

We were not allowed to take photos anywhere in the museum (though even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to post them here…more on that later), but seeing the bar poured was actually really cool. It was heated to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius, and then tipped into a lead tray using tongs. The person who poured the gold had to wear special safety gear, which he said was thoroughly modern. Many goldsmiths prior to about 1950 were frequently injured or died on the job. In contrast, today’s pour was all about effect, and he even dimmed the lights in the room, which allowed the liquid gold to shine like molten lava when he opened up the smelter. It was really cool, the gold had been melted in a carbon bowl thing, but when he poured it into the lead tray, literally not even one bead of gold was left (unlike pouring water out of a bottle). And just a few seconds in room temperature water allowed the gold to solidify into a bar that one could handle with gloves.

The rest of the mint featured coins from Australia’s past, official gold bars from banks around the world, the world’s **second-largest** coin (something they are quite proud of at the mint), and a real gold bar to pick up and hold. It was, in fact, quite heavy for its size.

Parliament of Western Australia

This was a quick but very interesting stop that I made on a Monday morning. I met Jeff, my 1030a tour guide, and realized that it was going to be a one-on-one thing as there was no one else there. He took me through the large WA Parliament House, both the original turn-of-the-century structure that parliament didn’t fund to completion4, and the 1960s addition that filled out what the architects originally had in mind. As I have visited all but one of the capitals of the states I have visited here in Australia, dedicated readers will notice a pattern: parliament houses of Australia tend not to be built all the way on the first try, if ever.

This parliament house had some unique features to it, including a blue-colored lower chamber, one of only three in the world (normally they are green). This was due to the color of fabric and carpet originally used in WA’s lower parliament chamber when boats with materials arrived far less frequently in Fremantle harbor; today it upholds a WA tradition, not the Westminster one. Parliament house also had its own aboriginal art gallery, setting itself apart from other parliaments and giving a nod to the sheer number of aboriginals living in WA. WA was also one of the first governments in the world to allow women to vote, so they have a wall of fame dedicated to the first women to hold seats in parliament too.

I learned a lot about WA on my tour with Jeff, and a taste of Perth’s history too. Along with the mint and the Fremantle Maritime Museum, I felt educated in all things Perth, but the city did make it harder than most to discover things about it!

For the rest of my parliament tour day, I walked through West Perth and the nearest western suburb, Subiaco. Both areas are quite chi chi and, as it was intolerably hot, I did a lot of sitting in the shade and people watching. I also ran across something I had yet to see in Australia: a bagel shop. Few natural forces could have impeded me pushing my way to the front of a very long line to order a multi grain bagel with cream cheese. For just under $5, I had in my hand the very worst bagel I had ever tasted in my life. I don’t know what they did to it, or the cream cheese for that matter, but I am more confident than ever in my idea to start an NYC-style bagel bakery in Australia. Millions to be made.

Museum of Western Australia

The Museum of Western Australia’s own history as an institution was, unfortunately, more interesting than the museum itself. Like many pubic services in WA, the museum has its hub in Perth, with several satellite locations around the state in large, regional towns. I had in fact already been to a branch of the Museum of WA while staying in Albany. The Perth location featured a bit of history on the city of Perth, lots of geological information, and some natural history (animal models and the like). All very interesting, but not especially special to someone who used to pass the American Museum of Natural History everyday on his subway commute.

The institution’s history is rather more interesting, as I found out later on during my trip to nearby Fremantle. The museum actually began as a project associated with the rehabilitation of prisoners at Fremantle Prison (see below). By collecting some of the fascinating and unique samples being unearthed around the nascent colony’s mines of that era, combined with some generous donations from museums in Britain, the Swan River Colony’s main prison was suddenly charged with maintaining a collection of artifacts in the name of science of education. This grew to be the basis of the Museum of WA’s current collection. I guess every place has to have it’s own access to real-life natural history artifacts!

Australia Day

Celebrated each January 26th, the same day that Captain Cook and the first British ships landed at Botany Bay, Australia Day is a national holiday that is meant to be a time to reflect on what it means to be “Australian” and give thanks for all the good fortunes Australians currently enjoy. On the ground, it is also a day to get drunk and shoot off fireworks – fire bans be damned.

Australia Day in Perth is a HUGE deal. Perth is host to the nation’s largest Australia Day celebration, complete with aboriginal ceremonies, new citizen inductions, and a water and air show that sets the stage for a tremendous fireworks show over Perth Water after dark. Australia Day would have been lots more fun if I had people to celebrate with! But as I did not, I enjoyed a relaxing morning and afternoon, before making my way up to Kings Park around 3p to see the impressive water/air show, shortly followed by the fireworks. It was threatening rain the entire time, so I took cover under a picnic pavilion just to be safe. The whole day was very nice, just not that exciting for this American!

Not everyone had such a nice Australia Day…everyone and their mothers were talking about this incident long after the last fireworks were set alight. This poor lady can’t catch a break, and the name “Kevin Rudd” is suddenly back in the national vernacular.

Two Days in Freo

The day after Australia Day was much more interesting! I hopped a commuter train down to nearby Fremantle (Freo) to spend a day in WA’s second largest city and Perth’s main port. It was in Fremantle that colonists originally landed to start their own settlement, but they quickly moved inland to present-day Perth upon discovering the poor conditions and lack of water.

Fremantle was a tough town until very recently. It was barely even a campsite until convicts began to arrive in the middle of the 1800s. WA, or the Swan River Colony, is unique among Australian colonies in that it originally intended to follow the same “freeman’s society” path that neighboring South Australia charted earlier in the century, but eventually accepted convicts from England as well. For the first few decades the Swan River Colony consisted of exclusively free settlers, however the settlement was not attracting the number of people needed to create a self-sustaining, let alone, growing, colony. So the governor at the time requested that England transport convicts to the Swan River Colony to provide the labor and population needed to solidify the colony’s place (if the British couldn’t make it in WA, there was a line of other colonial powers waiting to give it a shot!). Westminster agreed, and suddenly Fremantle, with its deep natural port, became the destination for 10,000 convicts over the next 30 years. WA was also unique in being able to request who was transported – no violent convicts – but this too was relaxed over the years of transportation to allow more skilled laborers in to work.

Fremantle, and nearby Perth, grew steadily as a result of arriving convicts. Problems came in tow, including mass heavy drinking and anti-social behaviors that made it an unattractive destination for those looking to move from the eastern colonies. Just one in five people living in WA at the time were women, making it even more difficult to guarantee the colony would survive without convict trafficking.

Today, Freo has evolved far beyond it’s grimy past into a beautiful seaside city, adjacent to one of Australia’s largest ports. On my first journey to Fremantle on Friday, I walked through the main streets of town before visiting the Western Australian Maritime Museum. Besides explaining the history of WA’s still-rapidly expanding fishing industry, the museum’s pride and joy was an exhibit on the yacht that finally ended the US’ 150+ years dominance in the Americas Cup Yacht Race. This was done in 1983 by a group of Western Australians who employed some new rudder technology on their yacht, the Australia II. It was a HUGE deal here; they even had WA license plates made with the motto “WA – The Home of the Americas Cup.” The Australians eventually lost the Americas Cup again, however, and some here though it was funny to scratch an “S” onto these plates after the “WA.” Hahaha

This museum kept me occupied until 5p closing time, at which point I walked over to “Round House,” the Swan River Colony’s first jail and now the oldest building in WA. It had a nice view of the Indian Ocean and Fremantle’s fishing boat harbor, where I walked to next. Ultimately, I made my way up to Monument Hill, the site of Fremantle’s impressive war memorial that overlooked the town and ocean. Here I watched the sunset, before catching the train home!

When I returned on Sunday, my first priority was to repurchase the camera I had lost the day before. It was on sale but buying the same camera again at any price is still pretty lame. I tried to retrace my steps quickly to retake some of the photos of the fancy architecture around town I had gotten on Friday, but I don’t think I got them all. Afterwards, I spent a few hours on a tour of Fremantle Prison, which incredibly was open from the mid-1800s when it housed recently arrived convicts of England all the way to 1991. Walking around the primitive stone building, I could not get over my shock of how recently the facility had held Australian criminals.

The tour was very comprehensive too, focusing on the entire history of the compound. We were obviously seeing the facility as it was when the government shut it down just over 20 years ago, but the condition had changed little over the 150 years prior. Cells were designed to be 3 feet by 7 feet originally, though at some point in the 1950s every other wall was knocked down to double the space – which was then scheduled to accommodate two inmates in bunk beds. Conditions inside the prison were well outside modern humane condition standards, with insects and vermin being a constant problem. Temperatures in the cells could reach 115 degrees during summer days, and below freezing in winter nights. Cells were fitted with running water at some point, but then stripped back down when drainage became a problem. Thus, right up through 1991, inmates were equipped with – and guards feared below – buckets in lieu of toilets. Inmates were kept outdoors in high-walled, heavily-guarded yards during most of the day and took breakfast and lunch there. Until the 1960s, there was no form of shade from the oppressive Australian sun, and serious fights were a regular occurrence to help maintain an inmate hierarchy of power (the guards would not step in, for fear of a riot).

Despite all that, in its early days, Fremantle was not meant to psychologically obliterate (much more enlightened than Port Arthur). Rather, it was a reforming facility that was intended to help prisoners find a trade and prove they could be returned to civilian society (where they could help build the colony, tame the land, and consume goods). Many now-infamous Western Australians found their way out of Fremantle, through it’s working programs and education services, to become successful members of society. Like in the eastern colonies, the majority of convicts transported to WA were only guilty of things like copyright infringement, making fake coins, and stealing produce.

It was later, when Fremantle became WA’s maximum security prison after WWII, that conditions for inmates became oppressive compared to other modern industrial nations. Considering that Fremantle Prison is a huge complex smack in the middle of the city of Fremantle, it is remarkable that Australians by and large had no idea what it was like for people just on the other side of the wall. Granted, Fremantle 20 years ago was much rougher than the gentrified version I saw, so it is unlikely many residents felt too bad for the prison’s inmates.

Nonetheless, by the 1980s, the government was considering closing the prison in favor of a more modern facility being built in a nearby suburb. It took a 2-day riot in the summer of 1987 to convince authorities that something had to be done. On a scorching-hot day in December 1987, prisoners used boiling hot water from afternoon tea to wound several guards before taking others captive. They then used any burnable materials from their cells to start a massive bonfire in the center of one of the cellblocks that burned for two full days and threatened the structural integrity of the building. This quickly caught the attention of news media around the county, and soon Australians became aware of life inside Freo Prison. The situation was finally calmed down, but it was only a matter of time after that the facility closed permanently.

We were also shown the yard where prisoners were tortured and reprimanded by guards, often with a “cat o’nine tails,” and the small hut where prisoners were hanged after conviction of their crimes. It was really weird how compelling everyone, including myself, found that last stop on our tour.

So interesting! From there, I went on to the Fremantle Arts Center, which was originally the main building of a woman’s insane asylum compound. It was a striking building for having such grim purposes, I can see why they saved it from the wrecking ball. Unfortunately, the museum was closed, but out in the yard (presumably where insane women were allowed to hang out back in the day) there was a concert going on and hundreds of people had brought picnics and chairs to sit outside on a nice day to enjoy it.

I joined them for a bit before walking back down to the center of town for more re-do photos and to stop at another small contemporary art gallery. This place was part coffee bar, part gallery. When I asked the barista if the galleries were open, he said that they had an artist cancel on them at the last minute that day, so instead there was a “minimalist exhibit” on…I turned around to see a couch, lamp, and rug set up in the gallery’s doorway that were likely for the café patrons to use. Had to laugh at that one, oh Australia!

Other Memorable Moments

The first weekend I was in Perth, they were showing a Disney movie for kids each evening on a large screen in Northbridge where I was staying. I caught Mulan and Pocahantas because, well, I had nothing else to do!

As I said, it was HOT pretty much the entire time I was in Perth. In fact, I read headlines on papers stating it was the longest series of days above 38 degrees (100 degrees) since the 1960s. Terrific. This meant some really hot and stuffy nights of sleep, and many days finding relief in free air conditioning. I spent a large amount of time in the library, wrestling with frustratingly slow internet, and even riding the three free bus routes around the city to do a bit of sightseeing without having to walk.

I did make it over to East Perth, a small sub-section of the city that is kind of out of the way for most tourists. It used to be a large industrial area as it has fine access to the Swan River out to Fremantle port. All that’s gone now, replaced with a pleasant little cove surrounded by rich-looking townhouses and condo buildings. Not much to do but enjoy the scenery, but I did unwittingly get involved in a conversation with a local who was excited to share her experiences working as a pharmacist in the US for many years. It was there that, when I got up to walk with her to the bus, that I left my camera on a park bench.

Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, the Australian Open was going on the entire time I was in Perth (but over in Melbourne). Nearly every night tennis was on in the lounge when I settled in for dinner before bed, and it became good fun joining the same faces each night in cheering on various players. The men’s final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal was particularly nail-biting, and at nearly six hours long, was immediately heralded as both the longest and best session of the game the world has seen in decades.