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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Series: | The City Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Perth
By David Whish-Wilson
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 David Whish-WilsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-661-1
CHAPTER 1
The River
'Thank God we don't outlive all of our childhood fancies.'
Tim Winton, Land's Edge
Twice a day, the skin of the Swan River rises in a small ripple as the tidal surge makes its way from the river mouth at Fremantle through Perth Water and up into the higher reaches of the river near the fast-growing suburb of Ellenbrook, just over twenty kilometres north-east of Perth. In winter, when a layer of brackish water runs off the scarp towards the ocean, the river flows in two directions, with the fresh water flowing seawards above the saline water flowing in beneath it.
Today the diurnal bulge of water that reveals the incoming tide is invisible. It's a Sunday morning and I'm out on the river in an open kayak with my Uncle Scott, my father's youngest brother. Scott moved from Tasmania to Perth as a teenager in the 1970s. Like so many others, he stayed for the climate and the lifestyle and the opportunity to work.
We put in to the river at Middle Swan and slowly glide our way upstream towards Ellen Brook, which takes its name from Captain James Stirling's young bride. This part of the river marks the furthest point that Stirling reached during his reconnoitre of 1827, with his small crew in one of the HMS Success's longboats, not knowing if he would get the opportunity to return.
Stirling had married Ellen Mangles, the daughter of a wealthy merchant with links to the East India Company, in 1823. He was thirty-two and she was sixteen. The story goes that Stirling first came across Ellen as a young teen, her feet astride two bareback horses, reins in her left and right hands, the nineteenth-century equivalent of hooning on her father's estate.
Portraits of Stirling as a young man emphasise his dark eyes; his grim, almost bitter mouth; and the stiff military posture expected of an officer. He'd joined the navy at the age of twelve, but he was an ambitious thirty-six-year-old when he was posted to Sydney in 1826. He convinced New South Wales governor Ralph Darling to allow him to survey the Swan River, although he was not the first European to visit the area.
In 1616 Dutchman Dirk Hartog surveyed the western coast of Australia and by 1627 Rottnest Island appeared on the first maps. The first reports of the Swan River were made in 1697 by fellow Dutchman Willem de Vlamingh's party, who entered the river and journeyed as far as the Causeway flats. While de Vlamingh is mostly remembered for naming Perth's favourite holiday island Rats-nest (after the marsupial quokka), an island that he found to be a 'terrestrial paradise ... delightful above all others I've seen', he also named the river Swartte Swanne Drift (Black Swan River). Representative of the fabulousness of European imaginings of the Great Southern Land at the time, de Vlamingh wrote that based on his discovery of 'gigantic human footprints ... That river leads to a land inhabited by giants.'
More than a century later, the French arrived in Western Australian waters as part of an expedition to map the coastline of the continent. In 1801 Sub-lieutenant Francois-Antoine Boniface Heirrison of the Naturaliste was commanded to take a longboat and explore the estuary and upper reaches of the Swan River. Post-Enlightenment explorers the Frenchmen might have been, part of the largest scientific team to ever leave Europe, but they were also chary of visiting a land where, according to academic Ross Gibson, there existed birds that didn't fly, rivers that flowed inland, and wood that didn't float. It must have seemed a bad omen when huge sharks circled their longboat en route from the Naturaliste to the river mouth (they caught one, a fourteen-footer). They were prepared for the worst, arming themselves with a small cannon and a musket for each man.
Inside the estuary, Heirrison was impressed. The area was densely wooded, with 'beautiful flowering shrubs', and the black swans were edible. Near the muddy, mosquito-ridden surrounds of the island that now bears Heirrison's name, the men did indeed identify a giant's footprint, which led to them doubling their sentries and burning bonfires through the night. However, it wasn't until they were further upriver that they were greeted 'by the most heart-chilling howls, so close that they seemed to emanate from the reeds,' Heirrison wrote. 'Feeling at a disadvantage under the cover of darkness, against an adversary whether man or beast, we chose to remain in mid-stream – where we spent a wretched night under the teeming rain.'
Twenty-seven years later, following his own inspection of the area, Stirling knew that London was the best place to influence those who might realise his project: a colony on the Swan River that he suggested calling Hesperia, 'indicating a Country looking towards the Setting Sun'. He was in luck. The Duke of Wellington became prime minister of Britain in 1828, and one of Stirling's old Scottish familial allies, the member for Perth in the national parliament, Sir George Murray, was named Minister for War and the Colonies. With a scratch of Murray's quill, the settlement scheme was on. Stirling would later repay those who had made the venture possible by naming the settlement Perth (the alternative proposed was Kingston) and its main thoroughfares Wellington, Murray and Hay streets (the third after Colonial Under-Secretary Robert Hay, the public servant who'd supported Stirling).
As is the case with any real estate venture today, flyers were immediately circulated and advertisements were taken out. The resulting 'Swan River Mania', as it was described in British newspapers, came down to Stirling tapping into the desires of a motivated caste of largely urban Britons: adventurers and those who would these days be called the 'aspirational class' – those wealthy enough to emigrate but not so rich that they might be insulated from the difficult economic conditions of the period.
* * *
We paddle quietly past the newly restored All Saints Church in Henley Brook, made of local mud bricks and oyster-shell lime. It is the oldest – and perhaps the smallest – church in Perth. Adorned with a simple bellcote, the church was built to mark the place where Stirling had prayed with his men in 1827 before returning downriver. In his journal, Stirling described how
the richness of the soil, the bright foliage of the shrubs, the majesty of the surrounding trees, the abrupt and red colour banks of the river occasionally seen, and the view of the blue mountains, from which we were not far distant, made the scenery of this spot as bieutiful [sic] as anything of the kind I have ever witnessed.
For us, too, it's a beautiful spring morning and the river is peaceful and the muddy banks high. You can smell the bricks baking at the local works and hear the drone of traffic on Reid Highway, but there is nobody else on the water. We pass some of Australia's oldest vineyards – Houghton and Sandalford – and dozens of newer ones, part of the original allotments disbursed by Surveyor-General Roe. The dry winter has limited the run-off from the Swan/Avon catchment (the Avon, Canning and Helena rivers are the Swan's three main tributaries), and while the water is brackish rather than saline, there is little flow to breach the incoming tide.
The tidal influence is felt right up to Ellen Brook, so the birdlife is similar to the lower estuary; there are shags and pelicans in large numbers, which suggests that there are plentiful fish but also that the river is more saline than usual. In a winter of heavy rain, practically the whole of the Swan River estuary is flushed out with fresh water and the more freshwater-intolerant fish are forced to migrate out into the ocean for a time. A neighbour of mine who works for the Swan River Trust told me that the Swan River bull sharks pup in the upper river during spring, and that one of their main food sources is birdlife. The pelicans and cormorants look unconcerned.
The shags move about like sticks thrown from tree to tree, or settle on pontoons and jetties to dry their wings. I've always been fascinated by the shag, the generic term for the four types of cormorant and one species of darter found on the Swan. When I was a child spear-fishing in the river, nervous of dark shadowy shapes, it was common to see a shag glide into a school of mullet or trum-peter beneath me, often many at the same time. Sometimes shags hunt communally, and because their feathers contain no protective oils (although strangely for this reason they look like the greasiest of birds) they spend a fair proportion of their time perched on rocks or branches with their sodden black wings comically draped in the sunshine, like skinny angels.
Novelist Seaforth Mackenzie wrote beautifully about this section of the upper river from his perspective as a boarder at Guildford Grammar, the same private boys' school where my younger brother learnt everything he needed to survive some tough years in the army. The first time I read Mackenzie's 1937 novel The Young Desire It, I identified with his narrator, a shy boy prone to spending time alone by the river. His budding sexuality is reflected in his observations of the waters, where the 'air was warm and sweet with the rotting water-levels of winter floods. Snags thrust up above their brown reflections ... drying and crusted with their own watery decay, but hard as iron beneath, and slippery to the swimmer's naked foot.'
I didn't go to a private boarding school, but the dislocation that Mackenzie's narrator feels when removed from his mother's rural property was something I understood. Our family had moved from the Pilbara, in the north of Western Australia, to Perth in 1976. Because of my father's employment in the Royal Australian Air Force, and later in the mining game, my mother estimates that in my first ten years we moved some twenty-one times before we finally settled in Perth.
We were used to moving interstate and overseas, from air-force base to small country town, but this was the first time I remember feeling any degree of culture shock. In the city, kids wore socks and shoes rather than getting about barefoot. They spoke a strange coded language gleaned from a popular culture that was alien to me. The air was heavy and damp (my sister recalls the 'uncomfortable feeling' that she was unable to articulate at the time, as it was so alien to us, of 'being cold'), and the suburbs stretched endlessly on our weekend drives up into the hills.
So the river was a haven for me. It was a place that reminded me of the one I'd left behind, where spiders and goannas and parrots and eagles had ruled the gullies, mud crabs and hermit crabs and mudskippers had populated the mangroves, and wild donkeys and kangaroos had filled the spaces now taken up by people. It was in the yellow sands and quarried limestone crags and bronzed shallows that I felt most at home as a child newly arrived from the desert. Here my brother and I dug out cave cubbies from the banks of sand. We hunted rabbits with bows and arrows, we speared cobbler, and we paddled out on surfboards into the broader river.
I can still remember the moment when I was suddenly happy to be in Perth, when I first felt like I belonged to my new home. It was an early summer morning on an incoming tide and I was alone in the water. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. Walking along the muddy foreshore, I'd seen the imprints of flathead in perfect moulds at low tide, the fan shape of their side-fins and the great weight of their spotted flanks, the broad-arrow indentation of their cavernous mouths at rest. I'd become fascinated by this lurking predator, as I would later become fascinated by the kingie, or mulloway, and later still sharks, finding as many books and speaking to as many fishermen and women as I could on the subject.
I'd caught a few flathead on a line from jetties but they were nowhere near the size I'd witnessed in lies left in the squelchy mud. Armed with a gidgee, I swam out into the current and drifted over the local sandbank at high tide, with its wave-rippled skin and sea-lettuce tumbleweed, anticipating the flathead lying in wait for the school-fish who fed in the shallows. And they were, camouflaged against the speckled mud, watchful as my shadow drifted across them. I was able to remain immobile except for my shivering, and let the current carry me – relaxed and concentrating at the same time. The large brown phyllorhiza punctata and the smaller white aurelia aurita jellyfish drifted with me and around me, my fellow travellers in the tidal current.
In her novel Black Mirror, Gail Jones describes the jellyfish as 'fruit bowls pulsating above her, light caught semi-circular in their fleshy domes ... she half expected to see a baby-face heave jellyfish-like into view', while Robert Drewe in his novel The Drowner describes them undulating 'below the surface as if swaying under glass. In their translucent but individually patterned globes the urgent faces of unborn babies press up against the ceiling.' These images of gestation would have appealed to me as a child, fascinated by the strange mobility of an unboned creature in an amniotic brine. The jellyfish were sometimes so numerous in the shallows that you could swim through them and upon them – the tactile nudge and little shiver of pleasure and revulsion as they brushed against my belly, face and legs.
This was a time in my life when, to use author Brenda Walker's expression, I lived within 'a loose muscular happiness that [my] mind was going to have trouble catching up with', except that it did, and too soon, leaving me with only the memory of the small epiphany I had that morning floating in the river: the sunlight burning my naked back, illuminating the algae-rich shallows; the gobbleguts, blowies and hardyheads accustomed to my presence. As a giant flathead spurted away into the darkness leaving a trail of smuts like a departing steam train, all of the sensual confusion of cold water and hot sun, and levitation and submersion, came together in a sudden recognition that I have never forgotten: the feeling of belonging to a place that did not belong to me, but only made an introverted kid feel more protective, even loving, of the river that carried him along on its soft skin.
About a kilometre downstream from Ellen Brook, the still surface of the river becomes covered in the delicate white flowers of the flooded gum, while beside us cicadas work up a racket and a whistling kite swoops over to take a look. It isn't hard to imagine the river as a billabong, so still and quiet in the midday heat, or as a place where restless spirits reside. I was a boy brought up on the stories of May Gibbs, who lived in Perth as a young girl and teenager. Her gumnut babies were inspired by the fruits of the marri tree, and her Wicked Banksia Men were created when, as a child out walking in the Western Australian bush, she came across 'a grove of banksia trees, and sitting on almost every branch were these ugly little, wicked men'.
For a boy newly arrived to Perth, swimming in this part of the river always unnerved me, especially treading water in the pools dark with leaf litter and laterite alluvium, the shaded banks and strange cold currents tugging at my feet, the unusual lack of buoyancy. My parents had all the illustrated Ainslie Roberts and Charles Mountford books on Aboriginal mythology, and I remember watching the Swan River frothing over rock pools within a forest of sloughing wind and granite boulders, sacred kingfishers swooping dragonflies over the tannic water, and being reminded of Roberts' pictures of dreaming landscapes, with their dramatic images of mythological characters. There was something about the resin-smelling water and lemony sunlight and humid dampness of the forest floor that evoked a sense of the uncanny. This impression was accentuated on our way home through the town of Guildford and its surrounding suburbs, although the mythos belonged to a different culture and a different time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Perth by David Whish-Wilson. Copyright © 2013 David Whish-Wilson. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,The River,
The Limestone Coast,
The Plain,
The City of Light,
Acknowledgments,
Bibliography,