Joy and Pain

Writer and photographer Chris van Ryn indulges in some of Perth's current pleasures and comes face-to-face with some of its past pains.

First published Life and Leisure Magazine

I encounter my first murder victim. On the top of the skull is a distinct groove, about 60mm 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, around the age of 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 happily survived were unhappily subjected to a mutiny and massacre that took place on 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 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. 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 organised.

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 cafes and restaurants and yet, it kinda feels … like a country town. But you're inside it, day to day. What do you think of Perth?”

“Perth... is easy living. Life 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 Swan Bells glowed an aquarium green and the copper facade emanated a florentine warmth. I couldn't see the 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 announces the construction of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, together with exclusive apartments and shops. Renderings depict 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 around 1900, with rows of neat little rectangles, each a building, surrounded by roads, and the harbour, and then this: surrounding 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 malaise 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.

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 the Swan River is 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 travelled 3,000 km to get here. It once stood in a location 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 rootlike 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 turquoise waters, caused by leaching limestone. 500,000 annual visitors 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 8,000 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 sepia-toned images. A quick glance and you can see immediately this isn't good. Groups of linked together, chained-by-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 colonisers, and for this they are prisoners. Rottnest, once an Aboriginal prison, housed 3,500 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 sauve 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.”

Indeed I do. Feeling mellow, and with a gentle glow emanating from the mid section - part bourbon, part travel euphoria - I slip into the Perth evening. I feel sure this would not be the last time I'd meet Mr Dickel ... or Perth.

End