Perth 2
Perth doesn’t know there’s a worldwide recession; they’re in the middle of a building boom. The unemployment rate in here is about 5%, which basically means that everybody who wants a job has got one. A labor shortage plus a lack of cranes has about eight major projects on hold. The city has 37 of those big construction cranes, but that’s not enough to keep up with the demand. 800 more people move into Perth every day. Real estate prices are through the roof and apartments are snapped up before the ink is dry on the building plans. Recession? What recession?
Having just come from China where she felt like a giantess next to most of the Chinese women, Sylv’s enjoyed the fact that there are a lot of strikingly tall women here in Perth. For myself, I’ve enjoyed the fact that a lot of Australian women are not only tall, but also um…well developed. And proud of both their height (they walk tall) and their um… other assets. Young and even not-so-young ladies often forget to button the top one or two or even three buttons of their shirts and a tremendous amount of cleavage seems to be on display at all times. I think I’m going to like Perth a lot!
There are also a lot of overweight people here though, which is surprising because Australia is such a sports-mad, outdoorsy country. There seems to be a hiking, camping or biking gear shop on every block. But there are also two or three pubs or fish ‘n chip places (or even to our shame KFC’s, Pizza Huts and McDonald’s) in between them.
Our apartment is missing a few things, like a shower curtain. That wouldn’t normally be much of an issue, but there’s only one wall to attach a rod to, so it became an engineering problem. Ultimately, I figured out a suspension system using an old mop handle and an appliance lock Velcro-ed to the ceiling. Works perfectly!
We’ve also got a lot of bare walls, so Sylv has undertaken to paint a cityscape of Perth at night, looking back in from the river. It’s a big canvas, twice the size she’s used to, and she’s working with acrylics instead of the watercolors that have been her primary medium for years, but it’s coming along fine. Can’t wait to see it done.
We’re making daily forays into the downtown area, mostly looking for bits and pieces to furnish the apartment. One thing I’ve been trying to find is some sort of a way to lock the front gate. We notice that all of our neighbors have serious locking systems fitted and the stores and apartments above across the alley have barred windows and razor wire atop their chain link fences. That’s worrying, frankly. I finally found a thin wire bike lock long enough to wrap around the bars, but it’s flimsy. Any burglar with a pair of wire cutters would be inside the wall in a second. I think I’ll get a quote from a locksmith for the same type of lock the neighbors have and see if either the landlady or the school will pay for it. There’s no safe in here either, so finding an unlikely hiding place for our passports and other important stuff is a challenge.
Not that we’re jumpy, but when big-time fireworks went off over the river Friday night to mark the start of the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF), we did wonder what was happening for a few seconds!
Saturday we walked up to the Museum of Western Australia to see all the indigenous stuff we’d read that they had on display. (Just about anything we want to do is within walking distance.) Behind the museum and among some associated buildings, we found that walls of black plastic-clad chain link fencing had been erected to control entrance to outdoor areas where several over-amplified bands are playing as part of the PIAF. Thousands of their fans are standing wall-to-wall in front of the bandstands in the hot sun. In case anyone gets thirsty though (this IS Australia!) there seem to be a goodly number of beer tents. Also long rows of Carolina blue PortaPotties.
We had an excellent fish-and-chips lunch across the street. Every restaurant here has fish-and-chips on the menu and they know how to cook it – flaky firm fish, light batter, non-soggy chips. And every restaurant seems to have a range of a dozen or more good beers on tap to wash it down!
We spent at least a couple of hours in the museum, then walked up the street to go home another way and found our path blocked by a bike race. I think they’re called something like “criterion” where there are several races among different classes of riders over the same closed course. We watched for a while (it’s almost scary being only a few feet from bunches of riders going that fast) and cheered on a couple of struggling underdogs before finding our way back to the apartment.
That night we hit another open-air alley restaurant next door to Durty Nelly’s called The Gentleman Squire. It’s named after John Squires, an early days convict turned brew master who became wealthy and therefore respectable. Brew a good pint and they’ll forgive you for anything, huh? Sounds fair to me! Again, we had an excellent meal for a reasonable price. Restaurants serve huge portions here, so we usually end up splitting one meal and that’s usually more than enough. It’s so pleasant at night here, dry air and always a sea breeze. No wonder everyone eats outside.
The next day we bought a couple of fat Sunday newspapers and wandered a few blocks down to the bank of the Swan River to read them in the shade of some very tall palm trees. There’s a huge Ferris wheel down near the wharf, styled after the London Eye, and a strikingly modern carillon that chimes the hours. (We later learned that the 12 bells in the carillon were a gift from St. Martin in the Fields in London and that they’re rung by hand.) We also saw a big red open-top double-decker London bus parked down by the wharf advertising tours of the city. One of these days we’ll do that.
This would be Super Bowl Sunday back in the states and I was worried that I’d miss the game because it was on at 9 o’clock Monday morning here, when sports bars probably wouldn’t be open. But to my delight, it was on free TV on one of the only three channels we get so I got to watch it all. The station carried the play-by-play by Phil Simms and (I think) Jim Nance, but they cut away during timeouts for analysis by four Australian sportscasters in the studio here. Their slightly different perspective was interesting. They even showed some of the U.S. commercials, not in the context of the game but rather for their entertainment value. I was disappointed by the way the game ended, but until the end it was one of the most competitive Super Bowl games I ever remember seeing.
Tuesday morning I met with the dean of the international school at ECU, a Shanghai-born Chinese gentleman who was delighted that I could speak a few sentences in Mandarin! We had a pleasant chat. International students are very important to Australian (and New Zealand) universities, because they pay full tuition. Australian schools recruit mostly in Asia, of course, especially China, but they also attract some Europeans. The associate dean is from Ecuador; they’d like to open up South America too. Shen said they were very happy to have me at ECU this semester and he hoped I might make a few lectures while I’m here. I’m easy. He also would be interested in exploring an exchange program with UNC-Chapel Hill. The schools are compatible; I’ll put him in touch.
Wednesday I tried to find an optometrist who could fix my reading glasses (I stepped on them and broke one of the two fastening posts on both bows), but no luck. Nobody carries this brand and no one had any spare parts that would fit. I guess I’ll just wear them ’til the other post breaks on one side or the other and maybe try to fix them myself with Super Glue. That might be dangerous to use around the plastic lenses, but I don’t seem to have much choice. We got Sylv a bus pass (after trying again to get a Senior Citizen’s card and getting turned down again as a bloody foreigner) and had lunch (barramundi filets – yum!) at a terrific British-style pub just around the corner, named The Moon & Sixpence. Maybe we’ve found our local.
Thursday and Friday we did hook up with that London bus hop on-hop off tour of the city and it was terrific. The tickets ($25 AUS apiece) were good for two days and you could switch back and forth between the bus and a little red trolley that followed a slightly different route.
Unlike Auckland, which tore down most of its great old downtown Victorian buildings during the misguided sixties and uglified its architectural face with glass-and-aluminum boxes, Perth managed to save at least the facades of the buildings that defined its early municipal glory. No thanks to the authorities or their political friends the developers, though – most of the buildings were preserved because of vigorous public protests every time their destruction was proposed. The result is a modern city with character.
Perth also has a lot of parks and green spaces, most notably King’s Park, a thousand well-tended acres on a river bluff overlooking the city. Slightly larger than Central Park, its continued existence is no less of a miracle considering its potential value as real estate. The land was set aside as public land way back in 1829, virtually at the city’s founding, and renamed to honor Queen Victoria’s son and heir Edward VII when he came to the throne in 1906.
King’s Park serves a lot of functions for Perth. It’s a eucalypt forest, with something like 70 different types growing here. There’s a huge section of natural bush and a tree top walk through it. There are sections sacred to the Aboriginals for whom this was a homeland and there’s an Aboriginal art gallery. There are 29 memorials honoring Australians who died in all the wars from the Boer War through Afghanistan, the most recent area of conflict – a total of 12,000. There are plaques on 1200 of those eucalyptus trees with specific names of dead soldiers, sailors or airmen. And there is a great natural bowl of an amphitheater with an outdoor stage for large performance events, such as the concert this coming March by the prehistoric Australian rock group AC/DC. Those guys must be older than the Rolling Stones!
During the bus tour we’d gone through an area of town called Northbridge, home to Perth’s Chinatown as well as to something like 150 bars and restaurants featuring every imaginable cuisine. It was an easy walk back over there for dinner at Uncle Billy’s, an oilcloth table cover place the tour guide/driver had recommended as cheap and good. It was. They didn’t serve wine, but we noticed another couple bringing in their own bottle. We’d forgotten that that was quite acceptable in Australia, as we’d learned when I was teaching at Bond University over on the Gold Coast a few years ago.
Everyplace in Perth seems to be a happening place when the sun begins go down, but Northbridge is even more so. The streets are just a din of music and conversation. Reminds us of the club our elder son Michael used to promote in NYC, times a hundred. He’d love this scene.