Perth 4
Terrific day today. We walked down to the Barrack Square Pier this morning and took a ferry down the Swan River to Freemantle, a refreshing hour on the water on a day when the temperature was headed for 40C – that’s in the 100º-Fahrenheit range.
Freemantle (or rather, Freo as the locals refer to it) is the old Victorian seaport that gave the world access to Western Australia and vice versa. It had deteriorated into a typical run-down waterfront warehouse area but the city fathers had the vision to see a different future. They also had the vision to retain and restore at least the facades of the great old buildings when they brought it back from a run-down waterfront to a major tourist destination.
The impetus for coming over to Freo today was a matinee performance of a play we’d wanted to see that had been sold out on the couple of evenings we tried before. We thought we’d spend the hot part of the afternoon in a nice, air-conditioned theatre, then hit the Saturday markets and finish up with a fish ‘n chips dinner, catching the sea breezes on the deck outside a dockside restaurant.
It almost worked out the way we’d planned it, but not quite. The nearly accurately named Deckchair Theatre was in the old Victorian Hall, probably the council chambers a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the founding fathers hadn’t made provisions for air-conditioning, nor had the current occupants. We sweltered.
But the play was excellent, a suspense thriller wrapped inside an anthropology lesson. The author of the book from which the work was adapted was, to my surprise and delight, Robert Drewe, the Western Australian writer I’d only discovered the week before. The main character was named “Grace,” which was also the title of the book and the play. Grace’s father, an anthropologist, had named her after the name he’d given to set of bones he’d found by a dry lake bed belonging to a young women who had lived 60,000 years ago – perhaps a representative of the first Australians, people who had come over from Asia long before the Aborigines. The play itself reminded us of “Wait Until Dark” in terms of the tension the audience feels. We were sweating for more reasons than one!
It was more than two hours long, including the intermission, so it was slightly cooler when we got out and went in search of the Saturday markets. They were held in the old Victorian market building – see what I mean about how they’ve retained the character of the old town? But it wasn’t air-conditioned either, of course. It’s hard to imagine how bad places must have smelled in the 1800’s, especially when you remember that people were wearing boots and heavy layers of clothing, not sandals and shorts and tee shirts.
We didn’t see anything we needed to buy in the market (although I almost succumbed to a nice little jarrah wood ukulele for $35), so on we went through the quaint old streets toward the docks and dinner. There were lots of options, including the main Little Creatures brewery which featured multiple drinking decks, minimal food and maximal prices. Little Creatures is a much-celebrated Freo success story, local boys who made good and from their microbrewery here built a national brand. It’s a nice beer, although it has a full-flavored taste our sons and our English friend Steve Shears would enjoy more than I do.
We continued on along the docks to a large Greek restaurant that had been voted #1 for fish and chips in some survey. We also chose it because its deck was in full shade from the late afternoon sun. So we had a very pleasant meal watching the gulls swoop around the colorful boats of the fishing fleet at anchor.
After dinner we walked around the harbor to a little beach, sat on a stone wall and watched the sun set into the sea. Spectacular!
We were wishing we’d brought our bathers. (Living here, Sylv’s dropped back into using lots of British words for things. If we’d been at a beach in America, she would have said swimsuits!) Living here also triggers lots of her childhood memories. As we sat there wishing we could go in, Sylv was recalling (still with some embarrassment) how her mother had once stripped down to her bra and panties to go swimming on the beach at Barry Island, a popular Welsh seaside holiday place. Everyone cheered Em for being such a good sport, but of course Sylv as her young daughter was mortified!
We took the train back to Perth, a half-hour trip. The trains are clean, well lit, air-conditioned, fast and frequent. Sylv had forgotten her Smart Rider pass (good for both trains and buses), so as I went through the turnstile using mine she squeezed in behind me. We kept furtively looking around, praying that a transit cop wouldn’t materialize and arrest her. I can see the headlines now: “WIFE OF PROFESSOR NABBED FOR FARE-JUMPING!” Talk about embarrassing.
Sunday was fun, too – Diane took us mango picking. We went out to a little mango farm out in the bush (well, used-to-be bush – they extended the highway and now it’s Boomtown). The guy running the farm was funny and he took a shine to Sylv, teasing her about her marvelous technique fondling the mangoes to see if they were ripe! We picked a couple of buckets worth. The trees are about the size of apple trees and the fruit varies from crabapple size to as big as your fist or bigger. We learned that the greener ones would be less tart and therefore better for salads; the ones going yellow on the ends (”nature turning the lights on,” the farmer said) will be sweeter and therefore better on cereal or for dessert. When we weighed our pickings up at the cash register, we saw that the farm is for sale for development. We asked why, since the guy clearly loved what he was doing. “The wife wants some money,” he said (I thought a bit ruefully). Still, the way residential development is booming in this area, the acreage must be worth a fortune. The farm would soon have been surrounded by housing estates anyway.
Later Diane took us home and cooked a delightful dinner for us. She’s a gourmet cook with an Asian palette, having lived for a long time in Singapore. A bit intimidating for us when we return the hospitality!
My first two classes have gone well, although we had a drop-off in attendance on Monday. It was Labour Day here (summer is officially over, though you wouldn’t know it by the temperature) and although it’s a public holiday, the school still held classes. There had also been the biggest outdoor music concert of the year the day before and some of the students who did show up had lost their voices!
It’s certainly fun living as we do in the heart of downtown. Every time we explore an alley we discover some new place. I found a barbershop that gives senior discounts and a second-hand bookstore this morning. In the second-hand bookstore I found a copy of Robert Drewe’s “Grace” for $12 (they were selling them at the theatre for $25), another book by him for even less, and a novel by Richard Flanagan (a favorite Tasmanian author) for the same price. Then on the el cheapo table I found a Joan Didion, a Joyce Carol Oates and an Ian Rankin (a Scottish mystery writer whom we also like) for $2 apiece. That haul ought to keep me busy for a couple of days!
Our neighborhood wine store also had a big sale – half-a-dozen bottles of Rhone wine (Sylv’s favorite) for $46 with a $35 bottle of Coonawarra cabernet thrown in for free. That ought to hold us for a couple of days too!
Diane brought us a non-alcoholic drink the other night that I’d never seen before and absolutely love. She drove me home from school and stopped in for a drink but was driving home afterwards so she couldn’t drink anything that’d register on a Breathalyzer test. Get caught once and you lose your license – they don’t mess around here. Anyhow, it’s a bitters, lime and lemon concoction bottled by Angostura. Delicious. I sometimes drink Campari and soda anyway, so it’s like it was made for me. It’s available in the grocery store, as are the Thai lime and chilli-flavored cashew nuts she brought along for munchies. Yummie!
There is a heavy Asian influx here, but the city has always attracted people from all over the world, especially during the Gold Rush days. “Everyone here is from somewhere else,” a local writer said recently. Evidence: St. Brigid’s, the Catholic church I pass on the way to school, offers separate three masses on Sunday mornings – one in English, one in Polish, and one in Italian. I’m tempted to go to the Polish one for old times’ sake. When I was a little kid my father sometimes would take me fishing very early on Sunday morning and the only church with that early a mass was the Polish Catholic church. The pastor was a fire-and-brimstone guy and while I couldn’t understand a word he said, he always seemed to be hollering directly at me! (On second thought, maybe that’s not a memory I want to retrieve.)
Australians drive on the other (left) side of the road, of course, deriving the custom from the British, but they also walk the same way. What that means is that when I’m walking toward someone who’s walking toward me coming from the other direction, I automatically move to my right to pass him or her. Unfortunately they automatically move to their left, which puts us nose to nose!
Friday we took another ferry across the harbor to visit the Perth Zoo. Lovely day, cooler than it has been, which made it perfect for wandering around a zoo. Nice zoo it is, too. Compact, but beautifully designed. Natural habitat. A lot of the time you feel like you’re walking along paths through the jungle. Sometimes the animals aren’t even penned in, like the half-dozen kangaroos that just peered back at us and the egrets that wandered around picking up crumbs like pigeons. Noon isn’t the best time to visit a zoo, though – a lot of the animals were sleeping.
Saturday we took the train out to a suburb called Subiaco where the Lonely Planet guidebook said there was a big market. Trains, busses and ferries all work on the Smart Rider card – you just swipe it on and off and your fare is automatically computed. Very convenient. Anyhow, there was a market in Subiaco but it wasn’t as extensive as the guidebook had promised. But there was also a very large derelict building with Public Market chiseled in stone toward the top. When I got home I checked the publication date of the Western Australia guidebook I’d bought in a second hand store: 1995! I’ll have to be careful just to use it for general information.