A "Perth"-fect Intro to WA

Perth: the most isolated city in the world. When I first started planning my yearlong trip back in 2023, its remote location in Western Australia beckoned to me. What could be hiding in this corner of the world? At long last, I was about to experience “WA”!
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In some ways, Perth is like the child of Sydney of Melbourne. It’s defined by its location on the Swan River, similar to Melbourne on the Yarra. But it’s also a short distance from a string of amazing beaches, like Sydney and Bondi. The Perth CBD is a fusion of the two larger cities, with the modern quays and promenades of Sydney and the quirky laneways and public squares of Melbourne. But of course, everything on a smaller scale, which makes it more relaxed.

​Some of the key landmarks included Elizabeth Quay, a ferry terminal with an artistic bridge, surrounded by a ring of cafes, sculptures, and playgrounds. Nearby in Barrack Square was the glass Bell Tower, recently named in the controversial “Top 100 Most Boring Tourist Attractions in the World.” I also stumbled across the newly renovated Yagan Square, an echo of Melbourne’s Fed Square, celebrating its reopening with a special weekend festival. After all this exploring, I treated myself to a cinnamon scroll at a cafe across from the square.

​I was fortunate to stay with a Servas host named Shirley, a kind and energetic woman who picked me up from the airport. Originally from the north island of New Zealand, she had lived in Perth for over 20 years. Her son Ed, a geologist, was also living at her house. Ed was recovering from the financial ripples of a bust in the mining industry and a difficult divorce, but you wouldn’t guess from his chipper attitude and non-stop jokes. For part of my visit, two of Ed’s teenage kids were also under the same roof. They emerged for dinner and were coaxed to stay for a game of cards called Seven of Diamonds. Shirley later told me she valued the ability of the game to bring everyone together.

Shirley had a very interesting life story. After growing up in a rural area, she studied horticulture and worked in the New Zealand kiwifruit industry. However, as the only woman in this area, her career progression was limited despite her tremendous success. She ended up moving to China and living there for a few years, an impactful chapter that often featured in her stories. She also overcame an unsuccessful marriage and the loss of her daughter to cancer. Eventually, she moved to Perth to be closer to Ed (whose mining career had brought him to WA) and worked as an ESL teacher. Nowadays, she teaches ukelele, finding particular joy in creating a community for other transplants like herself. Shirley even has her own ukelele song book that she lovingly compiled.
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On my first day, I was invited to join a jam session that Shirley attends as a regular member. Happening once a month, the jam was very well organized by a music teacher. The teacher had selected and distributed a song list, including some repeats and some new pieces. The teacher played guitar at the front of the group, and was accompanied by a keyboard, bass, and drum player. The attendees were a general audience, mainly retirees, and playing a mix of ukelele and guitar. Shirley had contacted the teacher in advance and arranged a guitar for me. Since the chord fingerings were provided on the sheet music, I was able to play along.

​Everyone was super friendly and accommodating to their unexpected guest guitarist. The teacher made sure to highlight the songs by Australian artists for my benefit, and I had some nice conversations during the coffee break intermission. As I was still jet-lagged and had just met Shirley hours earlier, the whole thing was a bit surreal. Still, it was memorable and good fun!

​Dinner conversation with Shirley and Ed was a key part of the experience. One night, Ed grilled some delicious steak and corn, served with wine. Another night, I prepared a round of jambalaya and sampled local beers. The food and drink greased the wheels for deep conversations about family history and politics. Ed and Shirley were more politically conservative than other Australians I had the chance to meet, and I learned a lot from their perspectives. Ed expressed frustration with Aboriginal landowners because of the expensive cultural surveys needed as a pre-requisite for mining. Shirley saw the prime minister as being too soft. Both of them were articulate and backed up their opinions with anecdotes, though at times I found the anecdotes to be a little reductive. It was fascinating and insightful.

Shirley’s place was conveniently located near a train station. Getting to the CBD only required a smooth 20-minute train ride across the Swan River. Along the way, I glimpsed harbors full of boats and a few of Perth’s iconic black swans. The first Europeans to arrive in Perth were baffled by these black swans, leading to the river’s name. The term “black swan event” was definitely not coined in Perth!
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There were plenty of other things coined in Perth, and I learned all about them at the Perth Mint. When gold was discovered near Kalgoorlie, 600km away, it started the 1890s gold rush. A branch of the British Royal Mint was opened in Perth in 1899, so the fresh gold haul could be struck into sovereigns. Eventually production was shifted to bullion bars, and later to Australia’s own coin designs. Nowadays, the Perth Mint does specialty jobs, while Canberra has taken over for circulating currency.

​The tour guide spoke fast but conveyed a lot of information in a short time. He also performed a gold pouring demo in a special theater. The molten gold, mostly liquid with a few glowing chunks, was poured into a bar shape and cooled down before our eyes. This same gold bar gets melted and cooled multiple times a day for years on end without deteriorating.

​The Perth Mint also had an impressive array of exhibits, including the world’s largest gold coin, stamped with a kangaroo and a face value of $1 million AUD. There were enormous gold nuggets and silver specimens, a gold bar you could try to pick up (it was well secured), a scale that would calculate “your weight’s worth in gold,” a place you could get custom-engraved coins, and archives of Australian coin designs over time. I thoroughly enjoyed the Perth Mint’s blend of mining history, materials science, and coin collecting.

​I visited two other attractions in the CBD, the Art Gallery of West Australia (AGWA) and the Boola Bardip Museum. The AGWA was free and worth browsing. I enjoyed a Yhonnie Scarce glassblowing exhibition. In her work, glass yams were used to represent nuclear fallout from the Maralinga bomb testing site. There was also a gallery of student projects that showcased Perth’s ethnic diversity, with some thought-provoking pieces.

​The Boola Bardip museum, meaning “many stories,” covered the natural history and human history of the area. I learned about indigenous customs and European industries like mining, logging, and raising livestock. There were excellent displays on biodiversity. Australia has so many unique animals. Just when I got down the difference between a bilby and a bettong, I was confronted with even more marsupials: the numbat, the quenda, the mulgara, and more! There wasn’t sufficient time to absorb it all. One small display that caught my attention was a classical guitar built by Greg Smallman in Esperance, WA. This luthier came up with the lattice brace construction technique, the same technique used in my own guitar back home.

​Every city in Australia, big or small, seems to have a botanic garden. Perth’s offering was the impressive King’s Park, located on a bluff with views of the CBD and Swan River. There were so many pockets to explore. A raised walkway through a forest canopy offered peeks into tree holes where lorikeets and galahs were nesting. A staircase shaped like DNA was a cleverly designed viewing platform. There was a giant boab tree, which made a long road trip from its original location in northern Australia. The park had kookaburras, but as I learned at the Boola Bardip museum, they are not native to WA. They were introduced by some Europeans who thought WA’s forests were too quiet. I guess the kookaburras got the last laugh.

So much of Western Australia’s treasures are in the remote northwest corner, including Ningaloo Reef and the Kimberley. Though alluring, I felt these areas were too remote for a solo road trip, or too expensive for a guided tour. To get a brief taste, I signed up for a day trip from Perth to the sand dunes and rock formations about 3 hours’ drive to the north. The stacked itinerary included sandboarding, the Pinnacles, dinner, and stargazing.
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Sandboarding on the Lancelin dunes was a thrilling experience! It was my first time trying sandboarding, and somehow I ended up being the first from the group to give it a go. It turned out to be more like sledding than snowboarding. But it could pick up speed, and trying to stay onboard was part of the thrill. A few people tried standing up, usually tumbling off as the board lost momentum. After each round was an arduous climb to the ridgeline, where a constant stream of wind greeted us with sand in the face. It stuck to my sunscreen-covered arms and neck. There were far fewer boards than people, but waiting in line gave a chance to enjoy the views of the ocean. I loved how the sand was jarringly white, a total contrast from the red sands of Uluru. It was also surprisingly cold, so no risk of burning ones' feet.

The other main stop on the tour was seeing the Pinnacles of Nambung National Park. The pinnacles were surprising in their quantity – vast plains filled with these tombstone-like pillars. The van traced the park’s main road, an unpaved dirt track marked only with a perimeter of stones. At times the pinnacles were just outside the boundary, looming precariously close to the windows as we drove by.
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The tour wasn’t really a guided tour, and we were let loose to wander through the pinnacles at our own pace while the “guides” prepared dinner. I took lots of silly photos with the rocks and admired the sunset over the desert.

Dinner was a surprisingly good, a spread of salads and sausages. It also included self-pour wine, both a blessing and a curse. Two women from NSW who had been friendly-chatty now became annoying-chatty. As we transitioned into the stargazing part of the tour, they loudly called out every passing satellite (of which there were many). One of the guides, who already had a proclivity for unhelpful banter, squabbled with the tipsy ladies while everyone else tried to enjoy the night sky. I’m glad I already had an amazing stargazing tour in Uluru, because this one was a disappointment.
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After three days revolving around Perth, my attention then shifted towards Fremantle, its ocean-based sister city. "Freo" is known for its active port and seafaring legacy. I thought it was fitting to start my visit at the Shipwreck Museum. (Also fitting was the weather, suddenly stormy after several perfect days.)

​WA has experienced its fair share of shipwrecks. During the 1600s, ships from the Dutch East India Company sailed around the tip of Africa and towards its port in modern Indonesia. The original route hugged the coast of Africa and India, but the Dutch discovered it was more efficient to power on east, and later turn north. The problem was, they didn’t have instruments for measuring longitude, so they had to guess when to turn. Ships that didn’t turn soon enough hit the west coast of Australia. The museum’s centerpiece was the hull of the Batavia, one of these unlucky Dutch ships.

​However, the wreck that really stood out was a steam ship called the SS Xantho which sank in 1872. When it was discovered, the steam engine was covered in concretion – a mix of corrosion and undersea growth. Since no working engines (nor their drawings) had survived from this era, an elaborate marine archaeology project was kicked off. The concretion was removed, the corrosion was chemically stopped, and after over 100 years underwater, it was restored to the point the engine could be cranked. A remarkable feat.

​Afterwards, I went across the street to Cicerello’s, a fish & chips fixture. The inside was decorated with multiple aquariums. The beautiful fish were unaware of the irony. From the ceiling, hanging kayaks with shark bites were a reminder that humans could also be on the menu. I washed the food down with a flight of beers from the neighboring brewery, called Little Creatures, a reference to microscopic yeast. The flight was superb, especially after a salty meal.

​The weather started to improve, so I worked my way north towards Cottesloe Beach. Along the way, I passed the Dingo Flour factory, a Fremantle landmark that’s visible to both trains and ships. The dingo logo has now found its way onto beer cans, posters, and t-shirts. I crossed the train tracks via a funky boardwalk and arrived at the beach.

​WA has some of the most luscious sand I’ve ever encountered, soft and coherent like cookie dough. It felt great on the feet. As I walked north while carrying my shoes, small waves crashed into the gentle slope with an outsized boom. In some places, seaweed had accumulated into natural levees. Eventually the sand ended, and I had to put my shoes back on. The overland pathway passed an elaborate sundial and then descended to the Cottesloe Beach jetty. There were a few fishermen and tourists, but otherwise this popular beach was quiet.

​I had a few errands that brought me back to the CBD and then got hungry. The local Woolworth’s had some decent hot food options, including dumplings and curry bowls, so I picked up a basic dinner and enjoyed it on Elizabeth Quay, dressed up in its evening colors. I looked up at the skyline. After talking with Ed, I now recognized the names on the skyscrapers – mining companies, like BHP and Rio Tinto. For better or worse, I had found something that made Perth distinct from other Australian cities.