TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

AUSTRALIA 2 - PART ONE

In 2004, nine months after my first journey there, I went back to Australia, landing in Melbourne, which I loved, before taking a 6 hour flight west to Perth. By the way apparently the flight is 5 hours on the way back. Prevailing winds, I believe.

Melbourne was, and almost certainly still is, a beautiful city. Trams still ran, in 2004, into and through the CBD. For those who don't know, the CBD is the central business district. The Yarra river also flows nearby and the CBD is laid out on a fairly typical grid pattern.

We had a few meetings there, one of which was high up in an office block, from where you could look down on Federation Square, more in a minute, and also see the Australian Open tennis complex and the MCG, Melbourne Cricket Ground. On a very personal level, I far preferred Melbourne to Sydney.

Federation Square was a fairly new initiative and apparently a world-wide competition was held for its design which received 177 entries. To me it rather looked as though they had combined all 177 into the final build and there had been no communication between all architects involved. I may be wrong.

The reason for this second trip to Australia was because we had decided to base our work, our project, in that country. Australia is a vast country. You could fit the United Kingdom into Australia over 30 times, and there are three times as many people living in the UK. The mainland of Australia plus the little island of Tasmania at the bottom (nothing better than a Tasmanian at your bottom, I’m told) are made up of six states and two territories. The six states are New South Wales, where we stayed last time, Queensland, which we visited last time, Victoria, where we were this time, Tasmania, south of Victoria, South Australia, guess where, and Western Australia, you could be winning this guessing game. The two territories are the Northern Territory, an easy one to finish and the Australian Capital Territory, which is actually within the boundary of New South Wales. It houses the capital city of Canberra and is the seat of the national government. Rather conveniently, and not, I believe accidentally, it is almost midway between Melbourne and Sydney.

So, where should we go next? As you can see, we had already seen three states. Tasmania was too small and Northern Territory, although we talked with the state government, was a little too remote and isolated. We, therefore, had to decide between checking out South Australia or Western Australia. South Australia, on its own, is four times bigger than the UK. I talked to its leaders, the responses were good, the Formula One Grand Prix had once been there and I liked Ian Chappell. I may have been the only Englishman who did, at the time, but I have never been one for convention. By the same token, I had little or no respect for his brother Greg, after the under-arm incident. If you need to know more, look it up.

Western Australia is ten times the size of the UK, the UK has about thirty times as many people. It covers the whole of the west side of the country, was the first place Europeans had landed on this island, more later, and had also been enthusiastic during our initial approaches. I also liked Marsh and Lillie and, more recently, Adam Gilchrist. Indeed, Mr Lillie was, I had once discovered, a mere one day younger than me, although, due to the time difference, he may have been older.

How could we decide? The answer was a virgin. As neither of us qualified in this respect, you are probably asking who we found, in St Kilda, who did indeed qualify. Well, you got it wrong, It was, in fact, a Virgin Airlines offer of cheap flights to Perth, in Western Australia. We took it, said goodbye to Melbourne with the promise to return, left a suitcase behind and took off.

It was only while we were in the air that an incredible thought occurred to me. We were flying, for about six hours, and we wouldn’t leave the country from which we had departed. Now, apart from a circular tour, there are not too many countries in which, or over which, you can do that. This really is a vast country. It also occurred to me that maybe we would be a little bit out-of-the-way over there but it was worth a look.

And what a look. We landed in Perth and had already arranged to stay at a backpackers in Fremantle. I was actually hoping to meet the famous doctor, of whom Brian Johnston had told me about many times. This blog is taking on a decidedly cricketing feel. We came out of the station and, remembering our experience in Sydney with the infamous Michael, looked for a bus. However, a taxi driver came up to us, asked where we were going, we explained and he offered to drive us there for what I considered a very reasonable fare. He then became even more reasonable. We told him why we were there and he offered to take us the scenic route for no extra money. Already, Western Australia was looking good. On that journey, it looked even better. Firstly, he took us for a drive around Perth. The city was clean, not too many tall buildings, the thing that had turned me off Brisbane, and the Swan River was so calm, so tranquil and so clean.

It had been early evening when we arrived and he took us, next, for a drive along the shoreline with the setting sun disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. You may already know of my love of sunsets but this one did it for me straight away. It was an incredible feeling after the bustle of Melbourne and the still-not-forgotten smells and noise of Bangkok. I think this drive was pivotal in my decision-making for the next year. It was truly stunning. We drove on along the shore for a while and then crossed over the Swan River and there we were, in Fremantle.

The driver dropped us off at the backpackers and we discovered that it was directly overlooking the port. We checked in for a week, intending to have a look around and see what was going on. Two days later, the American Navy followed suit. Apparently, they stopped off in Fremantle quite regularly. There were, literally, hundreds of people waiting to greet them, many young women with pushchairs. My first reaction was that maybe the US Navy had enjoyed itself a little too much among the population of Fremantle a few years back. However, we went across the road and talked to some of these people and, to my delight, most of them had been flown in to see their loved ones.

We, therefore, had a little time to see if this was where we would settle for a year before setting off on our journey of discovery. It didn’t take us long to decide.

I really wasn’t sure how to write these blogs. I spent nearly a year in Western Australia and did, and saw, so much. It may well turn out, as writing often does, that these pieces take a different route but, as I write this, it is my intention to firstly tell you a little bit about Western Australia and its capital city, Perth, and then, tomorrow, do the same about Fremantle. After that I will try to take you through that year in WA. I have to say my notes on all this are quite considerable. Good luck, if you stay with me.

Before I wax lyrical about Perth, let me tell you a little bit about Western Australia itself. I will leave my story about the first Europeans to set foot on this coast until a later blog but it is almost certain that it was this western side of Australia that Europeans saw first. At that time Europeans were sailing to what was known as the East Indies, now called Indonesia, to trade with the people who lived there. Of course, as they only had sailing ships, they were powered by the wind and so they had to find the best route, using the strongest winds, for speed. Sometimes they would get blown too far east after leaving the tip of South Africa and, if they turned north too late, they could see the land we now call Australia. They would have spotted a vast and fairly flat shore, with very few signs of, what they would know as, civilisation.

However, people had lived on this land for over 40,000 years, but, because it was an island and not on any main sailing route, hardly anyone from another country had been here. Nowadays, with satellites taking pictures from above us, it would be quite difficult to hide an island, especially one as big as Australia, but in those days people only knew about countries, and the shape of those countries, if navigators and sailors had travelled there and drawn maps. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the French, and possibly the Chinese, had all sighted parts of Australia after about 1600AD.

The people who did live there, and called this their home, lived in a totally different way to the Europeans and, as often happens, if you don’t recognise something, you don’t understand it. The Europeans saw no cities, no horses, no fields of food, probably some strange creatures, odd trees and people with no clothes and so they thought no-one could really live here, the people were weird, probably a bit stupid and they went away again. In actual fact, the people had been living there very nicely, thank you, for thousands of years. They were highly intelligent about using the land and how to survive, had a great culture and it was the Europeans who were a bit stupid for failing to recognise this. Later on, the failing to respect this as well, moved them from stupid to ignorant and thoughtless.

Of the two million people who live in Western Australia, about 1.2 million live in, or around, Perth, so the rest are scattered around a very large area. Perth is nearer to Singapore and Jakarta than it is to Canberra (get the map out, have a look). It has a coastline of about 12,500 kilometres and the distance from north to south is 2,400 kilometres. It occupies about one-third of the whole of Australia. The northern part is in the tropics. Between the north coast and the Indonesian Islands that straddle the equator, there is only the Timor Sea. Head south from the southern coast and the next thing you hit is ice; nothing between the coast and the Antarctic, as we were to discover later.

It was 1829, almost half past six to you my digital friend, that the colony or settlement of Western Australia was actually proclaimed. In case you still haven’t logged in to my humour (yes, I call it humour) it was the year 1829, not the time. The first governor was a man called Captain James Stirling and he was responsible for the whole idea of creating a colony there. In 1827 he had sailed his ship, HMS Success (HMS stands for His or Her Majesty’s Ship – the King or Queen of England obviously owns all the ships in the Royal Navy) into the Swan River with the idea of establishing a settlement there. It had been 1788 when the British had decided to settle on the eastern coast of Australia, using it as a place to send convicts and free up space in the overcrowded British gaols.

Captain Stirling sailed back to England in 1828 and urged the government to agree to his suggestion. A little later a guy called Thomas Peel made the same suggestion but, eventually, at the end of 1828, the government agreed that Stirling could have his way and so, no doubt using the King’s Ship again, he set off with his new settlers, arriving, as we said in 1829. It is likely that one reason the government of the UK agreed to this, was to stop the French, who had been exploring and sailing around this coast for several years. It was actually a Captain Fremantle, you can see where he went can’t you, who landed first and Captain Stirling arrived on May 31 but bad weather stopped him establishing his colony until June 18 when he was formally proclaimed the Lieutenant Governor. At about this time the site of the future city of Perth was chosen.

The early settlers did not have an easy time over the first few years. In May and June 1830 the Swan River was in flood, but some parts of normal life in and around the colony did begin. On February 27 1830 the Fremantle Journal and General Advertiser, a hand-written newspaper, first appeared. The settlers, as so often seems to have happened, were also helped by the natives in the early part, even though their ways were so different. The first official celebration of Founders Day took place in 1835 when the settling population numbered 1878. By then there were settlements in WA at various other places including Albany on the south coast.

Perth, when we were there, was a beautiful city; I am sure it still is. There were some high buildings but not too many. I’m afraid I don’t like cities that are full of massively tall buildings. I know we have to be creative about space but I still cannot feel any attraction at all to such buildings. Maybe, one day, I will find myself somewhere, full of skyscrapers, and think how wonderful it all looks. I have my doubts, and that is one reason why New York has never appealed to me. It’s not just my fear of heights that causes this. It’s true that I hate having to be in one of these buildings, and you may see photographic evidence of this in later blogs, but the buildings also tend to block out the light. I know they have lots of windows too but then they ruin natural light by reflecting it all over the place. Anyhow, enough said, I don’t like them.

The centre of the city has pedestrian areas, the usual array of shops and offices but it all feels, and looks, so clean. As you may remember, we arrived in autumn and so our first few months were spent in the depths of winter, hahaha. Our friendly teacher from Victoria had warned us about spending time in Western Australia. She claimed that we would find it difficult to even breathe when there in summer as the heat was oppressive and it was a very dry heat. I have to say that we had also been warned that in Victoria they have four seasons in one day so, just like in England, it seems the weather is a major source of conversation and, in some cases here, inter-state rivalry. I think that the proximity of the Swan River, which curls its way through the city, may make the air better than we had been led to believe.

However, the thing that impressed me most about Perth was its railway station and, indeed, the whole rail network. There are four main rail lines which track out of Perth, heading south-east, south-west, north-east and north-west. The advertising hoardings advertise that Perth brings you smarter stations and I would find it very hard to disagree. Remember this is the main terminus, the busiest station in Western Australia, and it was just so neat and tidy. Trains ran on time, no, really.

They were clean and, if memory serves me correctly, because it doesn’t say this in my notes, after a certain time at night, security guards travelled on the trains. I can’t remember if it was all trains or just a random thing. We had by now, in case you haven’t realised, decided to make our base here in WA. Fremantle had been chosen but we made many visits to Perth in the course of the next nine months while our project completed its gestation period. We had meetings, met friends we had made and enjoyed the night life on quite a few occasions.

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