Western Australia

1 Perth is fine

The capital city of Western Australia is Perth.

I came from Perth, so I’m allowed not to love it. I choose to exercise this privilege. I do not love it.

It is not that anything is definitively wrong with Perth. I freely confess that there are wonderful things about the town. The sunshine, the ocean waves. Several people I love are here. Some people I love, love Perth.

The Perth lifestyle is nice enough if you like that kind of thing. It’s also damn rich, which is a popular feature for lifestyles. Jobs seem plentiful. In global terms, it is wealthy beyond measure, in a rich city in a rich state in a rich nation. The infrastructure is freshly rebored and shiny new, new, new. New stadiums and hospitals. You can drive laps of the city all day long in a fancy imported car and muse at how quiet their “rush” hour is compared to anywhere else on the planet. All that. Perfectly adequate.

I think I might grow mean here though. It seems to happen to people. In an increasingly harsh world, Perth is on the wrong side of the average. Interpersonally, I mean. Compared to other cities I have lived in Australia, people are, on average, a little meaner, a jot more resentful, a dash surlier, a modicum more suspicious of outsiders, and one metric iota more likely to regard any given person as an outsider. The attitude of a hard-done-by country town pulling together against the world, but it hits different for a giant city that reeks of privilege.

A drive along wide, freshly laid roads winding between vineyards and parks into the hills brought me to a cellar-door restaurant. Restrained string ensemble music plays over clinking glasses in an extravagantly spacious freshly renovated neo-Tuscan dining room. As he takes a bite of a $65 steak, the gentleman next to me complains “The real problem here is that the Eastern States have taken all of Western Australia’s money and they don’t give anything back”.

Let’s talk plumage. Fashion! Subcultures! Street life! The human zoo I want to live in is full of peacocks and flamingos. Perth is not that. Fashion here is uniform, expensive, and bland. Country Road or Ralph Lauren, income-bracket depending. Living in Perth, we are a little less likely to cross the sun-bleached gulf between the front doors of our suburban mansions to do things in the world. All the colours of life have been sun-bleached to rusty beige. The streets are empty; why put on a show? The already tiny populations of punks and ravers and goths and hippies and metalheads have shrunk to endangered levels since my youth.

If Perth were a menagerie, it would not be a zoo, but a kennel of sullenly aloof cats. You don’t want to go look at a cat kennel. They don’t want you to either. Stop antagonizing the cats.

Perth does not want to show off.

How many art movements will take root in Perth? How many scientific revolutions? How many technological revolutions?¹

When I complain about Sydney becoming boring, I am sad that we are choking the gorgeous, fabulous, weird life out of that magnificent city. I do not mourn Perth in the same way, as this place has never decided to be fabulous to begin with.

I am aware my attitude is coloured by the fact that I am an extrovert. Vibrancy for me is crowded hell for others. Is it so wrong to have a city where the introverts too can live in their hermitages and be left in glorious solitude for most of their working days? Why can I not just leave everyone to their air-conditioned living rooms in their suburban estates, to drink their expensive wines while texting each other about their suspect neighbours? Is that so damnable, Dan?

It is not, I begrudgingly confess, damnable. It is fine. It is perfectly OK. Maybe it is best that the people who burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars steer clear of Perth. At least in summer when it would be a fire hazard in any case. It is fine that there is a safe haven for those who yearn to lock the door at 9pm and speak to their neighbours as rarely as possible. This kind of tolerable unremarkableness is probably an attracting state in the trajectory of the global middle classes, and so in a certain sense is what people want even if it is not what I want. It is some kind of local optimum in the fitness landscape of, well, actual landscapes. People want their homes to be like this, or at least that is what they buy from the estate agent catalogue. Perhaps all forests become paddocks, all swamps become suburbs, all cities become Perth. If that is so, I blame Perth not for being singular, but rather, commonplace; I blame Perth for sketching that trajectory to insular suburbia. Perth is: for all it be harbinger of the oncoming meh, it is not to blame.

I think Perth’s obvious wealth throws this into particular relief for me. Every now and again, when I am nervous about geopolitical tensions or societal divisions, I think that at least, if the needs of the poorest were addressed, if prosperity lifted up the downtrodden, then we would all get along. If we solve material progress, humanity would spend less time at each other’s throats and finally get around to the important work of making the world a better place.

Then, I see Perth, where the streets are paved in gold² and I note them manning their barricades against the world and begrudging it every dream. They import outsiders to put on a show during a festival, and then send them off when their job is done. The rest of the time, Perth would rather not, thanks all the same.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a grazing platter being fed into a human face, forever.

2 Amazing local produce

• mushrooms!
• goat’s cheese!

3 Outdoorlyf

Westralian nature is incredible, you guys.

I’m a forests guy, so I recommend the Karri forests in the southwest. There are coral reefs and beaches and deserts and all sorts of things, though.