Perth by David Whish-Wilson

Author:David Whish-Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2013-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Robert Drewe’s short story ‘The Water Person and the Tree Person’ expresses something of the way I feel about the limestone coast of Perth, its importance to a sense of place and civic identity. Part of Drewe’s broad thesis is that to be a Perth child is to develop an awareness of the natural world that verges on the uncanny, imparted by osmosis as much as by teaching and learning. The main character, Andy Melrose, feels as though his wife is belittling him by stating that he is a water person while she is a tree person. Melrose, as a product of a state whose key economic indicators at the time are ‘timber and whaling and asbestos’, feels increasingly distanced from his wife, ‘product of a middle-class Melbourne garden suburb of autumnal tones … and the manicured cold-weather flora of Europe’. Although the couple live in Perth, she is an academic whose urbane friends ridicule his daily swim and suspiciously ‘manly’ ability to change a car tyre. He can’t help feeling defensive about the fact that he’s a product of his environment, just as she is of hers:

What did she expect? Unlike her, he’d grown up on this limestone coast, with the roaring forties blowing sand into his ears and the smell of estuary algae in his nostrils every night as he fell asleep. Ever since, the landscape in his mind’s eye was a crumbly moonscape of a coastline, a glaring beached desert fringed by those two big and wondrous oases, the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.

Melrose suspects that his wife’s love of the bush is just ‘literary-political correctness’, a fictional landscape of the denatured urban mind, while his is a sense of attachment felt in the body.

The limestone coast has its freedoms but also its dangers, and my local beach is not all peace and light. I once witnessed a brawl that involved upwards of fifty people, the result of a family feud, and there is occasionally violent drunkenness in the evenings. Homeless men and women used to sleep in the hollows within the acacia, melaleuca and hakea bushes that cover the dunes, and parents don’t let their children stray there. Mark Reid’s poem ‘Ode to South Beach’ captures the beach’s sometimes mood of sulkiness and decay when he describes its ‘miserly west coast wash’ and ‘rabbity scrub’ as he walks the dog:

I am walking the dog beach, old Manners

arse up snout down on the trail

of vermin or the corpses of sea creatures.

I am giddy with aroma, brine,

the stench of pickled things tossed

from the ocean’s window.

There is a Shaun Tan painting that perfectly catches this beachside id, beyond the usual depictions of its beauty and significance to local swimmers, walkers, surfers and multitude ‘fools on the hill’ – the focus on the jade-coloured reefs and the cobalt waters and volcanic sunsets. In Tan’s North Beach, only a sliver of brilliant blue ocean is visible, hemmed in on all sides by groynes covered in the ‘pickled things’ of Reid’s poem, set against a human-sculpted vertical bank and a darkened snip of sky.

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