Return to Perth

Although our pool isn't freezing in winter, it's not exactly warm at 20 degrees so we've cheated and gone off to a slightly more heated pool at the Fremantle Leisure Centre for our aqua aerobics exercise classes. It's warmer in the water than out of of it but the oddest fashion look I've ever seen in a pool was on display.  Most of the ladies were wearing beanies with pom poms in the water! And some of them wear sunglasses as well. I did wonder whether it was worth bringing the beanies that I had crocheted for Melbourne weather across to Perth. After all, was I really going to need them? I certainly don't remember ever wearing such an item when I lived in Perth before. I only kept them because I was rather proud of my craft work, not because I thought I'd ever need such an item in Perth's milder climate. But wear them in a pool? I'm not convinced.

  While Melbourne might like to call itself the food capital of Australia (as well as the cultural capital), when I first moved there in the early 1990s, two items were missing from supermarket shelves: Chocolate Monte biscuits Kole Beer. I solved the first problem by writing to Arnotts and asking why I couldn't get my favourite biscuits in Melbourne. And full marks for customer service, they sent a reply and a couple of packets of biscuits. I took the Montes into the ABC were I was working at the time and people were somewhat bemused by my excitement over what is basically a very plain chocolate coated biscuit. Arnotts explained that as they took over state-based companies they tested biscuits out as to which lines to keep and which to discard and Victorians just didn't take to these WA biscuits. But my letter must have stimulated some further research because a few months later they started to appear in Victorian supermarkets and have stayed there ever since. Here's a pho...

People in both Perth and Melbourne have said words to the effect of "what are you going to do in a cultural desert?" i.e. a sense that I was giving up Australia's cultural heartland for some uncouth outlier world. But so far, even though I've missed a couple of Melbourn Theatre Company shows this year, there's been plenty to keep me entertained.  For example, in the first week of June I saw three shows, went to two art exhibitions and bought two pieces of art. A better hit rate than most weeks in Melbourne.  The first show was Blue , an impressive work by a young indigenous writer with an indigenous performer and director. Produced by Black Swan, it's a powerful one man show about death and suicide, told with grace and care with a pair of revolving mirrors working brilliantly as a centre piece of the set. [Yes, you can see Susan and I in the photo]. The second show was its opposite. Badly produced, badly performed, tedious in the extreme. It was Utopia Limited...

Two months from Settlement Day (14 April) and 6 weeks since we moved in (29 April), we were ready to welcome people into Archibald St. A few people had come to visit amongst the chaos of unpacking but many friends had only seen the realestate.com.au listing so it seemed time to introduce people to Willagee. Arrival #1 - Barry It was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon, pleasant enough to sit both inside and outside. We were lucky enough to host a collection of 20 or so friends from school days, university days, work days, friends of friends and even a (rare for us) cousin! What was fascinating was seeing people who who didn't know that we knew their friends or people catching up with people they hadn't seen for years even though they lived in the same city.  Juliet, Susan & Chris Colin, Ini & Anne Susan did a wonderful job with the catering, ably supported by the best maker of cucumber sandwiches and sausage rolls, Stephanie. My job (apart from crafting and laminating the men...

I'm very conscious as I sit in my nice new home, documenting generally pleasant experiences, that I'm extraordinarily lucky not just to live in Perth but to not live in so many other parts of the world. Whether its farmers suffering from floods in New South Wales, or people's lives being upended by Trump and his crew in the USA, or women living under the Taliban in Afghanistan, or those involved in wars in Sudan or Ukraine, or the people who have lost everything - homes, jobs, family members - in Gaza. I feel completely inadequate in my response to these scenarios. All I can do is make modest donations to organisations such as Amnesty International or Oxfam or the UNHCR (the United Nations' Refugee Agency). That sounds like virtue signally but I really don't know what else to do.  I read to keep myself informed but just knowing doesn't feel enough. However if you want some recommendations about what to read, here are some of the people whose research and writin...

Our friends Anna & Arthur had an exhibition opening on Friday 13 June where the art work, from WA, SA and the Northern Territory, focussed on one of the most powerful indigenous song lines, the Seven Sisters story or Kungkarangkalpa. It's the story of seven women fleeing a shape-shifting trickster, transforming the land as they travelled and eventually heading into the sky to form the Pleiades star cluster.  The artist whose work I bought early this year from Anna & Arthur -   Athena Nangala Granites from Yuendumu in the NT - has some more work in this exhibition. The e-catelogue with more information about the artists, their homelands and their art is available on the Artitja website. Some of the paintings are about the landscape created by the sisters such as the rock paintings in Cave Hill (SA) and salt lakes near Mt Connor (NT) that the sisters walked through and some about the skies to which they fled. I had heard the Seven Sisters story before I bought the...