Return to Perth

  As I've mentioned before, house prices in Perth have been rocketing up over the last 12 months. 25% increase compared to a 5% decrease in Melbourne. Even selling two properties isn't enough to buy the type of house we need in the suburbs we grew up in/lived in such as City Beach, Cottesloe, Claremont, Nedlands, Leederville and Shenton Park. This means that we have to go venturing both further north and further south. It's not as if we're downsizing. We still need 3-4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2 living areas, a decent sized kitchen for Susan, single story, a shelted alfresco area and of course, the pool. We started looking as soon as I arrived and the first house was perfect except the pool wasn't big enough and it was in Gwelup which is almost too far north. Although I don't know the area at all, I'm drawn towards the suburbs close to Fremantle. I love the village feel of Freo and we have more friends in the south than the north. There are also better/closer ...

Moving into a new house means lots of boxes and furniture to shift and sort. Hard physical labour - and the result is usually endless bruises. But the move to Loch St included damage that led to the emergency deparment of Queen Elizabeth II Medical Centre. And it was all my fault - even though Susan has tried hard to absolve me of her pain. In the process of moving boxes, I dropped one on her toe. I leapt to her aid and found a bandaid for amongst the other boxes but that wasn't enough. I should have insisted on good old Betadine as well. Somehow or other, Susan's leg became infected as a result and she developed cellulitis. Just in case you haven't heard of it, it's a  potentially life threating disease. That might have cut short our shared return to Perth! She managed to get an appointment to see a GP but the standard dose of antibiotics didn't work so it was off to what we used to call Charlies (short for Sir Charles Gardiner Hosptial) on 31 January. Even at 10am...

  Shellabears, a family owned real estate company, celebrate their 100 anniversity in Cottelsoe this year. And I suspect that our family connection probably goes back to the beginning. I think that the Tonks seniors played tennis with the Shellabears back in the day. Betty and Alan certainly bought their Anstey St, Claremont house from them. Shellabears have done a great job looking after the rental and the sale of that last parental home and then they delivered the goods in terms of a finding a temporary home for us. The rental market is tough and the idea of having to compete with dozens if not hundreds of others was disconcerting. But clearly loyalty and longeivity pay off. The joy of 51 Loch St Claremont is that it has a pool.  And that, as you know by now, was the whole of point of moving back to Perth. The house was built in the 1930s so is solid brick with enough extensions added over the years to ensure that Susan and I each have a bedroom, bathroom and couch-lying-o...

I arrived in Perth on Saturday 11 January to late for a swim but Susan and I managed to get to the beach on Sunday 12 January after a walk along the Swan River with Gabrielle and Masie, a trip to Welshpool to pick up Susan's car, and shopping excursions to Bunnings and Spotlight to buy everything from pillows to a bucket, powerboards to brooms. Our first swim was at South Beach in Fremantle, close to where Susan was staying. It's not our usual beach. We grew up going to City Beach which I hated. All I remember isa long schelp over the hot sand only to be dumped by the waves. In a way it's amazing that I got over my dislike of this beach only to fall in love with the ocean again when we moved to Cottesloe as teenagers. Ann & Susan getting ready for the beach - 1960s Peter's Pool, a reef-sheltered patch of water between Cottesloe and North Cottesloe beaches became our spot. It's a beach where we're rescued people caught in rips. It's a beach where we'v...

The rental market in Perth is just as challenging as the buying market so we called out to friends to see who could have us until we could find a temporary home. Part of the reason we want to return to Perth is because both Susan and I still have connections there - often going back to High School. But keeping a friendship via the occasional email is very different to moving into someone's house. In this case, we needed a home not just for us but for Indigo, the cat, as well.  Susan and Indigo spent an enjoyable couple of weeks in a studio apartment belong to friends Anna and Arthur. I met Anna during my years in community radio in Perth when she produced and presented a range of programs including one on trade unions. She met Arthur through this connection when he worked for a union in the North West of WA. They are the owners of  Artija Fine Art Gallery  which means that their home and the studio are full of indigenous art. If you have any interest in buying art, I high...

  What makes Perth different is blue. The rich dense blue of the sky. The sweeping blue of the Swan River. The tiny pockets of blue swimming pools as you fly into land. The cerulean/aquamarine/sparkling blue of the Indian Ocean. All of those blues called me back. I can enjoy a grey cloudy day, a little blue filled with fluffy clouds day. A dark overcast day. A dull day enlivened by a rainbow. But Perth's blue skies are something else altogether. The white cockatoos shine brightly as they fly across the blue. The flowering gums and the bougainvillea in their reds and pinks and oranges glow brilliantly against the blue. It's hue that I haven't found anywhere else. Fremantle - 2016 For those of you who have never been to Perth, the Swan River bears no resemblance to the Torrens in Adelaide or the Yarra in Melbourne or even the Brisband River. It's wide and magnificant is it winds it up from Fremantle to the city and beyond. I've swum in it. Sailed on it. Sat by it. Eve...

Today, I'm diverting from the linear narrative of how I moved to Perth. I just can't ignore what is going on in the world right now. And yes, I do mean Donald Trump. Destroyer of government, of relationships with allies, of the safety and security of women and trans people, migrants and people of colour. This week, he threw a fit when Volodymyr Zelensky refused to sign away half of his country's rare earth minerals and called out Trump as being in a 'misinformation bubble'. Caught out in lies time and time again, all Trump can do is bluster and blame the other. Just like a 6 or 7 year old. But the only damage a child does when they behave this way is to themselves. Instead, Trump seems to want to damage the world, including his own people. I'm not saying anything you haven't probably thought but I was reminded on what the good qualities of leader should be when I saw the Donmar Warehouse production of the the Scottish Play  last night. It's a somewhat cu...

The logistical challenges of moving state continued long after the house auction. It wasn't just a matter of buying plane tickets but of moving two cars and a cat - and more importantly, arranging our last haircut. Susan, Ann & Ivan Susan and I were introduced to Ivan Constable by John Jackson (whom some readers may remember) when we first moved to Melbourne i.e. the mid-1990s. He's moved salons over time but we have followed him religiously. He was the person that was brave enough to tell me that there was no point in dying my hair anymore - the grey had taken over. I still bear the scars of trying to find a replacement hairdresser in 2019 when I was working in Adelaide so I wasn't looking forward to saying farewell to Ivan. Susan and I booked on the same day in our last week in Melbourne and invited Ivan to lunch post-cuts. We had a delightful meal at a nearby Italian restaurant which he insisted on paying for. As he said, we had been amongst his most loyal customers....

If moving house in Melbourne was traumatic for us, it must have been doubly so for our elderly cat. And then to add insult to injury, we were going to put her on a plane for four hours to fly her across to the other side of the universe. But first, we made sure she had a moment of glory at the National Gallery of Victoria. They currently have a rather clever exhibition based on their collection of art related to  cats and dogs . As part of the experience, you can upload images of your beloved pets and for a moment or two, they star in the gallery. You can see Indigo looking very wise in the bottom left hand corner. In order to be able to travel, Indigo needed a "fit to fly" certificate. Every cat younger than 6 months and older than 12 years requires one. Indigo is over 80 years old in human years and has all the aliments you'd expect: arthritis, sagging bits, and it's hard for her to walk up stairs these days. And if one looked more closely, she's probably got a ...

What were my parents thinking? Partying over Easter only to deliver a child at the end of December? Betty's story about my birth was that I was due on Christmas Day. That was her birthday and she'd suffered for years with a lack of recognition or special presents so she was determined not to let that happen to her child. On 31 December, a photographer from the West Australian newspaper did the rounds of the maternity ward looking for the most likely New Year's Day baby to go on the front of the paper. But Betty wasn't going to have that either. After days in an un-airconditioned hospital during a heat wave, she was in no fit position to have her photo taken. So she went to work and I was born at 9pm.  If Betty worried about Christmas Day as a terrible day for a birthday, New Year's Eve isn't much better. For years I've either sulked, pretended it didn't happen or gone to someone else's party.  If I was lucky, on some years MTC had a show opening and ...

  2024 was our second Christmas in a row spent in Adelaide. Although Sebastian has a comfortable two bedroom unit in Marden, he shares it with Chaos, his cat, and his two Australian Green Tree frogs so taking into account all their paraphenalia, there isn't much room for estra humans. Susan and I rented an apartment nearby in Walkerville with views to the hills and the city and a magpie that came and carolled to us every morning. Although they aren't mentioned in one of my favourite Australian Christmas songs, it did feel as if we had our own  Carol of the Birds .  As well as the view and the magpie and the proximity to Sebastian, the Watson Hotel is one of the Art Hotels and is full of work by the indigenous artist  Tommy Watson . There was other good art to explore in the city as well. An exhibition of great nature photographs at the South Australian Museum. A collection of 'radical tapestries' at the Art Gallery of South Australia. A retrospective of a number of g...

  What, you may ask, is a diversion to the Yorke Peninsula doing in a blog about moving to Perth? Susan and I decided to have Christmas with Sebastian in Adelaide and to explore a part of the South Australia that we hadn't visited. You won't be surprised to know that I googled 'best country beaches in SA' and came up with Port Hughes, a tiny hamlet near the old copper mining town Moonta. I found an AirBnb big enough for all of us and one that was willing to house pets. Although Sebastian's frogs can live happily by themselves for 3 or 4 days, his cat Chaos can't. We hired a car big enough for suitcases and cat accessories and ended up with a huge hybrid Haval. It had cameras everywhere which was just as well because I could barely see the front of the car from the driver's seat.  For those who haven't explored this part of the world, in summer you are driving through flat dusty red/orange plains for most of the trip. The house was large and comfortable a...

It's a truism but it has to be said. Melbourne Theatre Company has been an important part of my life in Melbourne. Not just the 18 years I worked there but the endless shows before and after that time. In fact, my connection to MTC goes back to Perth in the 1960s when I first saw one of their productions. Of course, as a teenager, I didn't even think about the producing company, just about the thrill of seeing Robin Ramsay, then starring in the TV show Bellbird, live on stage as Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1  at the Octogan Theatre. So you could say I have had a connection to MTC for 55 years. Part of my farewell gift from the company was naming a bar after me in the Southbank Theatre which is an impressive form of 'thank you'. But even more impressive is free theatre tickets for life. So I will keep returning to Melbourne for theatre.  Me & my Bar (c) PK I was lucky to attend an MTC event in December which gave me a chance to catch up with many of...