Return to Perth

For the last week, it's rained every day. And I suddenly remembered what Perth winter's were like. Wet. I know some of you will find this hard to imagine, but I did play hockey as a school girl. Not well, I hasten to add but well enough to stay on the team. Left half back, that was my role. I don't remember getting any pleasure out of it but Betty, who was a great sportswoman, made us play sport summer and winter. I wasn't old enough or bold enough to object but I did have my own special way of demonstrating my discomfort. I wore a dry cleaning plastic bag over my uniform when playing hockey in order to reduce the risk of being drenched every weekend. Of course I was laughed at but as I watched other girls covered in mud and drowned in water, I felt that I had the last laugh. While Perth winters weren't as cold as Melbourne ones (as I type it's 18 degrees here and 11 degrees there), the houses were built for summer breezes rather than fires. There was a fireplac...

Amongst my missing detective books, while there were some classic Dorothy Sayer's, there were no Agatha Christie paperbacks. I read them as a teenager but never again. Susan, on the other hand, has DVDs of almost every Agatha Christie book that has ever been filmed and we have just watched the two most recent series: Towards Zero and Murder is Easy  (both - unsurprisingly - on Britbox). Susan won't watch any of my international noir mysteries but it doesn't matter how many bodies are scattered under English hedgerows or in the palour of English manors, she's tuned in to that world. While I have learnt to appreciate a well filmed drama with well loved English actors in such series, I have always struggled with staged version's of Agatha Christie's work, particularly in Australia. In all those annual journeys to London when I was at MTC, I never bothered to see The Mousetrap . And now, I'm faced with having to comment on the Australian production of And Then T...

This blog was going to focus on my return to Perth but I can't resist sharing this article by friend, academic, theatre director and historian Julian Meyrick. Julian, as well as being a delightful human being, is one of the smartest people I know. He's written a piece for Arts Hub about Donald Trump from a dramaturg's point of view. What this means is that he's looking at Trump as a performer and his presidency as a play.  Julian starts his piece this way: Donald Trump is often seen as a  performer , an  actor , a lover of drama, attention and  applause . His role on  The Apprentice  is frequently mentioned, as is the theatricality of his appearance: the yellow hair, the puckered lips, held high like a rooster’s beak, the displays of septuagenarian male bravura. Advice at the time of his 2025 inauguration to “grab the popcorn and sit back”, points up the performative expectations around him at the start of his second presidential term. But dramas can defy ...

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...

This is a post I should have done in April or May when one could still buy deliciously flavoursome grapes from the Swan Valley. I was reminded how lucky I am to have access to such a treat during the recent trip to Melbourne when I bought some "autumn" grapes. And they were horrible. Sure, they had some crunch, but no flavour. My tolerance for dull fruit is extremely limited so they went straight into the bin. I describe myself as a fruit fascist. I need fruit to have taste and texture - the taste and texture I remember from growing up in Perth when Uncle Pete, who worked as a packer in the markets, would drop off fresh seasonal produce. He retired to a small orchard in the Porongorups where we could walk outside and pick a granny smith apple or an apricot or a plum off a tree. If fruit doesn't taste that good, I won't eat it.  In Perth's autumn, we have managed to buy the best range of plums I've had for decades. Perth's climate suits many sorts of Japane...

At a poetry performance Susan and I attended as part of the Boorloo Heritage Festival, one of the speakers was  Jerome Masamaka   originally from Ghana. He talked about the difference between his watery home, built between the sea and a lagoon, and the sandy bush nature of Perth. He also talked about the birds. Flocks and flocks of birds. More than I ever remember as a child. It was always lovely waking up in the Pink House to the sound of magpies greeting the dawn. And the flash of those glorious lorikeets in the flowering gum tree out the back.  But I hated the irritating miner/myrnah birds, both imported and local. Every so often one would see a couple of pink and grey galahs nibbling someone's grass or some white cockatoos flitting past. But here the galahs and cockatoos travel in large noisy packs across the sky. The black ones are either Canarby's Black Cockatoo or the beautiful Red-tailed Black Cockatoo and the white ones, mainly Corellas. Jerome Masamaka talked ...

If you read my piece about Open Studios, you know that Susan and I had an enjoyable weekend meeting artists in Mandurah and surrounds last month. I had the chance to meet more artists last weekend. I was asked by staff from the Arts and Culture section of the Mandurah Council to chair a session on Courage and Resilence as part of a Creative Symposium on fundraising for local artists. We met at the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre and spent a day together exploring income options such as sponsorship, philanthropy and grant giving but also how to manage expectations and energy in the underfunded world that is arts funding in Australia. It's very easy to access Mandurah these days via public transport - a train and then regular buses looping through the town. The sky was blue and the water still as I walked to the Arts Centre.  I'm impressed by size of the Council's team of arts-focused workers and the range of activities they facilitate for local artists. For this symposium th...

The University of WA is blessed with a number of performance spaces on campus and I've been priviledged to have both watched and performed In a number of them back in the day. My first experience was seeing a production of Romeo and Juliet at the New Fortune Theatre. This theatre, situated in the middle of the Arts Faculty building, is based on the 1600 Fortune Theatre in London. It's an open air space which is also the home to a family of peacocks. I was 13 when I saw R&J and remember writing a fan letter to Romeo and waiting desparately for a reply which never came. My performance opportunity on this stage came in the 1980s when as part of a Graduate Drama Society production, I performed in The Country Wife,  a Restoration comedy   by William Wycherley. The first and last time I've ever worn a black wig!  Many of you will have heard the story of how I saw my first Melbourne Theatre Company production after winning a ticket to see a matinee at the new Octagon Theatre...

  In my book on Arts Management,  The A to Z of Arts Management , i wrote a number of sections that wouldn’t normally find in text books. On coffee. On laughter. And on humility. And one on manners. Susan and I regularly received feedback about how ‘nice’ we are. That might sound like a rather wishy-washy concept but what people mean is that we are polite, that we show respect, that we act civilly. Whether it’s thanking a bus driver or offering a cup of tea to a tradie, speaking without yelling on the phone even when we’re irritated, or smiling at a stranger in the street - none of this takes much effort or emotional labour. And it all adds lubrication to how we live together with our different tastes and interests and beliefs in a complex, pluralistic society.  There was a fascinating difference between walking to the tram in Pascoe Vale South and walking to the tram in Brunswick when Susan and I stayed in Glenlyon Road. In PVS, with only an occasional exception, strange...

Betty Tonks was an inveterate reader and buyer of detective novels. And for years (before my income started shrinking) so was  I. We even spent money posting our favourite new discoveries to each other.  Her taste was reasonably eclectic although she did tend to prefer English writers such as PD James (Inspector Dalgleish), Reginald Hill (Dalzeil & Pascoe), Peter Robinson (DCI Banks), Ian Rankin (DI Rebus). But occasionally she'd go venturing to foreign climes with writers like Barbara Nadel (Istanbul) and Donna Leon (Venice).  I built on those foreign adventures with all the Scandi Noir writers such as Henning Mankel, Stefan Larsson, Anne Holt, Camilla Lackberg, Arnaldur Indridasson etc but also found stories set in Saudi Arabia (Zoe Ferraris), South Africa (Malla Nunn), Cuba (Leonardo Padura), (Ireland (Benjamin Black), Netherlands (Nicholas Freeling), France (Georget Phillippe), Parker Bilal (Egypt)....and so the list goes on. Occasionally I’d visit the world of US...

  As I float around in pools and the ocean, I do wonder why I feel so much more comfortablable there than on land? There's thought from one of Evie Wyld's characters in The Bass Rock  about a woman in an outdoor pool: "She's enjoying being weightless, thought Ruth. She doesn't care about going foreward." (14) It's partly floating and not running the risk of tripping over my own feet. It's partly the warmth that usually provides the backdrop for such experiences. It's partly that there's nothing else you can do while you are in the water except ponder the world - or not.  A friend talked about stopping after a number of laps because she was bored with her own thoughts. I know exactly what she means. By definition, swimming laps is an utterly uninteresting process. Up down. Up down. The only thing that changes might be other people swimming in your lane. Traditionally, I have solved problems, written emails, crafted reports while I swam laps but ...