Return to Perth

T he floral emblem of Western Australia is the Red and Green Kangaroo Paw (Anigozanthos manglesii) which is endemic to the southwest of the state. I remember this from childhood but have no memory of all the other coloured Kangaroo Paws that I’ve seen since returning including a blue version. Having done some research, I’ve now discovered that there has been a kangaroo paw breeding program at Kings Park since 2007 designed to develop plants that were both disease tolerant and heat resistant. The original colours were red, green, yellow and sometimes purple plants but new colours are emerging. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-change-drives-creation-of-new-blue-kangaroo-paw-20220309-p5a38d.html Wandering along St George’s Terrace in the Perth CBD, once can see orange- green, pink, burgundy, and lime-green flowers. The largest collection of kangaroo paws I’ve seen was in an unexpected place: the Eden Project in Cornwall. Each space on the site had a different...

Palace Cinemas across the country are presenting a British Film Festival in November. As well as showing new films, these Festivals often do retrospectives and in the case, Ken Russell’s The Boyfriend, originally released in 1971 is on show. Susan, a musical lover, was eager to see it and I, a Ken Russell fan from the days of The Music Lover and Women in Love, joined her along with a friend, Fiona, visiting from Melbourne. I thought I’d seen it but I’d clearly only seen a live stage version. This film, over two hours long, is…..and I’m hard pressed to find the right word but here goes: demented. Fiona and Susan loved but I just sat there shaking my head at the ridiculous over-the-top Busby Berkeley-ness of it all. At what seemed like 10 minutes intervals, Russell would move into a dream sequence including people moving in wheelchairs filmed from above making patterns, elves and toadstools, people in Roman togas running over bridges. Bonkers. Twiggy, the female star, was just wide eyed ...

To round off my week of musicals, I went to concert at the University of Western Australia by the Mirabilis Collective . Their mission is to amplify women’s music and voices. They are a multi-generational classical music ensemble but they also adapt contemporary music for their purposes as well as commissioning new music. This concert, Southern Stars,  featured a world premiere by West Australian composer Katherine Potter, set to poetry by Caitlin Maling, alongside evocative works by Melody Eötvös, Brenda Gifford, Jessica Wells, and Elena Kats-Chernin. Songs by the Stiff Gins, Angie McMahon, and Kate Miller-Heidke were reimagined in new arrangements, highlighting the richness of Australia’s contemporary voices. The songs were performed by an ensemble of acclaimed WA musicians: Lucinda Nicholls – soprano, Yi-Yun Loei – harp, , Stephanie Nicholls – oboe and piano 
 Tresna Stampalia - flute, Julia Nicholls – violin, Katherine Potter – viola, Elena Wittkuhn – cello. They were an...

In 2004, Melbourne Theatre Company presented a production of a Tony-award winning musical, Urinetown . It’s one of the those titles that matches the content perfectly but has the effect of turning at least some of the potential audience away. Kate Herbet’s review at the time captures the essence of the show: “ Simon Phillips directs a cheeky, irreverent and funny production of the bladder-teasing Broadway musical hit, Urinetown.   The ensemble is skilful and adorable, the band exceptional under the musical direction of Ian McDonald and the whole is a cute parody of Broadway musicals.   During a drought, the water table is so low it is illegal to flush toilets.Caldwell B. Cladwell, (Gerry Connolly) a ruthless businessman, makes millions by compelling people to pay to use public conveniences on pain of exile. After his father's exile to the grim, unknown Urinetown, heroic young Bobby Strong, (Kane Alexander) leads the rebellion to pee without paying. The obligatory musica...

For three years, Eddie Perfect and Dean Bryant have been working with students at the WA Academy of Performing Arts to create a production of new musical: Tivoli Lovelies. This was a combination that couldn’t go unseen so we booked tickets months ago. Thank goodness. Because the short season was sold out. And rightly so. It’s an utterly charming piece about the vaudeville scene in Australia in the 1950s. Just that topic alone would have been entertaining enough but there was a madcap murder mystery thrown into the mix. With something like 42 students on stage and 26 musicians in the pit, it was a large and loud and exuberant production. There were some utterly mad scenes such as a musical number set on the Kokoda Trail during World War II with the Queen making an appearance. And the focus of the show, the Eleven Kevins , were wonderful to watch. The production was impeccable with effective lighting, charming costumes (such as the line up of young ladies dressed as each State moving t...

  After a conversation with an optometrist about moving from Melbourne to Perth, our conversation went something like this: A: Are you Perth born and bread? O: Marine Parade, Cottesloe.   A: Oh. I was Grant St, Cottesloe.   O: Wonderful to grow up near the ocean. You take it for granted and don’t realise how wonderful it is. A: Were you a surfer? O: No, I played tennis at Cottesloe Tennis Club. A: Oh, my father helped build that out of sand dunes in the 1930s. There’s a history of club including photos from time written by Pat someone or other. O: Pat Adamson? A: That’s right. She was   friend of my parents. O: I used to test her eyes. That’s how small Perth is. Alan ready for a game of tennis in the 1930s Alan at Cottesloe Beach

I continue my search for a craft form at which I am going to be something more than adequate and I have failed again. The Fremantle Arts Centre offers a range of arts courses and I signed up for one: Gelli printing. It’s a comparatively simple process – a form of monoprinting using a reusable gelatin plate to create unique layered prints using acrylic paint and a variety of items such as leaves and flowers, lace and feathers, stencils and cut outs. It’s easy to learn but not so easy to create great art even with a good teacher. It was an entertaining day and I’m still finding bits and pieces of paint on odd parts of my body but I’m not sure I’m going to be trying again any time soon. The Fremantle Arts Centre is one of my favourite buildings. Built by convicts from local limestone in the 1860s its original purpose was as a lunatic asylum but somehow, all the art and music that you now find in the place has banished the ghosts. And what ghosts there must have been. People were admitte...

  It was sad but not unecxpected to hear that the incomparable Prunella Scales had died. “Incomparable”   because how can we forget her as Sybil in Fawlty Towers or being so open about her vascular dementia in the series Great Canal Journeys ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zRI7xwN_mU ) made with husband of (eventually) 60 years, the equally wonderful actor Timothy West. Tim died last year and did a post on my website about how and when I met him, during a production of Women Beware Women : https://www.anntonks.com.au/category/anns-blog/ Gabrielle Sullivan, Pru, Tim, me, Rita Clarke, Phillip & Colin O'Brien - 1982 While Tim was in Perth, Pru bought the children out to Australia to be with him and they were a delightful family. We had entertaining outings and dinners, including one at the parent’s home which was somewhat challenging as Betty didn’t enjoy TV comedy and had never watched a Fawlty Towers episode. However, I just remember the laughter and the warmth. A f...

Those of you who have been conscientiously following this blog know that Susan and I enjoy the Open Studio process whereby you go and explore a neighbourhood through the lens of the artists who live there. Since coming back to Perth, we have explored Stirling, Melville and Mandurah this way. On 26 October, we travelled the Hills open studio route, visiting painters and ceramists, glassworkers and eco-printers, sculpturers and metal workers in Stoneville, Mundaring, Mahogany Creek, Glen Forrest and Swan View. Each time we go on these adventures we say to each other that we don’t need to buy anything, that looking is a pleasure in itself. But after you’ve spent time talking to the artists, there’s a creeping need to support them in financial ways as well providing admiration. Most times we can resist but this time, a few purchases were made. Susan bought some eco-prints and some greeting cards of beautiful flower paintings and I insisted on buying a clever piece of pottery to hold mosq...

  As I’ve mentioned, Betty’s favourite flowers were carnations, particularly red carnations. It’s a flower that I just don’t connect to at all. She owned a painting of carnations by Western Australian artist, Laurie Knott. Born in the UK in 1921, Laurie Knott studied in the UK and arrived in Western Australia in 1952. An impressionist painter in oil and watercolour, he exhibited his work in Australia from 1963. He was art critic for the 'Sunday Times' newspaper in Perth, and has also worked as an art teacher judge and lecturer in Perth and country areas. His work is represented in Western Australian regional art galleries and institutional collections in Perth and overseas. He died in 1980. Some more information about his work can be found here: https://www.aasd.com.au/artist/9281-laurence-laurie-knott/ To honour Betty’s memory, we hung the painting in the Pink House but in our review of the art we want to hang in Archibald St, we decided not to keep it. We offered it to fr...

  One of our friends, Barry, seems to go to Rottnest every month. Another friend of his, goes over almost every week, just for a day, to snorkel. Susan and I aren’t quite that committed but I can see the endless charm of the place. Even for a couple of spring days (23-24 October) when the temperature didn’t get over 17 degrees, it was still delightful to have a swim amongst the fish in the clear blue/green water and then warm up on the sand. We had a two bedroom bungalow at the end of South Thompson Bay and even though we were in the back row, we still had water views with a beach just five minutes walk away. After catching the ferry over in the morning, we caught the hop on hop off bus to Little Parrakeet Bay and spent the morning and early afternoon lounging on the beach and swimming. The joy of low temperatures means that I can be out in the sun for hours without too much damage.  We caught the bus back to what’s called the Settlement and bought some lunch at the famous...

Have you heard of the Japanese word "tsundoku'? It describes the process of buying books and letting them pile up unread. I confess I'm guilty of this and currently have over 50 books waiting to be explored. And then along came the Radio National Top 100 Books of the 21st Century to date. Mind you, it's really the top 200 because they provided a 'didn't quite make it' list as well. Did you submit your Top 10 books of the 21st Century? https://www.abc.net.au/listen/radionational/countdown/top100books     I did but I confess that only two of my list ended up in the Top 100 and only another two in the next 100. And that’s even when I went out of my way to look more intellectual that I really am by excluding from consideration the many detective novels I read. When the results came out, I thought I had been particularly clever because I’d read 49 of the top 100 but I’ve just met someone whose read 69!  It was impressive to hear during the broadcast on 1...

[I'm still madly trying to catch up with my blog posts so is one should have been listed last month.] Susan received a Facebook memory on 18 October to remind her that it was a year since we moved out of the Pink House. Since then we have lived in Brunswick, Claremont and Fremantle and finally Willagee. We have sold a house and bought a house. We have had trips back to Melbourne as well as trips overseas. We have packed and unpacked, sorted and discarded and refurbished. We still haven’t found the kettle. And a number of my book boxes remained lost. Did we make the right decision? I can’t speak for Susan but my answer is ‘yes’. As I was approaching retirement I knew I was going to have time on my hands with more time for the things I love doing including travel but also immersing myself in water. I now have more money to travel for a little longer and I can walk out the door and have a swim, drive for 15 minutes and dip into the Indian Ocean, catch a ferry for half an hour and ...

In my blog post about Geelong, I confessed that creativity was not my strong suit. But I still keep trying. When I was a student at the University of WA in the 1970s, each year I would enrol in a craft course at what used to Claremont Teachers College. I tried my hand at copper enamelling, weaving, screen printing. I wasn’t very good at any of it but I did make some cuff links for Alan (which he felt morally obliged to wear every so often), wove a bathmat, and made some screen printed curtains and tableware. Every so often I’ll take myself off to another course to try and discover the one thing I might be good at. And this year, I’ve tried twice. After the creative embroidery in Geelong, this month’s challenge was to paint waves in one day. We had an amazingly good teacher, Louise Collier, who managed to help us all to (almost) complete a piece. We painted and agonised and gained inspiration in an open sided shed at the Settlers Art Studios in Churchlands. There were two advantages...

  I’ve recently discovered another art space – the J ohn CurtinGallery at Curtin University. Way back in the 1970s when the University was the WA Institute of Technology I taught there for a year – subjects such as Construction Management about which I knew nothing and Personal Management about which I knew something. I haven’t been back on that campus for for nearly 50 years. The gallery is quite impressive and the staff more so. They were engaged, helpful and clearly passionate about their jobs, the work on the walls and on the floor. I was introduced to the gallery by friend Stephanie and we saw a number of exhibitions on the same day: ·          Everyday, Myths and Legends – an exhibition from the University’s Art Collection ·          Fantastic Forms – a touring exhibition of the drawings of Merric Boyd and a range of artists responding to his work ·       ...

I t would appear that I’m not as retired as I thought I was. In early October, I received a call from a colleague if I could help out. An arts organisation needs a locum CEO for a short period. The organisation was the WA Chamber of Arts and Culture . Their General Manager had just resigned and at a crucial time for the survival of the organisation. Over the next month there was an AGM to be held, a report to their funding agency, a new Strategic Plan to be developed, an application to be made for future funding – and so the list went on.  The Chamber was established nearly 15 years ago as an advocacy and capacity building organisation. A number of friends have been both members and even on the Board so I felt what one might call a moral obligation to offer some help. But not too much. The plan is to do 10 hours a week (although that’s not quite the case at the moment) which suits them financially and me in terms of all the other things I want to do and explore.  If the C...

  Sebastian, my nephew, moved to Adelaide   a few years ago to study for a PhD at the University of Adelaide. His study has been about the illegal trade of Australian reptiles. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-12/first-detailed-study-reveals-scale-of-wildlife-smuggling/104009206 During the process of his reseach, Sebastian has been to reptile fairs in Europe, presented papers at conferences in Borneo and Brisbane, helped Border Security identify smuggled animals, advised on government legislation, travelled out into the bush to identify animals and their habitats, written and contributed to academic papers and completed his PhD.   And finally, on 9 October, Susan got the text to say that his PhD had been approved.   Dr Chekunov. Needless to say both his mother and his aunt are extremely proud of him.  

  We were lucky that there was very little work to do when we moved into Archibald St but we have made a couple of changes. The house is filled with grey/brown blinds. Not my favourite colour, as you can imagine, but they work and if they are up (which they usually are), you don’t notice them very much. However, in the family/dining room, we decided we needed some colour. And that was our first challenge. It’s almost impossible to find blind and curtain material that is anything other than cream/beige/grey/sand/oatmeal etc etc etc. We wandered from blind shop to blind shop and finally discovered Warwick in Leederville. They did have plenty of those buff colours but they also had just a few alternatives. And Susan and I found one we both loved, called Fiesta, which seemed appropriate. Every blind-making person that came out to quote and saw our choice went “wow”.   Even they wished more people would be braver about their colour choice. Having found the perfect material we ha...