Return to Perth

After our mini-break on Hindmarsh Island we headed back to Adelaide for Christmas. Susan discovered a perfectly located hotel a couple of years ago which has two-bed room apartments -  the Watson Art Hotel in Walkerville. It's five minutes' drive from Sebastian's home, close to a supermarket, shops and cafes, not too far from the city, with a decent length swimming pool and it's full of the work of indigenous artist Tommy Watson. Christmas Eve was spent wrapping presents (all agreed to in advance so no one gets something they don't want but we still make the effort of making them look decorative) at Sebastian's home.  Christmas Day was spent having the traditional (invited by Betty decades ago) croissants for breakfast before heading to the Stamford in Glenelg for their buffet lunch. The aspect, looking out to the Glenelg pier as people played cricket on the grass, was delightful although the meal somewhat disappoint. They ran out of turkey before we'd even ...

The Australian Pelican (pelicans conspicillatus - ngori) is a fascinating bird. With a wing spa of 2.3-2.5m, they take up huge sky space as they take off but when resting, as they tuck their head in, one doesn’t appreciate their extraodinary pink pouched bill. They feed on fish, crustaceans and frogs, scooping them up in their large flexible bills which can measure up to half a metre. I love the various collective names that have people have invented for birds and my favourite options for pelicans are a squadron or a scoop. There was such a grouping on a pier a couple of houses down from our rental on Hindmarsh Island and every so often one would come and fish near our jetty. My great disappointment was that I didn’t manage to get one of those glorious pink pouched bill fish-catching moments on camera.  We did a tour on the Coorong and the array of water birds was extraordinary. More black swans than I ever seen. Pelicans where ever you turned. Herons and slits, grebes and terns, ...

On recent Christmas trips to visit Sebastian in Adelaide, we’ve tried to include a few days in the countryside. Our only criteria are finding a place that will allow Sebastian to travel with Chaos, his cat, and a place that is near a swimmable beach. Last year, it was Port Hughes on the York Peninsula. This year, it was Hindmarsh island, near the mouth of the Murray River. The first time I visited Goolwa, the nearest town to the island, was via train. I spent some time in 2019 in Adelaide as locum Managing Director for Australian Dance Theatre. I’d been on the Board of the company in the mid-1980s when I was studying for my MBA so it was fascinating to revisit the company and the city over 30 years later. Each weekend, I tried to visit a new part of Adelaide or the nearby countryside. Up to the Barossa Valley. Snorkelling in the river mangroves near Port Gawler. Up to Handoff to visit the Heysen home. Down to the beach at Noarlunga. Wine tasting in McLaren Vale. And on one weekend, I c...

There’s a new exhibition in the WA Museum – also know as Boola Bardip – called Wake up the Snake,   designed to raise people’s consciousness about the significance of water.   https://visit.museum.wa.gov.au/boolabardip/wake-snake It’s an oddly designed exhibition with a lack of clarity around the Kimberley part of the story but some great story boards and visual imaging around a Kids on Country project in the Great Western Woodlands area of WA, a phrase I’d never heard before, used to capture the lands around Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Led by grandmothers, the custodians of the Kalaako cultural custodians, young people are taken out bush and introduced to language, stories and Country. I was lucky enough to be shown around the exhibition by one of the kids, Emma, who pointed our her grandmothers and cousins and told me stories about water holes and a prison tree to which indigenous people were chained if they breached curfew or the white man’s law. It was great to h...

At the beginning of December we were luckily enough to lounge around in a friends’ very comfortable house with the world’s best view of Cottesloe Beach sunsets and then to have our own, somewhat more modest party (i.e. no DJ, just Susan’s Christmas Spotify list) at Archibald St. Sunset looking over Cottesloe Beach What made it particularly enjoyable, apart from all Susan’s afternoon tea treats, and lots of prosecco was seeing our Perth connections in action. Someone, coming with a partner, though they wouldn’t know any one but were surprised. Another caught up with an old school friend for the first time in decades. Another didn’t know that X knew Y let alone that X and Y knew us. It was a delightful afternoon. But there was one oddity to the event. We had invited people to bring their bathers for a swim as the temperature was forecast for 26 degrees but only one person did – and then they wimped out. When I questioned the crowd, the response was “not hot enough”. How positively peculi...

Susan and I enjoy taking random punts on films in the various Film Festivals that Palace Cinemas put on. Although I miss the comfort of Palace Pentridge (as I’ve whinged before), the Luna on Essex art house cinema isn’t too far away. The most recent collection of films has been the British Film Festival but just in case you have a chance to see them, here’s one to recommend and one to avoid. I love Brian Cox and valued his work long before the extraordinary portrayal of the patriarch in Succession. The first time I saw him perform was in a BBC series called The Devil’s Crown about the first three Plantagenet kings. It’s never been released on DVD so I’ll just have to live off the memory of how powerful he was as Henry II. I’ve only had the chance to see him perform live once – in a Conor McPherson play, St Nicholas, in New York in 1998. If you want to check the precursor to his work in Succession, check out his performance in  The Straits on ABC iview, set in Far North Queensland...

Y ou know the great Australia wave? Undertaken as we shoo away flies. Well, with rare exceptions, I haven’t had to use that gesture for over 30 years, since moving to Melbourne. But now I’ve had to start practicing it again in Perth. Usually, it’s just one per room and some of the flies are so dozy that one can catch them with a slap of the hand. Although that is rather yukky and we are now proud owners of three fly swats. I suppose I should be grateful that they aren’t as bad as when we were kids. https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/are-perth-s-flies-getting-worse-yes-but-they-re-not-nearly-as-bad-as-they-could-be-20251107-p5n8mi.html I might have to resurrect the fly protector that I wore on trips up north. I could have done with my fly protector on Hindmarsh Island this week. Susan and I flew to Adelaide to spend Christmas with Sebastian and organised a mini holiday first. We’ve rented a house near the mouth of the Murray River with its own jetty. As I type, Se...

Black Swan Theatre Company presented a tough but charming Christmas fable called Carol . Written by Andrea Gibbs and staring Sally Ann Upton, it tells the story of a widow in her 60s who becomes homeless. She’s been the stay at home wife with the “don’t worry about the money, dear” husband who gambled so much that their home is lost. This may not sound like a very cheery Christmas story but we were taken on the journey by an ocker Santa who entertained us all the way through.  I loved his introductory speech about Christmas and Ian Booth, Black Swan’s Managing Director, gave me a copy. Here’s the beginning of the show: "PROLOGUE – Santa Welcomes All   In the black .... curtain down.   SANTA (VO): Hello? (tap, tap, tap) This thing on?… (clears throat)   This Christmas — summer in Australia .  And when it’s summer down under, if you don’t like Christmas, that’s a real bummer.  It’s the number one game in town.  From Bondi to Bunbury , Dar...

This blog was supposed to be about the move to Perth but every so often I get so concerned about the world we live in that I have to comment. Last week, I started to write this and it was going to be in response to two Guardian articles but today it has to start with Bondi Beach and an acknowledgement of the horror of antisemitism. I've been listening to the Empire Podcast about Gaza and there was a discussion about the Balfour Declaration - the first time that the British government expressed interest in the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Zionists wanted it because they didn't think they could ever feel safe in Europe (or North America for that matter) but many Jews were fearful of the idea because they thought it let governments off the hook in terms of protecting their Jewish citizens. And we all know how it's played out - a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians. A Jewish state inhabited by many people with PTSD from generations of suffering. And a J...

Many writers have explored the idea that as we age, particularly as women age, they disappear. They are no longer of interest to a younger generation. They are no longer attractive to look at. Having never been a particularly elegant or fetching or good-looking person, that phenomenon was never going to bother me. But ladies, there is a way to get over this problem. Just wear bold glasses. Susan and I have encouraged each other to excess in frames since buying my first pair of large red frames in the 1980s. 1986 Then I added emerald green to the mix and Susan encouraged me to buy brilliant aqua frames with fluorescent lime green side arms. And each year in Melbourne (with help from Josie Redmond at Scoogles ), I’ve added to my collection as has Susan. Even when we’re wearing our most modest frames, a day rarely passes without someone complimenting us. And if I’m wearing my Oscar Mamooi glasses, inspired by Icelandic glaciers, the comments just flow. The Opening Night of Cinderella a...

I don’t particularly remember acaranda trees from my days of growing up in Perth. I’ve always connected them to the inner eastern suburbs of Adelaide and Nelson in New Zealand but they must have been here. From what I can found out on line they were brought from South America to Australia in the 1850s and the first advertisement for them in WA was in 1894. The best suburbs for Jacarandas are some of the old ones like Subiaco, Wembly and North Perth but Applecross, not far from us on the other side of Leach Highway is apparently “THE Jacaranda hotspot”. https://tessomewhere.com/best-jacaranda-locations-in-perth/ The trees start blossoming in late October/early November and I love the purple haze they contribute to the landscape. I used to enjoy the breathtaking beauty of walking home from Australian Dance Theatre when I worked in Adelaide in 2019 through jacaranda lined streets and even though Archibald St doesn’t have any near us, turn a corner and there they are. We had the richne...

I’ve always been a Tim Minchin fan but from a distance. I’ve enjoyed his Catholic Church satire. I’ve loved the energy of the stage productin and the film of Matilda the Musical. And the lyrics of White Wine in the Sun make it a brilliant Australian Christmas anthem. But I’ve never seen him perform live. As part of his Songs the World will never hear tour he came back to his home town and performed in the Perth High Performance Centre. It’s a sports venue but the name fits really well with the high energy that Minchin bought to the stage over nearly three hours. The tour celebrates the moment, twenty years ago, when his career took off – from the tiny Butterfly Club in Melbourne to the West End and Broadway. I’ve always been impressed with his piano playing, his song writing and his singing but I haven’t heard him speak before. He’s erudite, can riff on everything from philosophy to science. He talks fast, without a script, in witty ways and had a lovely interaction with a 12 year ol...

I’m sure that Hal who has been responsible for installing our art hanging system isn’t really called Hal the Hangman but that’s how we keep referring to him. He did the hard yakka putting the tracking system in before we went away but at that stage, we hadn’t unpacked our art boxes, let along decided which pieces we wanted to keep. We did a certain amount of culling before we left Melbourne but haven’t been able to resist adding to our collection since returning to Perth. Having a ‘system’ means that we can change work over when we get bored or (in my case) need to match the art to my seasonal doona covers. Towards the end of November, Hal was going to come back to start hanging work so we had to both sort out walls and be brutal  about what art we still wanted to keep looking at. There was the colourful nude I’d had for decades but was that enough time to live with it? And the sketches that a stranger had done as we sat on a deserted Port Fairy beach during COVID – did we really...

I don’t know how many times I have seen a ballet version of Cinderella over the years but the first would have been in His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth so it was delightful to revisit it in that wonderful venue. Is one ever too old for fairy stories? This version had been made a number of years ago by a Western Australian choreographer, Jayne Smeulder, and it contained all the traditional elements but also some new magical touches. We saw the show on opening night and Cinderella was danced by Mayume Noguromi who has a genuine smile that reaches out across the footlights. Cuban dancer Oscar Valdes leapt and spun as the Prince and was supported by two dancers playing his brothers and even they bought comedy and a light touch to what might have uninspiring roles. But best of all were the dancers playing the step-sisters, Pamela Barnes and Asja Petvocki. They provided the most witty, physically engaging, clever performances that I have seen in this piece of story telling . As one reviewer sa...