Return to Perth

I created this blog for me as much as anyone else: to make sure that our journey back to the West was captured in words and photos. As it turns out, our settlement day, the day we got the keys to 106 Archibald St, Willagee was 14 April 2025 and so that seems an appropriate time to stop this blog. Susan and I are heading off on another adventure, assuming airlines and cars and buses still have fuel, on 16 April so there will be holiday newsletters as we travel through Morocco, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Greece.  For those you who have persisted in dipping in and out of this monologue, thank you for your attention. When I return to Perth, I'll consider whether I should continue with a new blog to keep track of life. People normally do that via Facebook but that's not a social medial world I enjoy. Until then, stay well. Selling the Pink House - 30 November 2024 Moving into Archibald St - 14 April 2025

  A couple of posts ago, I promised to tell the story of Drastic on Plastic, a radio program of women's music that is still being broadcast on 6RTR-FM. Once upon a time, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was a volunteer at community radio station 6UVS-FM. I presented programs such as a Drive music show, the Stupendous Stereo Stage Show (with friend Barry - all about theatre), and a show featuring women's music. When I was packing up to go to Adelaide to start an MBA, I was worried that the women's music show would disappear. There weren't many other female presenters to pick up the slack. However, there was a group of feisty ladies whose boyfriends presented programs so I decided to encourage them to take up the challenge. Somehow or other, radio was seen as a man's world, presumably because of the technology, but if I could run a studio, so could other women. A group of women took up the challenge and created Drastic on Plastic and some of them are still presenting ...

  As we come to the 12 month anniversary of moving into 106 Archibald St, I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on why we came back to Perth. I tell the story that it started with me making an announcement one morning that I wanted a swimming pool before I died. And we got one. Albeit, a modest sized pool with just enough room for 8 strokes from one end and 8 strokes back. So the important question is: have we used it? Has it served as a place of exercise and a place of relaxation? And having just come back from a swim, in the middle of Autumn, without the heater on, the answer is yes. On almost every day during late spring, summer, and early autumn, Susan and I have both had a swim. We weren't here during winter last year so we haven't worked out whether the pool heater will make it bearable for really cold days but I do love being able to step outside and plunge into the cool. Having a pool hasn't stopped us going to the beach either. During summer in particular, w...

I've seen many variations on a Swan Lake theme but until this week, I haven't seen circus performers tell the story. Circa , the brilliant Brisbane-based physical theatre company, was in town for a minute and I was lucky enought to get tickets before the show sold out. The production is charmingly called Duck Pond.   What makes it so effective is that it contains all the elements of contemporary circus that you expect - aerial silks, hula hoops, acrobatics, clowning, balancing, diabolo - but presented within a story telling context that makes everything feel fresh and new. Whether it's the burlesque black swan or the row of quacking ducks, the pratfalls of the prince or the ugly duckling making her way to the top of the pyramid, it was all engaging. The music, composed by Jethro Woodward, was a series of brilliant riffs on Tchiakovksy's original score. Once again, Circa's artistic director Yaron Lifschitz has shown that he is an director of international standing. M...

My doonas don't match - tonally that is. I have a watermelon set in red, green and white for spring. A mediterranean view in aquas and blues for summer. I turn towards somewhat darker colours for autumn but still with lots of reds and oranges and golds and then for winter, it's an Australian forest with scarlet flowering gums. Which is all very well but it means I have to change the art in my room over each season. Now that we have hanging systems in most rooms, technically that should be an easy process but it was very handy that Hal the Hanging Man had to come back this week with the final set of attachements for the final room to be sorted and I could ask him to go up the ladder instead of me. For the last three or four months, my walls have been covered in tones of aqua and blue including a pastel of Cottesloe Beach by Betty's beach friend Barbara, a poster of the 1982 production Women Beware Women, a lagoon photo I took in Fiji, an indigenous painting of the area near ...

Monsignor O'Shea, director of Fremantle's Stella Maris Seafarer's Centre and founder of the Holy Trinty Church on Rottnest, died in 2012. His memory lives on amongst the faithful but now it's being shared amongst the somewhat less than faithful as the name of a new Irish pub in Fremantle. His family are outraged. In the initial publicity for the Mons O'Shea in South Terrace, he's described as a jolly beer drinking priest when in fact he was teetotal and his family feel that his legacy is ridiculed through being connetct with the bar. We decided to call into the Mons to check it out and I feel that Mons would have been more upset by our experience there than by the naming per se. I spotted an article about a play The Local written by a local and set in pub that was going to be performed in the Mons O'Shea  so bought some tickets. It's a slightly odd bar as there's a shop in the front including a fridge containing (presumably) Irish bacon and other fo...

Susan and I enjoy the film festivals that are offered by the Palace cinema group. Each has their own strength althoug I have learnt not to go to anything in the German Film Festival that's marked as a 'comedy'. The Spanish Film Festival is always interesting because films come from South America as well as Europe but it's usually the French Film Festival that has the most number of films that we go and see. Of course, as you know, our taste in culture differs so we don't always go to see the same films. This year, for example, I went alone to see the new production of Albert Camus' famous novel, The Stranger, plus some police procedurals. I also saw The Great Arch with different company when I was in Melbourne. It's a film about the making of La Grande Arche de la Defense in Paris, designed by a Danish architect. The story is very similar to that of Jorn Utzon and Sydney Opera House: a designer with ambition beyond the budget and the imagining of the people ...

Many years ago when I was Station Manager of ABC's Radio National, I worked with Chris Westwood to create a daily series of programmes about the arts. Over time, the content has morphed and changed but there were still key elements of what we'd put together - shows about books, music, the visual arts and the performing arts. And suddenly, The Stage Show has gone. I'm sure the ABC will say that there'll be coverage of the performing arts in the context of their weekly Arts Hour but I think it's a tragedy the programs been cancelled given that the live performance arts of theatre, dance, opera, ballet, circus, cabaret, musicals are all still stuggling to regain audiences post-Covid. Roger Grant, Gwen Bennett, Norman Swan, me, Chris Westwood - 1992 2024 statistics produced by Live Performance Australia show that more people attend performing arts events than ticketed sports events. Of course, in those statistics the most popular category is contemporary music which is ...

One of the challenges of travel is packing. I'm not the sort of person who can travel for months with carry-on luggage. Especially if there's a range of temperatures over the weeks and even months one is away. This time it's going to be 28 degrees in Rhodes but 10 degrees in Issyk-kul. But the other challenge is how many pairs of glasses to take? If the choice is two pairs, then clothes have to match. For the last couple of trips, this has meant sticking to a limited colour range e.g. an aqua theme for Mediterranean journeys, reds and blues in Japan. As I was staring at my wardrobe trying to decide what to pack for our trip northwards that starts next week, I was thinking about the new clothes I've bought since coming to Perth, coourful tops that reflect the sunny world we now live in. But I was also seeing clothes from days gone by that I still wear. A tropical shirt I bought from the Paddington Markets in Sydney in the late 1980s. A pair of red pants that I bought in ...

Were you an Enid Blyton fan? As a child, I was an avid reader of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five books. I even have a charming take-off on my bookshelf: But I didn't ever read The Magic Faraway Tree. So when a film version was released with such wonderful British/Irish actors as Claire Foy and Nicola Couglan, Simon Russel Beale and Lenny Henry, I had to brave the school holiday crowds and go and see it. Susan and I were the only group without children but we didn't look as suspicious as if we'd been two older men sitting in a cinema enjoy the charms of fairies and elves and pixies. It was a delightful piece of story telling that deals with the challenges parents are having to cope with  all over the world  - children addicted to technology. Even the forthcoming Toy Story 5 is exploring that problem. [We saw the short while we were waiting for the main film.] Of course, having a magic tree nearby and access to worlds of spells and goodies and birthday wishes does make ...

This year's Easter has been a bit of this and a bit of that but nothing religious. Susan said a polite but firm "no" when our delightful neighbours invited us to a service on Good Friday. We've eached worked in our preferred spaces. Susan baking cakes and roasts in the kitchen. Me creating photo books and blog posts in the study. And in between, we've seen some of the Fremantle Street Arts Festival and more films in the French Film Festival. So there was nothing in particular to write about until Susan showed me an utterly charming Substack post about Australian easter eggs and bunnies from the wonderfully named commentator Snarky Gherkin:  https://substack.com/@snarkygherkin/note/c-238269703  I have to confess that we have Haigh's bilby's sitting on the dining table as we speak and we've been giving Lindt bunnies to visitors. Mr Gherkin says that the Haigh's crowd doesn't so much eat chocolates as curate them. Haigh's chocolate signals ...

Ever since Heather Mitchell took on the role of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2022, I've missed the production. I was never in the right place at the right time. Finally I managed to catch up with it at the State Theatre in Perth and it was absolutley worth the money. It's a clever biographical piece of writing by lawyer/playwright Suzie Miller about RBG and Heather Mitchell puts on a virtuosic turn playing not only Ginsberg from age 13 to 87 but also all the other characters including three presidents - Clinton, Obama and Trump.  For those of you haven't seen it or don't know much about RBG she was a lawyer who dedicated her life to fighting for gender equality (don't say 'sex equality', the judges will focus on the wrong thing, she was told) and civil rights. She was the second woman to be appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1993. The great tragedy of Ginsberg's story comes at the end. There was the hope that she would resign while Obama was in office so tha...

One of the pleasures of living in Perth is that one has the chance to see the young students from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts at the very beginnings of their careers. The first production for third year music theatre students in 2026 was Renascence, a new musical set in the USA in the early 20th century. I went without having any idea what it was about which can always be a great way to step into a theatre. Open hearted with no expectations. It turns out that the play is about the poet Edna St Vincent Millay and the songs are all arrangements of her poems. She's a person I'd heard of but I'd never read any of her work. She turns about to be a feisty woman from an impoverished background who had her first poems published as a teenager. Through publicity gained about her poem Renascence published when she was 20, she obtained a scholarship to Vassar University and then moved to New York where she lived, as they say, a bohemian/bisexual life. The musical foc...

I had been invited to Melbourne to run a strategic planning session for an arts company but they cancelled at the last minute. However, flights had been booked, theatre tickets arranged, dates with friends confirmed so I decided to go anyway. It was only the equivalent of a long weekend but I did manage to fit in two theatre productions, two restaurant dinners, two cafe lunches, two home-cooked meals and a morning tea plus a film. I'm lucky to still have kind and inviting friends in Melbourne. The first MTC show was Do Not Pass Go by Jean Tong. Remember that phrase from Monopoly? It is set in a (cleverly designed) factory where two workers do repetitive tasks. They are new to each other and have qualities that feel very contemporary - one is a mother who may have undiagnosed ADHD and the other is a trans person, saving up for surgery. Each part was beautiful performed by Belinda McClory and Ella Prince. I don't know the latter actor but Belinda is wonderful performer so it was ...

I've always enjoyed seeing sculptures set amongst seascapes and this year, one such display is back at Cottesloe Beach . I have to confess that there few objects per se that particularly inspired me but it was wonderful to see so many people, including hordes of school children, meandering around, taking in the sights.  I enjoyed Evi and Tania Ferrier's Sun Dial . Tania is known for her " angry underwear " series of challenging painted bras and pants. The original exhibition in Perth was closed briefly because of "obscenity and inappropriate use of government funding. I bought one one of her bras back in the day called The Treasure Chest. Of course it no longer fits but I do still have it on display. Other pieces that appealed included: Love U by Jason Hirst - large hearts on which you could add your name The Ghost of Van Eileen by Tim Haynes  - a life sized installation of a food van that used to be at Cottelsoe Beach. Someone, and it wasn't clear whether it...