More Perth

Hi,

Well, I actually got out and saw a bit of the city of Perth yesterday. Weirdly for me I woke up naturally at about half five in the morning which gave me a good start for my own abridged version of the Lonely Planet Guides Walking Tour of Perth.

I eventually found the 'Perth Cultural Centre' after realising that it was a general area, not a specific building, and helped along the way by a couple of friendly Aussies who took pity on my confused face as I peered at the map. Turns out I need to review the difference between 'left' and 'right'.

So I started my proper tourist thing with a wander around the West Australia Museum, which seemed a good place to begin and give me a heads up about the local history. It was a pretty varied place, and every time I thought I had finished I ended up finding a new room. Lots of stuff about dinosaurs and wildlife and aborigines. Some things that grabbed me were a sample of the oldest rock ever found, not so much because of what it looked like (well, it was just a piece of rock) but the fact that it had lain there (generally, not specifically in a display cabinet in the museum) unchanging for billions of years. Being something of a pretender to the title of marine biologist I also like the preserved megamouth shark, and the comment of a lady with her small child.
"Is it alive?"
"No, it's very dead".

In places it was a very sombering experience, with all the lists of native animals that have become extinct since European colonisation/ invasion. Turns out rabbits are evil. It also vaguely amused me to hear of animals such as cats and pheasants being described as 'exotic'. There were also some pretty frank admissions of how horrible white Australians used to be to Aborigines, particularly with descriptions of the kidnapping of Aborigine children to be raised without ever knowing their families in an effort to totally destroy Aborigine culture.

However, these days Aborigine culture is very much to the fore, as shown in the West Australian Gallery of Art, which I next visited, and was full of Indigenous Art. Much of it was done in the traditional style, all done with patterns made up of vast numbers of individual dots, and loooking at them frankly made my eyes swim. There were also some good abstract pictures, which were actually aerial shots of the outback landscape. It was impressive how the artist/ photographer made photos look so 'arty'.

After that I went for a good long ramble across the middle of the city down to the Swan River Jetty then across the CBD (Central Business District) which seemed very much Perth's answer to Canary Wharf. Scattered around were various exotic plants which help[ed bring home the fact that I really am in a very different part of the world. Lots of them looked quite familiar from a recent trip to Kew Gardens where they were all in glasshouses. Here of course they just grow along the side of the road.

Eventually I made my way to Kings Park and Botanical Garden, which continued the exotic (to me) plants theme. It was a prety chilled place, and would be a good place to just have a picnic (which I assume the locals probably do). I reached it via 122 steps called 'Jacob's Ladder'. This is actually a biblical reference, and I worry myself with how culturally destitute I must be that my first thought on seeing the name was of the film by that name. But then I realised and thought 'ah, it's like a Stairway to Heaven... like the Led Zeppelin song.' Not helping my case here, am I?

But yeah, had a good wander around the park and left around 5pm, by which time all the locals had finished walk and I found out that the other use of the place is for exercise, so I got to feel a tad lazy in comparison to all the fit young things running about the place looking red-faced but very, very lean. Hmm, I guess around here they have to worry less about random showers that can come at any time. That's my excuse. Oh yes.

So that was about it. Today I might go and see the nearby city of Fremantle (I gather it is the Coventry to Perth's Birmingham, but hopefully not actually like Coventry).

I did take a load of photos, but forgot to bring my camera to the internet cafe. Dur.

Bye for now

Steven

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