Up close and personal
Join me on my 'image hunting' trip. I knocked on the door of people I knew, personally or just from the press and asked: "What image would you choose to represent our city?"
"The picture of my 1925 homestead I was looking forward to spend my retirement and I loose soon," said an old farmer, sitting on his porch overlooking the new mine built in his neighbourhood.
It was one of those open-cut mines, slow-moving omnivorers eating their way through the landscape and back-filling with clay-and-earth overfull as they inch forward.
The industrial din of the mine, the dull rumble of trucks, the boom of giant rocks slamming into haulers, the primordial groan of steel excavation bucket dragging through upturned earth...
traveled so clearly across the flat plain at night that most residents slept with windows closed and air-conditioners blasting. The old farmer long ago resorted to nightly sleeping pills.
He was informed, he was among those forced to stay on or sell up at a massive loss. But he was not going down without fight: "The mining company wants to make this land uninhabitable...
they want to make it as comfortable as they can so that people will sell out and they can drill right through here to the national park, I think they would like this special place to disappear off the map."
2011 Physics Nobel Prize winner from Australia, who found out that our universe is expanding came to have a talk in our city hall...
He marvelled at our ever changing and beautifully coloured sky that he thinks is the most spectacular in Australia.
"I love to cross the heart of Australia to visit you," he said in introduction," because it is the journey, rather than the destination that counts."
"Your laid back city always teaches me, that leisure/work balance is the key. Because I am fearing that my constant quest for answers to cosmic mysteries may soon consume me."
At Challenge stadium on a Saturday our young athletic star won her race before a supportive crowd. She is in her peak, ahead of any hurdler in Australia but down to earth and very pleasant to talk to.
She was furious when 400 m runner appeared to put his fellow competitiors down after he won a race earlier this year here: "You can be pumped up but you don't have to do this, it is un-Australian."
After the race we sat in her favourite beach cafe and talked about her foundation: 'The Kids Who Chase Their Dreams', to help those from broken families, just like hers once was.
"I don't feel sorry for myself, when I grew up I was abused and bullied, but I survived and did whatever I had to get where I am now, and I want to help other kids to get there too." She smiled sipping her latte.
"I was very independent from very young age and I realized that things can quickly turn around in sport as well as in life. But when you perserve and keep going, you eventually succeed."
"I love to live near the beach," she added dreamily and pointed towards the ocean: "This is where I run every morning."
I stood next to the 46-year-old man in the wheelchair on the top of a steep cliff, when he said: "Loosing my legs was one of the best things that ever happened to me."
I looked at him in surprise and he nodded in understanding: "I didn't feel that straight away after my accident, but it's amazing what you can do in a situation that looks like 'game over'."
He pointed at the steep rocky wall: "I even absailed this one without legs, after I figured out how to get in and out of this wheelchair, I learned to swim again and to walk on prosthetic legs."
I visited my friend, the 30-year-old high school teacher, who camped in the treetop for five months to highlight the imminent lodging of our supposed protected old-growth-forest.
"Our noble jarrah trees are the unluckiest trees alive," she sighed opening the door: "Jarrah thrives in soils rich in bauxite and mining companies knock them down and sell wood for good money, then dig out all that bauxite underneath."
"Mining and forestry indurstry destroy everything here in the end," she shook her head in disbelief: "When I went up that tree I knew I might be arrested, but I did it anyway."
Our young stand up comic, who is recently a big star in London talked about his 'Antipodean childhood' on TV. He used two words to describe it: bluntness and practicality.
"Mum always told me to just pick myself up and get on with it, don't muck about, just do it and Dad told me to get out there and make something of myself with hard yakka and a smile on my face...
so I ran away to England and work hard to make people laugh." He bent down in a manner of respect and the audience responded with a great applause.
Then he continued: " My city was built on iron ore but it's greatest natural resource is their youth dreaming big because no one told them they can't, never been clamped down...
by a suffocating sense of class or hierarchy. Overseas they feel bolder and braver than they'd ever been back home, they bring to their new lands a restless, cheeky, larriking energy...
a feeling they could be anything there." I turned my TV off and watched my two sons having an argument when my youngest shouted: "Who says I can't do it, if it doesn't work out, I can always try something else..."
I am excited to be raising my kids here, in our city because of where it may lead them as adults. And I will never stifle the sense of yearning that may bloom in them - to be someone else, somewhere else.
Agonizing as that is for a mum to acknowledge. But necessary. As Ben Okri once said: "Learn to free yourself from all things that have moulded you...
and which limit your secret and undiscovered road." I discovered my road at the end of which lies my city....
Far and away
the most remote big city
on earth
behind it
miles and miles
of inert red emptiness,
before it
tracherous Indian ocean
full of sharks,
lures you to its shore
in Perfect weather
blue sheen of a mirror
more luminous
than glass.
MY FIRST IMPRESSION;
THE IMAGE IN MY MIND
IMPRINTED THERE
FROM THE FIRST SIGHT
OF MY FUTURE HOME
UP FROM THE AIR...
Watching blood-red sun
spreading golden rays
on the ocean horizon
in approaching night,
you dream to cross it
with a pirate flag
flapping high
proudly
freely
in the bitter wind,
all the way to Africa.
Each night you play
'dare me if you can'
games in your head,
planning travelling trips
to every part of the world,
to wake up again
bathing in morning sunshine,
feeling good,
you walk out of the door,
green streets
of your large,
modern
and clean
city
embrace you
and you know
you stay
in this most lonely place
that few pop in to visit
and not many
are aware
of its existence....
THE SECOND IMAGE
IN MY MIND
OF THE FIRST FEW WEEKS
OF SETTLING IN....
A lonely outpost
down under
with its sharp and radiant light
and yet
you wil never see
the bluer city sky.
Walking above
the azure basin
of the Swan River,
in one of the largest
and finest parks
in the world
located on a bluff
you marvel on the beauty below
the panaromatic view
of tall skyscrapers
pure golden sunlight
bouncing off their steel and glass.
THE THIRD IMAGE IN MY MIND
OF INTRODUCING
MY NEW HOME CITY
TO MY FAMILY
VISITING ME
FROM EUROPE...
Lost among
the endless lawns
and flower beds
you find a long,
lovely avenue
of tall white gum trees.
Planted long time ago
to commemorate the fallen
who went to fight foreign wars.
Farmers, shearers and wanderers
full of mischief and mistrust
of an authority
ready for adventure
and loose their lives
if necessary
among the foreigners.
No other nations,
as a proportion of population,
lost more men.
With passing years
their memory is more alive
than ever before.
Australians are immensely proud,
not of the heroes
who fought
and won the foreign wars,
but those 'unlucky buggers',
who died for no reason at all
and became a legend
of 'mateship and fair go'.
THE FOURTH IMAGE
IN MY MIND
THE DAY OF MY CITIZENSHIP CEREMONY
THE DAY I BECOME AUSTRALIAN....
The perfume and bright foliage
envelopes you
in the botanical garden
with 25,000 species of plants
you have never seen before,
a third of them never been named
or studied,
surviving fire and prolonged drought,
thriving in the very poor soil
and isolation
just like its own inhabitants.
Isolation is the golden card
for the country
that seems on the outside
hostile to the life.
For 50 millions of years
invisible island
without name and place on the map
sheltered indigenous life forms,
eucalypts in the plant world,
marsupials in the animal world,
to prosper
without any competition
or outside danger to its shores...
Isolated within and out,
scattered pockets of life
separated by great zones
of harshness
and inhospitabilty.
Just down,
below my city,
in the South-West
where city folks
buy their weekend homes
and cottages,
the abundance of plant species
is unimaginable,
no less than 12,000 of them
grow nowhere else in the world.
THE FIFTH IMAGE
IN MY MIND
THE DAY I BECOME A TEACHER;
A SOCIETY AND ENVIRONMENT TEACHER
IN MY NEW HOMELAND....
If the South is the holidayPlayground
for residents of my city,
the harsh North is where they find their work.
A rancher in 1952,
while piloting a light aircraft
over the trackless emptiness
of the Hamersley Range
near the North coast
lost his bearings in a sudden storm
and made a forced landing
in a zone of flat rock
known to geology as the Western Shield.
He was standing on an almost solid iron
and owned a 100-km-long block of it.
By the end of 1960
he controlled the iron ore reserves
greater than those of USA and Canada
combined.
His daughter who inherited it all,
is the richest person in Australia
and among the ten richest people in the world.
It was the beginning
of the greatest mineral booms
in modern history,
mineral deposits
were found
suddenly
all over
the inhospitable North.
Bauxite, nickel, uranium,
copper lead,
diamonds, tin, zinc,
magnesium and lots of gold...
From a sleepy and good-natured
producer of wool,
Western Australia became a mining colossus,
the world's biggest exporter of minerals,
and much of the wealth
settled in its capital.
THE SIXTH IMAGE IN MY MIND;
THE IMAGE OF SPLIT UP FAMILIES
HUSBANDS LIVE AND WORK UP NORTH
FLY IN AND FLY OUT
OF THEIR HOMES.
THEIR WIFES ACCUSTOMED TO LIVE ALONE
AND THEIR KIDS USE NET
TO GET GLIMPSE OF THEIR MISSING FATHERS....
Before my relatives flew out,
back to their home,
the taxi driver drove them proudly
through sprawling residential zones
of startling
showing wealth,
Nedland, Dalkeith, Peppermint Grove,
where palatial houses
basked in the penetrating sunshine
for miles
day in and day out.
Trophy homes
with big gates
and garages
for fleets of cars,
broad patios
and ugly Grecian urns
on ornate plinths
unfitted for this unique landscape.
They looked at the driver
in a sheer wonderment:
"Why did you drive us here?"
And he just laughed,
goodheartedly:
"I don't live here and bugger you if I will,
I have lovely small cottage up thehill."
They nodded their heads
and suddenly they could understand,
why Aussies resent so much
'tall poppies',
those vain and spoilt people
who like to show off their wealth,
and no one is better for it.
On the way to airport,
he winked at them and added:
"See you next time guys,
my parents come from Europe as well,
never been there,
but apparently,
you built your houses with more taste."
They thanked him,
adding
that not the buildings
but open space and people
make this place
worth of visit and they will back.
He waved his hand
and shouted from his window:
"Our Western suburbs
are just 'snobs' paradise'
and a 'pain in my ass."
He speeded off
chuckling to himself,
they never saw him again,
and yet,
this cheeky larrikin
represents our city for them
his image
pops up in our telephone conversation
now and then...
IN MY LAST IMAGE
THERE IS JUST A QUESTION
TO BE ASKED:
"Do you wonder,
why 1.3 millions of people
of a free society
would choose to live here?"
