Back home in A Sunburnt Country

Perth, the town where i grew up, is unique. All places are – and a pedant will argue uniqueness is a binary state, something either is unique or it isn’t – but Perth is especially so. And the word continues to spread. The number of British people emigrating to Australia has already increased from 8,749 in 2001-2 to 23,290 in 2005-6 – and wandering through the major cities of Australia, you’d conclude the lion’s share have come to settle – as my parents, my brother and I did twenty-two years ago – on the sun-drenched and sleepy banks of the Swan River.

So why is Perth ‘especially’ unique?

A few facts to begin: Ben Elton once wrote that Perth has more dollar-millionaires per capita than any other city on earth. This would appear a tall claim to anyone who’s visited Hong Kong, Monte Carlo, southern California or Dubai. He wrote that in the 1980s so even if it were true then, it may not be now. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Perth is confidently affluent in a way that is dumbfounding, breathtaking to the hundreds of thousand of visitors it receives every year. If the weather, the green spaces, the crime rate, the provision of public services, the cleanliness of the air and the average standard of housing are what constitute ‘standard of living, it’s probably unrivalled by any world city. It’s also the most isolated city in the world. Adelaide is the closest neighbour (about 3000km away), Melbourne and Sydney are about half as far again, Singapore and Jakarta are about the same distance. Western Australia – of which Perth is the capital – has a population of just over a couple million, for an area the size of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Greece combined. It is 2.7m km2 of uninhabited and largely uninhabitable wilderness. So take my word, when you’re in Perth, you really feel a long way from everywhere.

Perth’s an ‘American’ city, built for the car and an exemplar of how urban sprawl can go unchecked when circumstances permit and geography mandates. Part of the reason is the history. The city was founded in 1829 on the banks of the Swan, but the early settlers were disappointed by the soil’s – that’s an Australian euphemism for gigahectares of sand – poor agricultural prospects. The more fertile areas were upstream and so small settlements such as Guilford were built. Although a ‘free’ settlement – unlike the settlements those built with convict labour on the east coast – many convicts arrived in the west and tourists can see their sartorially improved descendants to this day, stealing cars, plotting vegetable heists and sniffing glue over a tall macchiato on one of the cappuccino strip’s quaint cafes. Do wave and take pictures, I implore you. They love it.

Perth was generously designated a ‘city’ by Queen Victoria in 1856 – but a city which doesn’t have a second university shouldn't really be called a city at all. And that second university happened in 1975 – the same year that Australia had its major constitutional crisis (when the Queen through the Governor-General sacked the Prime Minister and dissolved parliament) and Australians vowed never again to tolerate a foreign Head of State*. The second university was called Murdoch Uni – rather appropriate since Rupert is Australia’s most influential person and he himself would be pleased to find that tens of thousands of mealy-mouthed undergraduates drop his name every day. A momentary digression on the subject of Mr Murdoch: Australia has the highest concentration of media ownership in the industrialised world. In the last major review (done in 1999), of the twelve capital city and daily papers, seven were owned by Murdoch and three by Fairfax. Few people complain, though, because the Australian media is so execrable there’s no guarantee letting anyone else in to produce more of it would have any beneficial effect whatsoever.

*They broke their necks getting around to a speedy referendum on the Republic issue only 24 years later, and the electorate – with the sort of well thought-out reason you expect from Australians en masse – decided that they quite liked the Queen after all, so voted no. Another referendum is expected some time in the 25th Century.


So although Perth was a city since back in 1856 (two years before the first independent school was founded – of which I am a proud alumnus, go you Haleians), it took until the 1950s to begin any meaningful expansion. Wave after wave of British immigrants came over on £10 tickets – the ‘£10 poms’ as they are affectionately known – and found themselves on a coastal settlement bound to the east by a mountain range (hills, really, but an obstacle nonetheless) and the endless Indian Ocean to the west. With barely thirty or so kilometres separating these two longitudinal barriers, expansion north and south was inevitable. And expand the intrepid settlers did. To call Perth enormous does an injustice to enormity. I’ve been to LA, I’ve been to Mumbai and I live in London. Trust me, for what it is, Perth is enormous.

The 1950s was the decade when the car became an affordable, mass-produced commodity. So a city like Melbourne on the other side of the country – which began its real growth decades earlier than Perth, setting up three universities** has a European-style system of trams and a public transport system broadly adequate for its people. Perth on the other hand has about the worst public transport of any place outside of Somalia, Mozambique and the United States. In that sense, Melbourne is to San Francisco or New York as Perth is to LA or Phoenix or Vegas. When space is aplenty and the car is affordable, governments built roads. And Perth is a road city like you’ve never seen.

**Murdoch Tech, Murdoch U and The Centre for the Study of Murdoch have done quite well, but the Murdoch Institute for Largescale Finance suffered due to its unfortunate acronym. No, I’m joking, but on that subject, Perth’s third university is the Curtin University of Technology. It was originally and ill-advisedly called the Curtin University of New Technology. But not for long.

Perth has more cars per capita than any other city in the world (roughly 750 per 1000 population, which translates to one per person when you exclude the elderly, children and those too incapable to pass their test. Thankfully, I suppose, it also has more car park spaces per capita than any other city in the world. Nobody seems to know how many that fleshes out to. Suffice to say at certain times of day you behold endless expanses of empty grey tarmac shimmering under the summer sun. At other times, you’ll get dizzy from driving around and around the block, cursing your road-fellows for their parking incompetence. “If that guy had parked ten centimetres further back, and the guy in front had done the same, and the guy in front and the guy in front and the guy in front of him had done the same too – I could’ve squeezed in there. Bastards.” This is a popular complaint. Circling the block in the city centre at night is like playing pass the parcel with Hyundais. It sucks.

In most other places, if you don’t have a car, or choose to leave it at home, you have – in addition to buses, trains and perhaps trams too – a variety of taxis buzzing around, which at least affords the option of beating the sweaty crush and not having to stand around with everyone else. For the sociopathically enclined, this has an irresistible appeal.

Perth has a population of just over two million people. Greater London has a population of nine or ten million. London has 30,000 official black cabs, and thousands of private hire mini-cabs too – which get you there just as fast, can be ordered at any time, and are a fair bit cheaper. Often the driver smells like a Parisian, but it’s a small price to pay for not actually having to be in Paris.

Perth, by contrast, has six hundred taxi licences. That’s right, six hundred, for a city the size of Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester combined. Because everybody drives, nobody takes taxis during the day. So you seldom see them, and when you do they’re parked on taxiranks with bored drivers. But that’s fine, because as I said, nobody has any need for them. The six hundred drivers have a pretty rotten life with nothing to do. Which explains the government’s refusal to issue any more licences.

The evening is a very, very different matter. On weekend nights in particular, the whole city wants to go out on the town to drink until they fall over. This is Australia, after all, a country whose people coined the expression “technicolour yawn” and who largely herald from working-class England. And the English are famous for binge drinking in the way the French are known for sitting around and spouting pseudo-intellectual tripe; it’s not so much an engrained habit as the scaffolding which keeps society in one piece.

A local here will tell you the average time nowadays to get a taxi after midnight on the weekend is somewhere around two hours. My brother once waited for three hours before giving up and walking home, which took three more hours. When half a million people go out eating, drinking and dancing, and then all want to go home at roughly the same time, six hundred cars is a trifle inadequate. This was a problem when I lived here. It’s become even worse in the years since.

But watching the Aussies trying to get home from the nightclub district is revealing in itself. I saw a queue at the taxirank one hundred long. They all waited patiently in the way only Anglo-Saxons can. I took the girl I was with (a very attractive young blonde), walked fifty yards up the road before the rank, and sent her into the oncoming traffic. We had a cab within ten seconds. Nobody else thought of this. Which just goes to show that you can take the Aussies out of England, but you can't take being English out of the Aussies.

That night I'd been out with a bunch of friends. We went first to a Caribbean bar at 9pm. The queue outside was fifty feet long. I pushed to the front and schmalzed the bouncer, which had about as much success as it would anywhere else in the world. The men at the front of the queue sported the self-conscious metrosexuality all Australia men have nowadays, including designer stubble. One of them said he’d been queuing so long he was clean shaven when he got in line. Actually, he didn’t say that – he was a moron – but that was a gist. The queue was static.

So we walked to another bar. Which was closed. On a Saturday night. We passed half a dozen clubs – all of which had queues more than a hundred people long – and found one which was moving at passable speed.

Twenty minutes later, my friends and I reached the entrance. A wet-faced eleven-year old girl with acne scarring that suggested she’d been hunting with Dick Cheney was clutching a clipboard with an expression of nauseating self-importance. She looked down at my shoes (perfectly clean and neat navy suede sneakers), shook her head gravely and announced – with the nails-down-the-blackboard excrutiatingness of the ocker Australian lilt: “Yoi carnt come in hiere wurring thoise, mite!”

I argued, I reasoned. I even tried flirting. I pointed out that the guy in front was let into the club wearing a singlet which left tufts of black hair hanging from his armpits like a couple of squished bushrats. I explained that the group of gentlemen in front were likely too mentally challenged to be able to exit the building in case of fire, whereas I am an expert at trying to leave places, having grown up right here in Perth. And finally, I touched her shoulder, smiled and gave her a look of saccharine droopiness that made my friends want to vomit. She looked hesitantly around for a bouncer. I left.

But a place is nothing without its people and, unlike the various other cities, towns and villages I’ve been lucky enough to visit on this trip so far, I can speak of Perth as a local. I spent sixteen years of my life here. And although many of my attitudes to this remarkable corner of the world would be wholly unrepresentative of the thoughts of others, it’s nevertheless a place I know well and one which has indelibly marked my sense of self. One’s self is but a function of the people and places which have passed through it.

Paradise – by many people’s understanding of the term – Perth really is. Describe to an Indian or a Bulgarian or a Cambodian or a Serb a place of such bountiful wealth and opportunity, of such safety and sunshine, of such abundant space and flora, and they will think you waxing panglossian about a hereafter. When you tell them it’s the place where you first played cricket in the street, drank your first beer, had your first kiss, learned to swim and drive and write in rhyme, they regard you with an otherworldly fascination. Even Americans – brought up as they so often are to believe in the unarguable exceptionalism of their own culture – see in Perth in particular and Australia as a whole – that which America wishes it were.

If you tell the Indian or the Serb, however, that – despite being grateful for what this pristine utopia afforded you – you couldn’t wait to leave, he or she regards you not with fascination or even bemusement, but a real incredulity. Either your description of the place has been woefully misleading, or you are indefensibly ungrateful for what you’ve been given. After having experienced this incredulity many times, I cannot help but conclude that the truth must in fact be both. I have both failed to depict fully Perth’s shortcomings and I have never fully appreciated its virtues and its people.

But who are the people? Who are the inhabitants of this most isolated of metropolises? Despite Perth’s (and Australia’s) chest-puffing claims to multiculturalism, it’s actually anything but. Scandinavia it is not, but – don’t be fooled – if you come here expecting a polyglot melting-pot of white, black, brown and yellow faces, you’ll be disappointed. To this day it’s an overwhelmingly white country – and a great majority of these white inhabitants are protestant Anglo-Saxons too. Melbourne and Sydney have small but significant Mediterranean minorities (predominantly Greek, Macedonian, Croatian and Italian), and Sydney has a growing Lebanese community – many of whom came over in 1980s during the civil war.

White as it is, though, Australia is a country which is changing, and it’s a really interesting time to be back. After 11 years of a right-wing coalition federal government the November elections brought about a landslide victory for the centre-left Australian Labor Party. In truth the ALP is neither a “Labor” party (Australians don’t shed many tears for the unions) nor centre-left (the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, calls himself a fiscal conservative) but it holds a commanding majority in Canberra, as well as every single one of the State and Territory governments. The vanquished Liberal party of John Howard is now so weakened that its highest-ranking public servant in the entire country is the mayor of Brisbane. And next week, as the US did for slavery and its treatment of native Americans, and the British for Ireland, Australia atones for its own original sin. The federal government, meeting one of its campaign promises, will apologise to the Aborigines for the Stolen Generation, which is supposed to put to bed the sorriest chapter in Australia’s young history.

Australia’s relationship with its original inhabitants is a tortured tale of disrespect, neglect, blame, racism, middle-class guilt and politically-correct relativism. To visit this self-described ‘lucky country’ and lay eyes on its original inhabitants has broken the hearts of thousands with a social conscience who’ve come to these shores. Surely, what’s left of the Aborigines is the most wretched social group of any developed country in the world. Prevailing wisdom across the political spectrum is gloomy beyond belief. Virtually everyone thinks the Aborigines will be effectively extinct within two generations. And to make matters worse, virtually everyone thinks the problem is intractable.

Aborigines have 26 times the dementia of Australians as a whole. They have 3 or 4 times the rate of respiratory disease and diabetes. They have a full 70-fold the rate of communicable diseases, two to three times the infant mortality and five times the drug-induced mental-disorders. Life expectancy is 59.6 years compared to 72.9 for Native Canadians, 72.1 for Maoris and 70.6 for Native Americans. According to a 2004 Canadian study of 100 countries, Australia’s Aborigines have the second worst standard of life of any group on earth (after some Chinese indigenous communities). Despite this, Australia ranks fourth globally on the study’s human development index. The UNDP’s 2007/8 Development Index (the best recognised of its type) puts Australia third, after Iceland and Norway.

None of these statistics can ever reveal the full picture, though. For that, you have to sit in the centre of any of Australia’s cities for a couple of hours, and watch the world go by. The Aborigines lurk in the shadows like H.G Wells’ Moorlocks. When you see them, they’re dressed like vagrants, limping, invariably carrying a bottle in a paper bag. These are the more active ones. Take a stroll to a nearby park, and you’ll likely see a group of Aborigines, of both sexes and all ages, passed out on the grass. But even this doesn’t tell the full story.

The full horror lies outside the cities. Although a small minority of Aborigines do live in urban areas (with almost universal unemployment and welfare dependance), a large percentage live on what may charitably be called ‘reservations’ in the Australian outback. They live neither the traditional nomadic lifestyle they once had, nor do they integrate into modern Australia in any way. Ask any knowledgeable Aussie and he or she will tell you that I’m not overblowing my point: Aborigines live a life where they just wait to die. These outback communities have no employment save the one man who sells alcohol. The children regularly die of diseases which have been eradicated in all but sub-Saharan Africa. I met a lecturer in the History department at the University of Western Australia. He made an interesting point:

“This is a soft left department at a soft left university. But whenever there’s some sort of governmental intervention into these settlements, those academics who’ve never visited one predictably decry the policy’s paternalism and illiberalism. And those who have been out there, complain that it doesn’t go far enough. These Aboriginal communities are places of indescribable degeneracy. And nobody knows what more can be done”.

A comprehensive examination of the history and causes of Aborigines’ wretchedness is beyond the scope of this piece here. But it’s worth telling an undisputable truth. Alcohol and pornography have decimated black Australia. In the middle of last year, the Howard government – in response to a long-awaited report which detailed horrific levels of child sex abuse in these communities – banned alcohol and pornography to certain areas of the Northern Territory, which amounted to a ban for Aborigines alone. The only real outcry from the Australian Left was not to the policy per se, but to the cynical, populist reactionism of the government in so drastically implementing it. In short, practically nobody who lives here, irrespective of their political leanings, is unaware of the appalling, unspeakable sex abuse which is widespread in Aboriginal culture. In my two decades here, barely a week would pass without yet another story of the gang-rape of children. Only two months ago, nine men who pleaded guilty to gang-raping a 10-year-old girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York escaped a prison term, with the sentencing judge inexplicably saying the child victim "probably agreed" to have sex with them.

The argument that alcohol and pornography are to blame is one which tends to stun and bemuse neophytes. After all, both are freely available in society at large, and child rape – while it does exist – is not endemic. But whether you loathe Aboriginal men for their evil, or make the case that the taboo on child sex is as culturally specific as the prohibition on corporal punishment, the fact is a significant majority of children as young as two or three are systematically and continually raped in these communities and 2007 in Australia was the year the civil libertarians ran out of objections. The complaint that imposing our standards on these communities is paternalistic and is the root cause of Aboriginal wretchedness carries no more steam. Just this week, Robert Bropho, a prominent Perth Aboriginal leader of the Swan River Nyungah community, is on trial for child sex charges. He is – and I don’t say this lightly – completely representative of Aboriginal leadership in Australia. In twenty years, I can’t count the number of Aboriginal “leaders” who’ve been found to be – at best – corrupt, and – at worse – child rapists.

In my final year of law school here in Perth, I took Advanced Criminology. The majority of this very small class conducted investigations and wrote theses into Aboriginal rates of juvenile incarceration, or deaths in custody, arguing vociferously that White Australia is to blame, that Aborigines are unfairly targeted, that the media manipulates the electorate into believing Aborigines are more predisposed to crime than everyone else. As a proud social liberal, I was stunned and a little guilty to find myself shouting these people down, class after class. Despite the good-intentioned but morally deficient policy of taking Aboriginal children from their homes in the 1950s, despite the fact that this was their country long before it was ours, and despite early Aborigines being massacred by the British, the relativistic nonsense my classmates were spewing made me bilious with opprobrium. As they spent a semester researching and making excuses, always separating the disease from the symptoms, I wrote my thesis on virtual child pornography and argued its continued legality. It made me a hate figure, but I think their hatred of me served to confuse their own defense of contemporary Aboriginal culture. This was in 2003. Maybe they’ve come round to mainstream opinion since. Not for nothing, I topped the class. In response they voted me most likely to be a serial killer. I hated them all.

So next week there’ll be a milestone in modern Australia. Although a handful of progressive premiers and senators apologised to the Aborigines a decade ago, the Howard government – despite public support – steadfastly refused to do so. The explanation was that an apology implies culpability and a flood of litigation would drown the judiciary and bankrupt the country.

This was farcical and mean-spirited. But the time has come, and the new PM is giving both a written and verbal apology for the suffering caused. It probably won’t make much practical difference to the dire conditions in which Aborigines live. An apology won’t get them off welfare dependence any more than it'll convince Aboriginal men that child sex is evil. But if there's any disease which underpins the wretchedness of Aborigines, the disease with contributes to the other diseases I’ve already mentioned, it’s a disease of the soul. A culture with no remaining self-respect cannot summon the strength to save itself. The dearth of dignity which leads Aborigines to spend their days stumbling through city centres, eye-bleedingly drunk and cursing drivel at an imaginary foe, must surely stem from knowing that the white man never thought much of them in the first place. So if a genuine, heartfelt apology, based not on direct guilt but on compassion and sincerity, helps just a few Aboriginal men to stand up tall and announce, “I am a proud man and I will be a leader of my people before it’s too late!” then perhaps everything is not as dire as I've made out.

Time will tell of course, but on this historic week, I can't overstate how sad the Aboriginal problem is. Australia is a country with so much to be proud of. With a tiny population, it has a booming and resilient economy, sends fine actors, writers and musicians everywhere around the world, conducts some of the world’s pre-eminent science, has produced thinkers as diverse as Germaine Greer, Peter Singer, Edna Everage and my own greatest hero, Clive James. It’s the country of Don Bradman and Banjo Patterson and Joan Sutherland and Rod Laver, and the tenets which underpin Australian culture are as admirable as any in the world. Although visitors and expats may laugh at the notion of “fair dinkum”, it’s a laudable belief and should be on the flag. Admittedly difficult to define, it broadly refers to a spirit of fair play and hard work. It means respect for integrity and candour. And it’s the reason Australians smile and call total strangers “mate” – and really mean it when they do. It’s a marvellous country with a marvellous people. Which makes it all the more sad that the open wound of Aboriginal reconciliation continues to fester on an otherwise tough and tanned skin.

Each time I come back to Australia, I find it less and less like home, but with more and more to admire. And being here in Perth, in this most isolated metropolis of all, on a land which – as the anthem goes – abounds with nature’s gifts, with beauty rich and rare, I am moved to raise a cold beer to the Great Southern Land, which is going through a rite of passage, consigning to the past its adolescent sins, and beginning an exciting and unwritten chapter in its history.