Perth Is Full Of Plans

Sydneysider Goes Walkabout Perth Is Full Of Plans

The thing that beats me, after I’ve embarked on one of these sea voyages which happen like a recurring madness every few years, is — why?

WO one could be more temperamentally unsuited to a life at :a in a large passenger liner than our Sydneysider. Even in a 707 jet, • 560 miles an hour, I can get a [ ck out of watching clouds below ’ sta rs above. Such joie de vivre is mspicuously missing as I sit here utching great lumps of grey, wet a hurl themselves past the ship, or It can’t even be a desire to meet uch nice people”, one of the rea (ns people go to sea for, because lr mg the beginning of a voyage . as this, I don’t like people and inicularly when they’re “nice”, .there is the faded, sixty-fivish umow-sized female at our table m 1 , shall Probably attack with meat-chopper before this voyage oVer - She “feels like a bird”, at

8 o’clock in the morning—having been tramping the deck since dawn, come calm or storm. And in the Great Australian Bight, when the ship behaved as though it had a hinge in the middle, so that each end could bash the water at a different time, she champed steadily through tomato juice, shredded wheat and prunes, two bloaters and an omelette while I got down half a grape-fruit and a piece of toast. “Life’s wonder ful”, and apart from feeling like a bird she also, as a change, some times feels like “walking on air”.

There’s the organised type, who on the first day make all their hair dressing appointments right up to a day off Tilbury; decide the hours each day when they will swim; organise a bridge four to meet daily at 5 p.m.; know how many times

Everybody's

Doing It

There are different names for it in the South Pacific, but the native-style feast is popular everywhere among tourists. In New Caledonia it's called a bougna, and a travel agency, French Pacific Tours, is having considerable success promoting them for visitors.

The tourists always watch the food being cooked (top photo). Spring chicken and tropical vegetables are wrapped in banana leaves and buried in an earth oven. When the oven is opened the visitors sit down to a home-cooked meal served with a tropical rum punch and choice wines. In the good old days the natives cooked "long pig" the same way— but served it without the wines!

Photos: Fred Dunn

they will walk up and down the each day, and have had all shore excursions fixed, montl advance.

Life on board is so relaxing, like suburbia.

There’s the like-it-or-bust bi —the little, round, bald-headec in the bulky-knit sweater; am equally round little wife with tl behind, short legs and mud-col slacks who looks like a beai quit hibernating, who forcibly themselves each morning t launching themselves on to th deck to tramp up and down ir of the current Southern 1 Ocean gale.

Life on board ship is so invi ing.

There are the funny men camera addicts; the people whc just bought a transistor radk are busting to try it, and an frustrated because it won’t wo side the ship; the people who eaten this and that—probably oyster, mushroom or more sauce—in Timbuktu or Trinid; seen strip tease all the way Tokyo to Tripoli.

The aristocracy who are overseas for the ninth, or seventh, time; while others, down the social scale, are r their maiden run.

From the sophisticated !

there is much casual place dropping; and from the ye travelled a bitter battle to kee] end up, safe, however, in the ledge that before this junket i they too will be able to drop references into any convers where they will do most good But perhaps the biggest sch all is between the Bolters < “first sitting” and the Dawdl the “second”. This is of moment in the day-time mea takes on the aura of social ( tion in the evening when the are off at the first toot of the at the unfashionable hour of while the sophisticated D; linger on in the bar even afte Come and Get It goes at eq Even the Social Event of tl week out —the Captain s c< party—was neatly divided s the seven o’clock sheep imbib martinis at a different hour

eight-o’clock goats.

I feel that Nancy Mitford have added a sub-section < above in her treatise on U an U.

So it’s not the passengei lure me on to these sea (although I’ll be surprised ho<

I them will improve in the next reeks). Nor do I wish to learn tottish dancing (in the ballroom, •30); nor meet stamp collectors (in (k library, 3.30); or join a choir to |ng at Sunday services (Observa |on Lounge, 10.30); all of which flights are included, free, in with our tea, by the proprietors of this topping line. , Why do I travel by sea? Apart r om the obvious reason that I’m '°ing somewhere I want to go, it ould be in order to indulge in my Wounte sport of being anti-social.

mpire and

ommonwealth Perth, Western Australia, where I® ere several days ago now, is ready on the job with preparations J the Games of November, 1962. oese Games are called, for the first me, and presumably to have a little “ *ay f°r the conservatives and newly-born self-governing > 0 ries > T he British Empire and 'Ommonwealth Games.

X™** wi H like the host city, e frLnm Uo grown to ° bi 8 t 0 tnendly although 450,000 of the

people in the State of WA live with in its city limits.

A new Games village is being built about five miles out of the city centre, and when the time comes, special arrangements will be made to get visitors to the Games and to accommodate them in a city that is without much in the way of modern hotel accommodation. The arrangements will be special for those Australians from other States who want to take on the trans continental adventure of driving themselves there across the Nullabor Plains. (Road mileage, Adelaide - Perth is nudging 2,000.) Western Australia has other at tractions apart from the fact that Perth will be the venue of the Games. It probably offers the best opportunity in Australia for people who want to take up land—either in the high rainfall areas of the south west; in the wheat and wool belt west and north of Perth; or in the far and empty north around the Ord River which is a long-range project based on irrigation.

Land is cheaper, more accessible than in the Eastern States and there is far more State encouragement for would-be pioneers.

WA lacks certain secondary in dustries but is making some headway even here. Suburban Perth, with its charming ranch-style houses on big lots of land, is calculated to make home-hungry Easterners envious.

Suburban land is a third the price it is in Sydney and there is no city sprawl—-six miles from the city centre is considered right out in the sticks.

There is no housing shortage, even if you prefer to rent rather than buy, and the State has not so far been hit to the same extent as the Eastern States by the so-called “credit squeeze”.

For Islands types who have had it in the Pacific, Western Australia bears thinking about—if for no other reason, than because there is a thou sand or so miles of sand and salt bush separating it from the rat-run of the East.

Footnote for other Sydneysiders: Fremantle, Perth’s port, has a new overseas shipping terminal that makes Sydney’s more publicised ter minal look as elegant as an outback wool-shed.

Fremantle terminal has the lot— escalators, banks, a cafe, news-stands, shops, tourist bureau, decor based on the State’s birds and wild-flowers and the fanciest-looking covered gang-ways this side of New York.