The Story of Perth

The Story of Your Place:

South-West Australia

‘the croaking of the frogs… within town limits was so loud that we sometimes had to raise our voices, as if talking to the deaf’.

The Italian Monk Dom Salvado in Perth in the 1840s

The frogs aren’t quite as loud in downtown Perth these days. The chain of wetlands that sat above the city were thought to spread disease. Since European Settlement 70-80% of the original wetlands on the Swan Coastal plain have been cleared, drained or filled in.

Wetlands

This reconstruction shows the CBD area of Perth as it would have been before Europeans settled there.

What do you think the areas of green are in the top half of the map?

Swan RiverCBDMill Point

For most of its history central Perth has been the administrative centre for the Western third of Australia. Even in the early settler years it was half-way between the farmed land in the Upper Swan and the port’s trade at Fremantle. Later wheat and sheep flooded in from different parts of the state. Later still it was gold and then iron ore and other minerals.

Perth was a small town from the 1830s until the gold rush of the 1880s and 1890s turned it into a small city. Up until the 1940s and 1950s it had two and three story Victorian architecture lining long streets like St. Georges Terrace and Hay St. You could stroll along St. Georges Terrace and get flashes of the sun sparkling on the river down to the south between the breaks in the stately facades. It was a city of English values 13 thousand kms from England.

What’s different about the transport compared to today?

Suburbia came late.

Perth’s early development of suburbs was fostered by the introduction of railways in 1881. These early bush blocks fronted a quiet road. Sand filtered the waste from your septic tank, but this meant that your water supply was liable to contamination, and cases of dysentery and typhoid were alarmingly high.

To solve this situation the authorities began to insist that suburban blocks were even larger: a quarter of an acre.

This legacy of the quarter of an acre block left its mark on future generations

of suburban Australians and their culture.

Perth remained a small sunny city basically clustered around the Swan River up to the 1970s.

Then things started to really change.

The urban area of Perth has doubled since the 1970s. Now, in 2010 the Perth metropolitan area keeps growing outwards, knocking down the tiny patches of paperbark wetlands or banksia woodland we have left on the Swan Coastal Plain. Native vegetation in Perth is destroyed at an average of 853 hectares per year (or over one football oval per day).

What do you notice about the land area and population of Perth compared

to other cities?

In the words of Richard Weller,

‘Like most North American and Australian cities, Perth is now predominantly a flatland of free-standing suburban homes and their related infrastructure. In a word, sprawl.’

Perth has only 1.6 million people. Many of the cities below have 10 million or more people.

Perth is one of the most sprawled cities on earth, with an average density of six homes per hectare. From south to north the city is over 120kms long.

Low density urban development carries a high environmental cost associated with requirements not just for land but also expanded infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewerage) and services (e.g. water supply,

electricity). People feel forced to use their car to get to work. In 2006 the Western Australian Department of Planning

and Infrastructure released figures for the percentage of work trips made on public transport:

Perth 9.7 %; Australian average 14.5%; US average 9%; European average 39%. This polluting transport

choice makes Perth people, considered on a global per capita basis, major contributors to the global crisis

of climate warming.

Perth is cutting into the remaining native vegetation around its edges. This permanently destroys the habitat for thousands of plants and animals.

The brown haze you see over the city is photochemical smog created by pollution.

Do we want to see the extinction of the beautiful and emotionally complex Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo?

Will we live in sprawl or in high density apartments? Do we want Perth to be another concreted Los Angeles or should we embrace European style apartment living?

In 2009 Perth was home to 1.6 million people. Thousands of immigrants are welcomed each year and the

population keeps growing. Perth’s population is predicted to double to

over 3 million people by 2020.

Many of the new homes being built are built on land that used to be banksia woodland, and feeding habitat for the now endangered Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo.

Even if you didn’t care about nature, you should still think about the future of Perth’s environment . The most pressing problem for humans here is water. From 1911-1974 Perth’s reservoirs has an average annual inflow of 338 gigalitres. From 1975-1996 it was 177 gigalitres. From 1997 – 2004 it was 120 gigalitres. Notice a trend? The reality we face is of declining rainfall in an already dry corner of the planet. Nowadays we get 60 % of our drinking water from underground, from the Gnangara Mound acquifer, however recharge into the acquifer has reduced 25% over the last 25 years.

So we’ve started to make our own fresh water. As of 2010 one seawater desalination plant has been built, and another one is scheduled to come online in 2011. Right now 17% of the water that comes out of your tap originally came from the sea. But desalination plants use huge amounts of energy, ultimately causing more carbon pollution to go into the atmosphere.

Where is Perth headed in your lifetime?

What are our choices?

Reconstructed image of Perth from above by Andrea Tate. Image of Perth’s incremental growth and suburban sprawl from above from Richard

Weller’s Boomtown 2050. All other photos copyright Tom M. Wilson.