Australia: Perth 23-29 Feb 12

I flew with Virgin Australia airlines from Melbourne to Perth at 8.30am, it was a three hour forty min flight but I arrived at 9.40 so lost 3 hours of time. It’s good to be getting closer to GMT so it doesn’t feel like you’re so totally opposite to connecting with anyone from home. We flew across a lot of dry and red land, and then lots of sea and then some more red dry land. I would really have loved to explore the outback and countryside a bit more, maybe on another trip.

My cousin Jessica and my Uncle Pete came to fetch me from the airport. I was expecting, after all the many warnings I had about sweltering heat, to come out and be hit by a wall of 40 degrees, but actually it was an easy 26 or so. I had brought the cool weather to Perth, like I had brought the sun to Sydney after a cool wet summer.

My family in Perth includes: My mom’s sister Colleen, her husband Paul and their four children Theresa (now living in Canada), Michelle, Mark and Geoff who are between around 38 and 26. My mom’s sister Ronnie, her husband Pete and their four children – Jessica, Camaryn, Joshua and Olivia who are between 28 and 22. Then there’s my mom’s brother Joe and his wife Nibby and their five children – James, Mathew, Lucy, Rachel, Mary who are between 24 and 16. Mark is married to Di and they have five children I think all under 6 years. Colleen and family I think immigrated twenty or more years ago, and Joe and Ronnie followed around twelve years ago, all from either Zimbabwe or South Africa. So basically I hadn’t seen my cousins for a very long time! Although we try keep up with news as much as possible, and now Facebook has really helped a dispersed and insanely huge family like ours keep in contact. About three years ago my Granny (my mother’s mom) came to live in Perth with her children there, so I was really looking forward to spending some time with her. She is around 84.

Granny Maisie

Perth is one of the most isolated cities in the world. It takes over five hours to fly there from Sydney, and almost four to fly from Melbourne. It’s almost three thousand km from Adelaide and four thousand km to Darwin. The UK can fit into Western Australia alone 10.4 times! Seriously.

All the family live conveniently near each other around Joondalup in North Perth. My lovely cousins Jess, Lily and Cammy entertained me and spoilt me by just being generally sweet and generous, thank you so much girls! The three of us went to an art gallery on Saturday and had some yum coffee with ice-cream at their favourite coffee place. Lily and her boyfriend Lenny took me to the boardwalk near their house for some ice-creams when I just arrived, we spent a Saturday night having pizza and wine and tried to see kangaroos in the local park, had a brisk walk along the beach and Cammy even took a day off on Monday to take me around Perth. We went to King’s Park and looked at the view over the city, hired bikes and rode around the river and saw some black swans and just had a generally lovely sunny day.

View from Kings Park over Perth

Black Swans

I spent some time at Joe and Nibby’s house with their sweeter than sweet kids, completely relaxing and restoring my energy. James, Mathew, Rachel and I went to a beach nearby where the boys boogie boarded and Rachel and I waded into the really warm water and tried to soak up some sun. I went to visit Mark and Di and their amazingly cute brood of five and had a good catch up and chat, while the sweeties read and played contentedly and Mark showed me their big heaven-for-a-child garden with tree-houses and chickens.

I spent some time with granny playing my ukulele. Granny has a song book that she’s had for years (although this was a newer version) where she had written out all her favourite songs and the guitar chords. I have no idea how she remembers which chords go where as she doesn’t play herself, although she obsessively loves music and will stop any conversation to listen even if someone is just idly plucking guitar strings, and she’ll sing the harmony or correct the person if they’re playing it wrong. I believe that the love of music in our very musical family comes directly from granny Maisie herself. She wrote some travelling type songs down in my own song book like The Happy Wanderer, Blowing in the Wind and, all family members will know the most important one of all, A Hundred Miles. I had such a nice time learning the songs while she sang harmony’s (which she calls descants) in her ever croakier sweet granny voice. A few of the chords were wrong in her book although she would never own it! 

Granny writing chords in my book

We also had a Sunday get together at Ronnie and Pete's and I made roast lamb and caught up with Aunty Colleen, Uncle Paul and Geoff.

Jess, Lily and Cam were going to watch Roxette (isn’t that a huge fat blast from the past?) and my extremely cute and generous Uncle Pete and Aunty Ronnie bought me a ticket so I could go with them. We had some Mexican food before hand and met at Cammy’s house in town to get dolled up, and then packed into her friends car and we drove there listening to the greatest hits and singing at the top of our lungs. They were playing in a stadium with old school pop concert lighting and backdrops. The girl in Roxette had a brain tumour which she had been fighting for years, but now is better which is why they’re touring. There were mainly chicks there over 30, we seemed like the youngest group there by miles. We danced and sang and jumped around to their set which was mainly old songs, and they chucked in a few old ballads too. It was retro fun to
the max!

Retro max - Roxette

To me Perth seems a really nice relaxing place to live and bring up kids, although recently it’s become one of the most expensive places to live in Australia. From what I can gather this is because of all the mines a few hours down the road mining iron ore... people are highly paid there and then want to come spend it in Perth, pushing property prices etc up. It’s a city that doesn’t seem to have any kind of tug in any direction though. The trains run on time and are air conditioned and streamlined (although there is no train between the airport and the city which is seriously backward), the city has everything you’d expect from one and there are universities and schools, parks and museums. If I was to give Perth a colour it would be Magnolia. Perfectly acceptable and easy on the eye, it won’t offend anyone and isn’t outstanding or memorable, but everyone is happy with it in the background. What I found strange about Australia was that I only saw one, yes a solitary and singular Aboriginal person in Sydney airport. Otherwise I didn't see any others, at all. I found it really strange and also found that this is something that Australians in general don't really like to discuss either. I also saw hardly any animals at all which I'm sad about, besides the kangaroos scuttling away from the train from Sydney. This was probably because I was in the cities, but I just expected to see a little more wildlife and for it to feel a little more wild than it did, but actually the cities and small bits of countryside that I did see felt a bit sterile. Although, there were tons of spiders by the beach that I went to with Hanneke and Steve in Sydney, which we had to duck under when walking along the path. 

Thanks to all my family for being so generous and cute and giving me a seriously lovely week! Now off I go to Singapore, for my first taste of steamy Asia.

Here are all the photos.