Crush humanity out of shape

Before proceeding with today’s post

I would like to acknowledge the Whadjuk People of the Noongar Nation – the Traditional Custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the Elders past, present, and emerging and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.

I was awake early enough on 1 November to take a brisk walk in the area near our hotel in the place the Whadjuk People call Boorloo and that’s known to the English speaking world as Perth. C had pointed out some nearby public art and one interesting building in particular that I wanted to add to my photo record.

As nearly as I could tell, this building is called QV1 and it’s the fourth tallest building in Perth. According to C, the building’s entrance is based on the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch were she is standing on a grate and air is blowing her skirt up.

The red, curved structure in the forecourt of the building are her lips. I leave the determination to your judgement.

Nearby there was this work of public art that I found particularly interesting.

It’s not that kangaroos are an unusual subject in Australia – even if they may be holding briefcases and commuting. I was drawn to this work because it evoked the Ghost Horses sculpture in a highway median near Tucson.

Wadjemup

After breakfast, our group piled onto the bus (or coach as tour operators prefer) to meet the Sealink Ferry in Fremantle for the half hour ride across 22 kilometers of the Indian Ocean to Wadjemup.

It’s important to note that Wadjemup wasn’t always an island. About 20,000 years ago, at the last glacial maximum, global sea level was likely 125 meters lower than it is at present. Thus, Wadjemup would have appeared as an elevated position along a broader coastal plain and would have been accessible on foot until the sea separated it from the mainland. Given what we know now (and continue to learn) Australia’s first people arrived on the continent at least 60,000 years BP and perhaps as long as 80,000 years ago. For generations, Wadjemup was used by the Whadjuk Noongar people for important ceremonies and meetings. Although there’s no evidence that they returned to Wadjemup once it was enisled, it continued (and continues) to be a place of spiritual importance. According to the website Always Wadjemup, the name means “land across the sea where the spirits are.” Thus, we can conclude that the traditional custodians bestowed the name Wadjemup sometime after it separated from the mainland.

How Wadjemup became Rottnest

Believing that there had to be a large southern landmass Europeans began searching for it sometime in the middle of the 15th century and, in 1606, Willem Jansz landed at the tip of today’s northern Queensland at the Cape York Peninsula. A decade later Dirk Hartog mapped a stretch of the continent’s west coast. Then in 1696, another Dutchman, Willem de Vlamingh became the first European to find the island. It was he who christened it Rotte Nest or Rat’s Nest. He might have been a worthy sea captain for the Dutch East India Corporation but he wasn’t a particularly good zoologist. What he saw was many animals like this one.

He probably saw a shaka of Quokkas. (Okay, there was no collective noun for quokkas until about 2019 when the famous surfer Kelly Slater posted a selfie on Instagram. Slater is making the “shaka” or hang loose gesture with a quokka nearby. Thus was born a shaka of quokkas.) Not only did de Vlamingh fail to recognize that the quokka is a marsupial, he mistook them for large rats and the island became a rat’s nest.

Darkness in the 19th Century

All of the early colonization of Australia took place on the east coast. It wasn’t until 1829 that the British established the Swan River Colony that would eventually become Perth. Initially, the Noongar People welcomed the settlers thinking they were djanga or returned spirits of the dead who had forgotten their identities. Thus, for the first two years or so, thinking they needed re-education, the Noongar sought to incorporate the Europeans into their cultural understanding and social structure and there was cooperation between the groups.

But the Europeans brought with them concepts of land ownership and resource use that were far outside the understanding of the First People. As with other places, the colonizers also brought diseases to which the Noongar had no resistance and no knowledge of how to treat them.

Meanwhile, in 1830, Robert Thomson received a land grant and took his wife and eight children to Rottnest Island. He developed pasture land for hay and harvested salt from island lakes. Others, together with an 1836 plan for the Townsite of Kingstown, followed: R M Lyon (10 acres) on the shores of Threefold Lake; W Bolton, C Norcott, A H Stone and J Greswell (10 acres each) also clustered along Threefold Lake and adjacent to each other.

Over the decade, relations between the Noongar and the British continued to deteriorate and in 1838 the colonial government established a prison on Wadjemup for Aboriginal people from all across Western Australia. Many of these men were forcibly removed from their own Country and many came from environments and climates that were alien to them and for which they were physically and spiritually unprepared. Looking at the latter factor we need to pause to understand its gravity. Here’s a map that shows the distribution of the nations of Indigenous People in parts of Western Australia – a state that occupies nearly one-third of Australia and has at least 13 different biological regions represented in the WA Botanic Garden.

You need to keep in mind that every individual in each of these groups views themselves as inextricably connected to their land and environment. They are the land and the land is them. Removing them from their land is akin to amputating them from their spirit.

Over nearly a century an estimated 4,000 Aboriginal men and boys were incarcerated at what was colloquially called the Quod. At least 300 died.

My 21st century visit

(And a chill runs down your spine.)

The ferry arrived at the jetty and, approaching the nine-meter tall Koora-Yeye-Boordawan-Kalyakoorl (Past-Present-Future-Forever) sculpture of a Noongar warrior and a breaching whale

we had the opportunity to listen to a recorded Welcome to Country ceremony. (Welcome to Country is qualitatively different from the Acknowledgement of Country I made at the beginning of this post. Only individuals from a territory can welcome other individuals to Country. More than a simple greeting, a full Welcome to Country recognizes areas where people traditionally lived, hunted and gathered, and places they hold sacred. It also reinforces their spiritual unity with the land.) Any visitor to the island should stop, pause, and reflect before engaging in typical touristic activities.

We were also greeted by a symphony (or cacophony for some) of calls from Australian ravens. These birds have habitat all over the country but I hadn’t heard them in the urban areas we’d visited thus far. I found it a memorable (and perhaps a bit mournful) call and you can hear them a bit in the background of the video above but the one below is more representative of what we heard.

From there RS provided us a short block of time to explore Thomson Bay Village (mainly, I think, to look for places to grab a bite of lunch and observe the highly habituated quokkas happily scavenging for whatever food the humans dropped. (No touching or deliberate feeding allowed!) Afterward we had a guided walking tour of the settlement that mentioned some of the horrors but seemed more focused on providing the history of European settlement and, our guide told us (with some pride, I think) that in his youth he was among those who used the Quod as a hotel.

We had a bit more free time after the tour, in addition to visiting the Wadjemup Museum where I learned much of the true history, I spent a few lighter moments with L, one of my RA travel mates to walk to the beach and wade in the Indian Ocean – waters my feet had never before touched.

Back to Freo

Freo is how the locals refer to Fremantle which is Perth’s port and the arrival and departure point for our ferry. C gave us a brief walking tour that started with the observation of the white swan sculptures adorning the top of the train station. Black swans are endemic to WA and no one seems to know why Walter Burvill chose to make his swans white.

Fremantle looks like a charming town (perhaps a large town) about half an hour by train from Perth. It’s developed around a strong sense of building conservation so it looks much as it did a century or more ago. From there we were off to Cicerello’s for the first of too many fish and chips dinners followed by our return to Perth for the evening.

More photos are here.