Author / Eddie

by Eddie

Fighting the British, one arch at a time

claremont

All arches are created equal

Some buildings are revolutionary. Literally. Like kick-out-the-Brits type revolutionary. And you probably wouldn’t think that a humble church hall in Claremont would be the place to start looking for this. But you should.

If you travel down Stirling Highway, probably cursing the traffic as you crawl along, you’ll notice Congregational Hall at Claremont, which was built in 1896. The church, on the right in the picture above, was erected a decade later. While it might not seem much to look at now, the hall was part of a movement to rid ourselves of British influence.

When people in the 1890s started talking about Federation and a new country, architects were not going to be left out of this exciting new movement. Henry Stirling Trigg was the first qualified architect to be born in Western Australia so, unsurprisingly, he wanted to contribute. But if English architecture was to be abandoned, where was he going to look for new ideas? He needed a country that had also broken free from the motherland and formed its own identity. Naturally, he thought of the good old U. S. of A.

The Americans call the style the ‘Richardsonian’, but we decided it was sexier to described the architecture as being ‘American Romanesque’. The easiest way to spot it is to look for rounded arches and, quite often, rustication, which is where you cut back the edges of the stone leaving a perfectly regular block with a rough surface in the middle.

The entrance to Congregational Hall and the windows above are good examples of the American Romanesque at work. Even better is the very fine Trinity Church on St George’s Terrace, also by Henry Stirling Trigg and opened in 1893. Although it’s in brick not stone, this is American Romanesque at its finest.

Trinity

Or nearly its finest, because there was an even better building which we have now lost. On the corner of St George’s Terrace and Howard Street used to be Surrey Chambers. Designed by Edward Herbert Dean Smith in 1903, this was one of the greatest buildings ever to be put up in Perth. Just look at those rounded arches. And, if you feel like being depressed, go and look at what’s replaced it.

Surrey

So, there you have it. An imported style of architecture specifically intended to be not-British for a new nation which saw itself coming into being. Next time you see these rounded arches, you’ll know that it wasn’t just a fashionable design, it was a political statement.

by Eddie

The home of tomorrow, 1944 style

kitchen

Yes, we would like to live here.

We here at Dodgy Perth have lost count of the number of times we’ve been asked “Where was the most futuristic house in Western Australia?” Actually, the number is zero. But that’s never stopped us from imagining people asking such questions.

Anyway, even though you don’t care, the answer is a large residence on First Avenue, Mt Lawley. Unfortunately, the house number appears lost to history, but if you have any additional information please let us know.

In 1944, an RAAF man had some brief leave and decided to turn the family home into something out of Star Trek. The first thing you would notice is that the front door bell automatically triggered a light over your head. Now that’s space-age.

Then he modified the grandfather clock’s pendulum to work with two magnets, meaning it never needed winding and kept perfect time. This clock was wired to half-a-dozen other timepieces around the house, which ensured they always told the same time.

Both husband and wife were musicians, so the house was wired with an amplification system, which was reported as being one of the very best. We’re sure the neighbours would have loved that.

After this, it gets a bit weird. There were many other electric gadgets, all beautifully designed and finished from Tasmanian woods. But part of the house was a self-contained flat leased to tenants. And as the newspaper report cryptically put it:

There are naturally certain domestic offices which have to be shared by householder and tenants. To obviate any embarrassment, electric gadgets flash signals to the house indicating whether or not they are in use.

Embarrassment? What kind of electric devices would cause embarrassment if you were to be discovered using them? So you had to flash signals to the house? What? How? Why?

Get your mind out of the gutter, we’re sure there is an innocent explanation. Surely there must be an innocent explanation.

by Eddie

Dry hair: our proposal to save traditional marriage

bathing

This is what we must stop. And soon.

Something is endangering the very foundation of marriage. And we at Dodgy Perth are taking a stand. We would like, no we insist on, a plebiscite to defend the very core of traditional holy matrimony.

What can this awful thing be, you ask? Is it mixed-race marriages? Is it a Roman Catholic marrying an Anglican? Or is it The Gays demanding the right to be as miserable as their heterosexual counterparts? Nope. None of those. It is much, much worse. We refer, of course, to the horror of mixed bathing.

As Western Australia left behind the values of the 19th century, the question of whether men and women should be allowed to enter the same stretch of water at the same time became the most pressing issue of the hour.

Take Kalgoorlie, for example. In 1912 the council had to decide whether to allow ‘family bathing’ in the local pool. The experiment had been tried at Claremont, they were told, but it required the local police and three private security guards to be on patrol at all times, otherwise who knows what might happen? Kalgoorlie wisely decided to delay any decisions on the matter

And they were right to do so. As the newspapers explained the following year, bathing suits have a bad effect on the male libido and marriage rates plummet as a consequence.

In times gone by, men were entranced by the sight of girls daintily and modestly attired, and affection sprang from a kind of worship of something which charmed. Are bare necks, bare arms and bare legs, with ugly skull caps, a bewitching spectacle? What effect has the ungraceful ‘flopping’ of the feminine figure on the male emotions? The desire to harpoon it rather than embrace it is probably one result.

The debate raged on for years, but by 1920 science had definitively settled the question. Marriage rates were dropping because the mere sight of the bathing female kills all possibility of reproduction: “The spectacle of a girl in a dripping bathing costume, with wet hair hanging over her eyes, and looking like a bedraggled Skye terrier, has been responsible for many a man taking an oath of celibacy”.

So there you have it. This is the line which must be drawn. Marriage must be protected from change. And mixed bathing is change. Demand the plebiscite now.

 

by Eddie

Getting it on at Maccas

maccas

Buy Em By The Bag. We dare you.

As you probably know, the good citizens of Guildford are rejoicing over having fought off plans for a 24-hour Maccas to be built at the back of the Guildford Hotel. Even the local MLA, Michelle Roberts, is against any new fast food outlets in the town.

One of the reasons given for opposing the chain was that it was too close to a primary school. In other words, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” But this is far from a novel complaint about hamburger bars.

Although the media had regularly written accounts of how exciting Americans found them, the first burger bars seem to have arrived in WA only during World War II. And, just like the proposed Maccas, these were all-night joints. Which some sections of society found problematic.

In 1943, the head of the Salvation Army demanded that Perth should ensure all burger bars were closed at midnight, or society would be destroyed. How? you might ask. Well, they are “places of temptation”. And not just a temptation to supersize your order, oh no, temptation between the sexes.

You see, burger bars had become pick-up joints. (For young people: a pick-up joint is like Tinder, but without the need to register your email address.) “Perth has held such a fine place in moral standards that it ought to be the vital concern of every citizen to keep it in that position,” thundered the Salvation Army’s commissioner.

And he was not alone. The Women’s Service Guild wanted early closing on hamburgers, as did the Children’s Court magistrate and the Child Welfare Secretary.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

We suspect that the problem with burger bars was they were simply too American for the taste of Perth’s leading citizens. What was more likely to corrupt young minds than being exposed to Yankee food?

Anyway, Guildford has managed to protect young people (at least for the moment) from both the pleasures of a thick shake and the pleasures of the flesh. So we salute them.

by Eddie

The secret life of Hepburn Tindale

Tindale

A not very good picture of Hepburn, but the best we could find

Today we go down a rabbit hole. It starts with what we thought was a cute story about (possibly) the first Christian in Perth to convert to Islam and ends with lies at the inquiry into the Forrest River Massacre. If that’s not a rabbit hole, we don’t know what is.

But first, the story we originally thought we were going to tell.

In 1935, Hepburn Joseph Tindale underwent a ceremony at the William Street Mosque to formally convert to Islam. An old Guildford Grammar School boy, he had studied at Oxford University, before taking a degree in theology, working in South Africa, and then coming here as a freelance journalist for Sydney’s Bulletin.

Taking the new name Sadig Akber, he spoke about how all people needed to unite under one God, and this would eliminate war and racism. Which we thought was rather inspirational, even if it’s not a solution to world problems that particularly appeals to us.

So needing to know more about Hepburn’s spiritual journey, we looked him up in the archives. Which is where the Forrest River Massacre comes in, because he was one of the key witnesses during the inquiry in 1927. Only there he held a Masters in Anthropology from Oxford, was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and, as one of the leading experts on Aboriginal life, he was currently writing articles about them for the Manchester Guardian.

Which is a completely different story to the one he told eight years later.

As it happens, Hepburn was the cousin of Norman Tindale, whose anthropology is still considered masterful today. You’ve probably seen his map of Aboriginal language groups prior to European settlement. But Hepburn was not an expert on anything. In fact, he had no degree from Oxford, no Fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society, and had never written for the Guardian. To be fair, he had gone to Oxford in 1923 but left the same year with no qualifications.

But the inquiry didn’t know this and took him at face value as an expert on Aboriginal life in the Kimberley. Norman Tindale would have been. Hepburn Tindale was not. His testimony on how Aborigines lit fires and their cremation practices made it very difficult for the inquiry to prove beyond all reasonable doubt there had been a massacre.

So, it appears we have a Walter Mitty character, desperate to appear important in the eyes of others, and willing to do anything to be noticed. And the poor worshippers at the Mosque may have been the unknowing witnesses of yet another one of his fantasies. Certainly, we can’t find any more references to a ‘Sadig Akber’ after 1935, but the secretary of the Morowa Road Board in the 1940s was an ‘H. J. Tindale’. Could this be where our man finally ended up?

by Eddie

Fowl play

redrooster

Chickens in this story may be more alive than the ones pictured above

A little-known fact about the Dodgy Perth team is that we spend our days talking to town planners. Those who have dealt with this subspecies before will know they spend their office hours measuring your plans with a ruler and sadly shaking their heads when your setback from the side boundary is not in compliance with the R-Codes. (Look at us, using all the technical planning language.)

Yet it turns out there is a good reason for these rules, as we will demonstrate with a bizarre court case from April 1838, long before there were any planning regulations in Perth.

Frederick Turner and Charles Farmer were neighbours on St George’s Terrace. Turner had built his house right on the boundary, with his bedroom window overlooking Farmer’s land and residence. This evidently annoyed the latter, who happened to keep poultry in his backyard to feed his family, and probably make a little extra cash on the side.

These birds had a habit of wandering into Turner’s garden and pecking at his hay, messing it all up, so (at least according to Turner) his pony wouldn’t eat it. Now we are no experts on either ponies or chickens, but the allegation the fowl had destroyed eight tons of hay, none of which was then suitable for a pony, seems a little exaggerated. But, like we say, this office has no proficiency in creatures either two or four legged.

Rather than try to resolve the issue like good neighbours, Turner responded by employing George Embleton to put up a six-foot fence between the properties. The same George Embleton after whom the suburb is named, at least according to Landgate. Who have no reason to lie to us. Do they?

Farmer responded that if his bloody neighbour put up the fence, he would respond by building an enormous chicken coop right next to Turner’s bedroom window. He also complained that a tiny length of roof shingles was overhanging his land and demanded Embleton get a saw and shorten them all.

It probably didn’t calm matters down when Turner and Embleton decided one day to round up a few stray chickens in the backyard, tie their legs together with string and toss them in the pony’s stable. That probably didn’t help at all.

So, Farmer made good on his promise, and built a giant fowl (foul?) house right against Turner’s residence, blocking out all the light and ensuring that if he ever opened his window, all he would smell was chickens and more chickens.

This is why it went to the civil court.

The Commissioner, W. Mackie, was less than impressed by both sides. There not being any local regulations, he was forced back onto English law which said if you build up to the boundary your neighbour is entitled to do the same. And you can’t claim loss of light or air unless your house has been standing for more than twenty years.

But, he continued, it was clear that Farmer was an awful person too, who only built the coop to annoy his neighbour, not because it was the best place to put it. So, because of the health issues involved he demanded the shed be relocated. Even so, because both were to blame the Commissioner would award only a token one shilling for damages.

It turns out that planning regulations make for good neighbours. Probably. Unless your neighbour is an awful person anyway, in which case no rules are going to help you. Probably.

by Eddie

The times we need racists

Chinese_gardener,_ca._1893_121707

Market Gardener, 1893

Wait. What? Dodgy Perth is championing racists now? Of course not, but we must begrudgingly admit that bigots in the past have one good use: they give details about the lives of minorities which would otherwise be lost to historians. Don’t believe us? Let’s prove it.

Opposite the Brisbane Hotel is a patch of grass known as Birdwood Square. Most nights of the week you’ll find soccer players practicing there, and it hosts various events throughout the year. (Although it should be noted we mostly see it out of the Brisbane windows, rather than playing sport or doing non-drinking things.)

The original plan for the park was developed in 1917, and all sorts of exciting things were planned. It was to be laid out in avenues, lawns, shrubbery, and paths, with two hothouses and two shelters. Much more interesting than the current flat grass park which now exists.

The proposal also mentioned that in 1917 the land was currently a Chinese garden. And that’s all it said. To find out more we must turn to our racists. In this case, as so often back then, they were to be found among the journalists working for the scandal rag, The Truth.

How do we know the writer was xenophobic? Easy. The language used to describe the workers was ‘Chows’ and ‘heathens’, and a white woman who had a child with one of the Chinese market gardeners, and worked as their housekeeper, was ‘degraded’ by having a ‘half-caste’ kid. Pretty conclusive evidence we’d say. But what can we do with the information provided? We don’t want to discard it, because then we’d having nothing to say about the Chinese community living next to Beaufort Street in the early 20th century. But nor do we want to take it at face value. Instead, let’s pick it apart and see what’s of value.

According to our bigot, in 1903 there were four Chinese men running the market gardens, with sixteen men in their employ. A quick glance at the gardens, we are told, is deceptive. They can look beautiful with their spring foliage and fruit blossoms. And, of course, they provided food for the good (white) citizens of Perth.

But a peep ‘behind the scenes’ would disgust every right-thinking person, and probably put them off buying Chinese produce. The gardens were really a swamp, and there were piles of “evil-smelling manure, rotten old sacks, pieces of old matting, kerosene tins, old iron, and wire netting”. In other words, if not prejudiced against the workers, you might think this is like every other market garden. Ever.

The workers lived in rough housing on site, which revolted our journo, since he couldn’t imagine wanting to live in impoverished housing in a swamp. Naturally, this says more about the type of less-than-human the Chinese really were, than any socio-economic factors which might explain the choice of accommodation.

There is one factor more than any other which keeps coming up in accounts of Chinese market gardens. It is mentioned so often, it may even be true. Allegedly, and this sickened our white writer, one source of fertiliser was the water closets on site. The vegetables and fruit were being fed with human waste.

This topic is still controversial today, and the merits and dangers of biosolids (as poop is now euphemistically known) are debated over and over, with some claiming it’s the future and others decrying it as poisoning the crops. We don’t claim to have an opinion on the issue, but we do know that journalists working for The Truth wanted to expose this ‘crime’ as evidence no one should buy Chinese veg.

Worse, the workers, we are told, delighted in being surrounded by filth, “even if they know it will kill them”.

None of this would be easy information to come by, if it wasn’t for racists writing up lurid accounts, trying to discourage people from buying from the Chinese. Sure, it might be buried in a tedious government report, but the purple prose of a bigot can give an insight into the lives of those who aren’t usually documented in the history of our city.

by Eddie

What’s in a name?

Transperth_Queens_Park_Train_Station

Image courtesy of Shinjiman – Public Domain

Some stories are so good, they get retold over and over again. The only problem with some of these stories is that they aren’t true. In this particular case, the story is how the suburb of Queen’s Park got its name. And it involves a murder.

According to Landgate, and repeated by that source-of-all-truth Wikipedia, Queen’s Park was originally called Woodlupine and changed its name after a brutal crime which happened in the suburb in 1911 and became widely known as the Woolupine Murder. After all, who wants to live in a suburb with that association?

We won’t go into the details of the horrific rape-murder here, except to note there are question marks over whether the offender was mentally fit to stand trial, let alone be executed. But executed he was and there’s not a lot we can do about that now.

Now there is some truth to the story, but it doesn’t involve the local residents trying to get rid of a name to which they were very much attached.

Woodlupine wasn’t even originally called that. Until 1898 it was known as Jubilee Estate, until the Railway Department changed the name of the station. The new name was after an old orange plantation in the area which had been called Wood-Lupin. There were some protests, but the station name was changed anyway.

The good citizens of Woodlupine felt that everyone hated them. They were victimised by the Railway Department, by the Post Office and, most of all, by their local government, Queen’s Park, which had been founded in 1907. The new local government rose out of the ashes of the short-lived, and completely disastrous, Canning Roads Board which, you will not be surprised to hear, was loathed by everyone in Woodlupine.

So, when one of the first actions of Queen’s Park was to propose changing the name of Woodlupine Station and the Post Office to Queen’s Park, there was outrage. After all, the new council wanted everything named after itself, and Woodlupine was the busiest Post Office and Station, so it had to go.

Naturally, petitions and complaints followed, and the council chickened out and didn’t follow through on its plan. That is, until the Woodlupine Murder in 1911. Seizing their chance, the following year the councillors wrote to the Railway Department asking for the station’s name to be changed. This was agreed, provided Queen’s Park pay the £10 cost of having all the signage changed.

Perhaps the Woodlupine residents were worn down by years of council ‘oppression’. Perhaps the murder was on their minds. In any case, little opposition seems to have been raised and the council finally got their way.

The real story here (if we put aside the murder victim and her family) is about a local government needing to have its ‘brand’ on a Post Office and Railway Station and opportunistically seizing the moment. Is it more interesting than a tale of residents so disgusted by a crime they wanted to change the name of their suburb? That’s for the reader to decide.

by Eddie

Do you fancy another date?

straya-day

Just no.

As is well known, the Dodgy Perth team are patriotic loyalists to the core, as well as being internationally recognised historians (hello mum). Which means we are often asked about whether Australia Day should be on the 26 January, or if some other date would do equally well. Sit down, fire up the barbie, take a big sip of Emu Export and we’ll tell you a story.

We firmly believe the date on which the British flag was first raised on this continent should continue to be celebrated by taking a day off, dressing in Aussie flag bikinis and thongs, and drinking far too much. Which is why we commemorate every 23 August when James Cook first did this, on behalf of King George III, in 1770.

Wait. What we mean is we honour the founding of the first colony in New South Wales. Which was, as you know, 7 February. Because this is when David Collins read out the instructions which were to establish the permanent British presence on the east coast in 1788.

Wait. What we mean is the first landing by Arthur Phillip at Botany Bay to establish the first convict colony here. Which was 18 January 1788. After a week setting up, unloading equipment and livestock and clearing the ground, Phillip decided he’d made a mistake, forced everyone to put everything back on the ships and set sail for Sydney Cove. Which must have made some people very grumpy.

It was here they landed on the east coast, for the second time, on 26 January 1788. True, Phillip did lots of pomp and ceremony (again), as such an occasion demands, but it had no legal significance until 7 February. In any case, Cook had claimed the whole bloody continent eight years earlier.

And Australia wasn’t even a thing until 1 January 1901, anyway. So really it’s NSW Day at best. Although 1 January is already a holiday, and we’d prefer another day off each year to doubling up the meaning of that one.

Anyway, we propose having four Australia Days: 18 January, 26 January, 7 February, and 23 August. But if we’re only allowed one, 26 January is probably the worst choice, from both a historical and political angle. Still, four sounds good to us.

by Eddie

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1841

united-service

United Service Tavern shortly before demolition

As New Year’s Eve rapidly approaches, the Dodgy Perth team will be undertaking their usual ritual of preloading followed by a night out in a pub with live music, followed by drunkenly trying to get a snog at midnight. Naturally, the venue will not be the Brass Monkey, but you probably guessed that already. (Please note that Dodgy Perth does not condone excessive consumption of alcohol. If you do, it means less for us.)

Which made us wonder which Perth hotel threw the first ever NYE party. And we believe the answer is the United Service Tavern, pictured above. Sadly, this long-standing pub on St George’s Terrace was demolished around 1970 and was replaced by a fairly ugly building.

The original tavern was opened in 1835 by James Dobbins, formerly a private in the 63rd Regiment, who had arrived on the Sulphur accompanying the first wave of colonists in 1829. Keen to attract his former military colleagues to sink a couple of pints, James called the pub United Service Tavern and painted large pictures of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington on the front. That what was passed for equal opportunities in the 1830s: both army and navy were welcome.

united-service-2

The original United Service Tavern, pictured here in the 1860s

In 1840, the tavern was taken over by Henry Cole, known locally as King Cole, because apparently that was funny in the 19th century. And it was Henry who seems to have organised the first ever NYE public event in the Swan River Colony for 31 December 1841. Gentlemen’s tickets were 10 shillings each, while ladies only had to pay 7s 6d. Presumably because they would eat and drink less than the blokes, rather than a tacky stunt to get more females into the bar. Maybe.

nye

We object to gendered pricing policies. Even from 1841.

Later the building came into the hands of Henry Strickland and Stephen Chipper, before being leased by John Giles who added a new front to the original building. It was this frontage, and the 1835 hotel behind it, which were demolished in 1970, including original stables and outbuildings.

So, if you’re heading out tonight to a historic venue, remember to be thankful not everything has been knocked down. Yet.