Benemma

Our final weekend in Australia was set to be in Perth, zillions of miles from anywhere in the southwest corner of the country. I have two friends who live in Perth so I called them from the airport when we landed. One of my friends didn’t answer his phone and we never managed to make contact over the whole weekend. However, Spencer answered his phone on the second attempt, he sounded gravelly and confused. “Have I woken you up?” I asked.

“Ahhh, it’s okay, it’s fine, no worries. What time is it?”

“It’s pretty late”.

“I had a big night”.

“Sorry mate, I’ll let you sleep. I just wanted to see if you were still up for meeting us today”.

“Nah man, it’s all good. Get yourself a coffee, I’ll be there in half an hour”. We have some lovely friends.

EXPLORING THE COAST AROUND ROCKINGHAM

Spence gave us the master bedroom in his house, relegating himself to a mattress on the floor of a small back room. He bought the house a few years ago and recently threw himself at renovating it. When we arrived the walls were freshly painted and he had just laid the last panels of a wood-vinyl floor throughout. On seeing Spence’s good work I said, “I’d love to do something like this one day but unlike you I haven’t got a clue how to do anything practical like renovation”.

“Neither did I mate, I learned it all on YouTube”.

We didn’t linger at the house as our short stay in Western Australia was shrinking fast. We took a train to the centre of Perth and waiting for us there was our old friend Rachel. Rachel had toured India by herself, starting just two weeks after we did and teaming up with us in Goa in November, then she’d been through Thailand and moved on to Oz, starting in Perth just ahead of our arrival there. She was golden and relaxed. We had a beer in a downtown bar that had been fitted, like many in scorching Oz, with water vapour jets to cool the customers, engulfing everyone in a slightly disturbing mist. Disturbed even more so by the beer prices we left and Rachel led us to her hostel for a cheaper brew. The hostel was buzzing with young travellers, most of whom seemed to be friendly with Rachel already. She leaned over to us and whispered, “I’m 25, okay?”

Our enjoyment of cavorting with multicultured people worryingly younger than ourselves was ruptured by a scuffle nearby. Amongst typically friendly, open people, a small group of heavily-accented Irish lads had been making themselves increasingly irritating with bravado and posturing. Now one of them had taken a disliking to a posh English gap-year boy. He tore off his shirt to reveal the skinny chest he was projecting in anger. His face was screwed in a pathetic attempt to look menacing. Somehow the crowd surged out onto the street to take the fight outside but it mounted to little. Unsure of where to direct his wayward testosterone, the Irish lad head-butted the front window of the hostel. An Irish girl leaned out the door and shouted, “Ah, you’re just a knacker!” Then the police arrived – on horseback, to our glee – and we sneaked out through the mêlée. We gathered from conversations that night, not to mention immediate evidence, that the Irish have a poor reputation in Perth. One girl we spoke to said that her and her friends kept being turned away by potential landlords at the sound of her Cork accent. Emma and I have travelled fairly widely and the Perth situation is anomalous. Elsewhere in the world, to hail from Ireland is a passport to hospitality.

That’s enough of drunken people and their weaknesses. Besides, our night ended abruptly after leaving the hostel because it’s annoyingly hard to buy alcohol after about 21:00 in much of Oz. Let’s move to the next day, spent in the infinitely more rewarding company of Mother Nature. Spencer took us to some of his favourite spots around his home town of Rockingham and added to the mounting proof of quite how lovely outdoor Australia can be. We waded out on a low tide across a few hundred metres of crystal water to a small, rocky protrusion called Penguin Island.

REEDS ON THE BEACH NEAR ROCKINGHAM

Most of the penguins on that eponymous island are in captivity but we found the odd wild one scuffling around under the searing boardwalks. The higher parts of the island were dominated by a regal crowd of nesting pelicans, squadrons of which made occasional launches and encircled us in the clear sky. Huge, black, skink-like reptiles, their scales shimmering like oil, made sporadic sorties from the bushes to take food scraps from picnicking tourists. The island teems. The surrounding sea teems more still. We all snorkelled off one of the headlands amongst crowds of darting fish. Spencer and I ventured further off, into rougher and deeper water. He dived deep under an overhanging section of rock and popped up on the other side, so I filled my lungs and followed him through. In that brief moment of beating our limbs against the water our old friend Adrenalin tapped us on the shoulders and made us a little giddy with pleasure.

Back on the mainland we toured the waterfront in central Rockingham. There is plentiful public parkland along the front, surrounded by spacious venues offering good eating (and very good ice-cream, for the record). At the back end of the afternoon the trees filled with noisy galahs and the sunlight took on a prettier and less aggressive demeanour. We went to another of Spencer’s top hideaways in hope of spotting some dolphins before we left the country. He showed us cliffs that had been pummelled by the sea into a Martian labyrinth of black rock. At the cliffs’ deepest point a wild colony of bees was huddled into a crevice. It was from this weird landscape that we looked out across the glistening sea and saw the slow bulges of dolphins in the middle distance. As if that was enough, driving away we passed a man in smart golfing gear, standing in a lay-by playing bagpipes for nobody but the passing cars.

OUR GANG UNDER A BEEHIVE IN THE ROCKS AT SPENCE'S SECRET SPOT

On our final day we had a quick daylight look at Perth itself. The city’s proud highlight is King’s Park. The park is perched above high, steep slopes and offers a mighty panorama over the city centre and the junction of Swan river. Technicolour streaks of yet more noisy birds darted between an impressive array of trees, with plaques explaining the Aborigines’ many uses for those trees. The park hosts a sacred boab, brought hundreds of miles from its home for safe-keeping in Perth. Spence’s description of the boab tree was more eloquent than anything I could rustle up: “All trunk and no tree”.

Perth is, as many people say, generally laid-back, clean and not without a little style. Outside the city, the region abounds with natural beauty, particularly its wildlife, which is both prolific and on display. It is the only place in the country where we really felt the presence of Aborigine people but we got the impression that white Western Australians have little more good to say about the indigenous race than elsewhere. We would liked to have delved deeper into this dark story but our time was up. We said goodbye to our dear friends over one final overpriced pint in the city centre then took a bus to the airport. We were now well along the retracing of our outward steps and headed home but it didn’t feel like it. Thankfully, there was still plenty of fun and wonder ahead of us.