Jump to content. The Library building will be closed on Good Friday, 2 April, and public holiday hours will operate April. Check our opening hours before you stop by. Read more. My novels, A Stranger in my Street and Taking a Chance , are both set in Perth in and they describe the landscape of a Perth that has now changed completely. One of the main motivations for setting my novels in the Second World War period, and in Perth, is entirely personal. It came out of a drive with my then ninety-year-old mother in All the places that had sheltered her in her long life in Perth, all the fixed landmarks of her emotional landscape, had disappeared.
It was to form the backdrop for my first novel, A Stranger in my Street. That drive with my mother made me vividly aware of how much the Perth my mother knew as a young woman had changed. In the s, St Georges Terrace had been Built To Survey Boats accounted one of the most elegant main streets in Australia, but three mining booms since the s have seen landmark buildings tumble, to be replaced with towers of steel, glass and concrete. The trams and trolley buses that transported my mother to her job at the General Post Office are no more.
The dance halls, ballrooms and cabarets where she danced with American servicemen have disappeared. I decided then that in my novels I wanted to chronicle the old Perth, to preserve in words what had been lost, to recreate the landscape of the past.
And I wanted to do so in the context of mystery novels set in the time when my mother was a young woman.
Using the stories and memories of someone who had been an inhabitant of the landscape of wartime Perth, would, I hoped, provide an extra dimension to novels that would not be reliant only on my research and imagination. People tend to interpret the word landscape as simply the physical setting, but there is a human landscape as well. So, the landscape of my novels is more than the buildings of central Perth and its suburbs set along the banks of the Swan River.
The people of Perth inhabited suburban houses in streets that were really little communities and most of them were white, due to Boats Built In Georgia 9th the rural segregation of Aborigines and the White Australia Policy. Perth was seen as a safe environment, so houses were left unlocked. Children were told to go out and play and not come back until tea.
Neighbours knew each other and kept an eye out for each other in this time of national and often personal crises. Because it must be remembered that Perth in was a city in a nation that was at war. And, as Western Australia had the highest enlistment rate of any state in Australia, it was a city that was missing its men. It was a time of fear, of constant worry about husbands, sons, boyfriends, brothers and friends who were in danger.
It was also an exciting time, and I wanted to recreate that sense of excitement. The poet and novelist, Dorothy Hewett, was then a young reporter in Perth, and she was quoted as saying:.
Those Yanks had money, manners, smart uniforms and they knew how to jitterbug! American movies were the staple entertainment at the pictures, and it was as if Hollywood had come to Perth. They wore tailored uniforms and handed out sweets and chewing gum and flowers and chocolates and nylons, and they romanced Australian girls. Even now, people remember the Americans vividly as part of the landscape of the time. Obviously there was also a physical landscape and it has to be described in the novels.
It was the most isolated capital city in the world. And in that meant real isolation, a journey of 4 or 5 days to Melbourne or Sydney by train, or by boat, via Adelaide. Unlike other Australian cities there was no large scale manufacturing industry or industrial slums. So, when my nineteen-year-old father was on leave in Melbourne in , he wrote that Melbourne:. To my eyes it looked smudgy and dirty and not a bit like Perth, which is always clean no matter where one looks.
But in Perth was also a city at war, and the landscape reflected this. Sandbags were piled against shop windows. Department store windows were boarded up, or covered with planks or wire netting or criss-crossed with cotton strips.
Air raid shelters were constructed in suburban back yards and slit trenches had been dug in parks and by the roadside. Submarines were crowded into Fremantle Harbour and there were always war ships in Gage Roads. Catalina flying boats rested in Crawley Bay; they took off and returned each day with a roar that was heard for miles around.
There was barbed wire also on suburban beaches and riverbanks. Army bases had been constructed on football grounds, golf courses and parks. At least some of these elements had to be referred to in my novels, in order to paint a vivid picture of wartime Perth. I had prided myself on my authentic recreation of the period in my first novel, A Stranger in my Street. In my second novel, Taking a Chance , I had the temerity to invent a fictional village that I named Richmond.
I needed somewhere similar to the real village of Darlington, which is located in the hills above Perth and is famous for having hosted D. Lawrence in For plot purposes, my village needed to be bigger and to have a hotel and a church. When I was crafting the novel, it had been a difficult choice for me, between adding fictional elements to a real village or creating an entirely new one.
Inventing a village named Richmond was driven by the needs of the plot, but the landscape of my fictional village was as accurate as I could make it, given my knowledge of s Perth and of the little settlements in the hills above the city.
I used digitized newspapers in the marvellous National Library of Australia site, Trove. This allowed me to read the same news items my characters read, to see the advertisements that tempted them, and to pore over the casualty lists that horrified them. The Mirror specialised in gossip and tawdry tales of the divorce courts.
The Mirror certainly captured the spirit of the times. I also read the Australian National Dictionary to find when words were first used and in what context. Trove again proved invaluable if I was worried about whether a particular word or phrase was actually used in I would put the phrase or word into Trove and do a search in the newspapers of the s. If it was used in contemporary newspapers, then I felt confident in including it in my writing.
I examined photographs of Perth in the s to get a feel for the streetscape and the buildings that have now disappeared.
These photographs were found on-line at various library sites such as Trove, or the state libraries, or in books. I also bought post cards and photographs from e-bay, or viewed collections held at libraries or in personal collections. I visited museums in Perth and other cities that had exhibitions that were relevant to my period.
I read memoirs of people who had lived through the time. They told me of parties and dances with Americans, and described hotels and houses and buildings that had been demolished long ago. I studied the social and political history of the period. I analysed the Post Office Directories for to see where my characters lived, and where the shops, cabarets, dance halls, cafes and public buildings they visited were located. I looked at the Perth Street Directory of , to trace tram routes and bus routes.
But I was writing fiction, not history, and so I had to scatter my research lightly in the novels. More than any other capital city in Australia, I think that Perth has changed beyond recognition in the last seventy years. In my novels I wanted to evoke a sense of the Perth of the early s, and a sense of a city at war. I wanted to reconstruct what has gone, both in the landscape my characters inhabited, but also in the way they lived and behaved. I wanted the Home Built Boats Youtube 5.0 characters I placed into the landscape of wartime Perth to behave as people of their time, not as contemporary creatures moving awkwardly around in a lovingly recreated theatrical set, with their twenty-first century sensibilities intact.
And yet, although the characters needed to engage with their landscape as accurately as possible, they had to do so in a way that would be of interest to readers in And that is possibly the most difficult part of writing historical fiction � balancing historical plausibility with an engaging story.
I suppose my ultimate aim in researching the period so intensively, was to paint a picture of wartime Perth that was so believable that the reader would simply accept it without thinking too much about it. Close alert. Collections menu What we collect Recent acquisition highlights Archived websites Asian Dance Ephemera Indigenous Manuscripts Maps Music Newspapers Oral history and folklore Pacific Pictures Preserving our collections Building our collections Collecting multicultural Australia Acquisitions wish list Selected Library collections Collection statistics History of the collection Processing and describing our collections.
My motivations for writing novels set in wartime Perth. How did I go about the reconstruction of the landscape of s Perth? Conclusion More than any other capital city in Australia, I think that Perth has changed beyond recognition in the last seventy years.
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