The beautiful Swan River flows into the Indian Ocean at the port of Fremantle, but 12 miles before that the river opens out to form a lake nearly a mile wide, and it is here that the city of Perth sits, surrounding the river as if to protect its most treasured possession. The tree lined St Georges Terrace runs along the north side of the river and is the main business district and heart of Perth.
Our first drive along the Terrace was unforgettable; so many tall buildings running away into the distance and everywhere looking clean and new all bathed in the sunlight which reflected off the acres of glass reaching up towards a perfectly blue sky.
All too soon we arrived at the car yard and were left alone to look at the cars on offer. I had set my heart on a big estate car that we might use for camping but there was nothing suitable there, however the salesman said he had one coming in and it would be ready in about a week and that he would lend me a car until then, I agreed and 10 minutes later we were loose on the streets of Perth in a huge Valiant.
That first week was fantastic, there are about 20 beaches up and down the metropolitan coast and we explored every one. I found driving in Perth very easy as the road rules are similar to those in the UK.
At the end of the week we returned the valiant and bought the estate car, it was a good solid Holden that gave us good service for 3 years at which time I sold it and got most of our money back on it.
As the weeks went by we made friends with several families and started to settle into hostel life, Sue was drafted into the ladies rounders team and joined various classes for arts, crafts cookery and typing, all of which helped to enlarge her circle of friends. I joined the darts/pool team which went down to the local pub each week and frequently won cases of beer in the pool competition.
The kids started at the local school when the summer holidays finished in February, with the kids gone our days were free to enjoy so we started going down to the beach every day with about 10 other couples and our little encampment of beach umbrellas became a familiar sight at Cottesloe beach.
This particular beach had gained fame several years earlier when Prince Charles was visiting Perth and went there for a swim. A nubile young lass ran into the surf and gave him a big kiss, the picture ran in all the papers at the time, it came out later that the girl was a local model and had been paid to stage the ‘impromptu’ kiss.
The weeks slipped easily by as we took to our new hedonistic lifestyle as beach goers, no matter that non of us had much money, we could have been millionaires for all anyone knew, lazing in the sun everyday. At first I had felt guilty about not looking for work but there was nothing about so why worry?
I had gone to an employment agency and been told that there were so many locals out of work that a migrant had no chance at the moment, their best advice was to find something temporary like selling life insurance until the situation improved. There seemed to be a reluctance to employ people living in the hostel because there was a fairly high percentage of migrants leaving to go back home at short notice.
After a few months things started to change in the hostel, we first heard movement at night, coaches coming and going and lots of people. When we got up in the morning there were about 100 Vietnamese boat people - refugees wandering around, they had been brought into the hostel overnight and would spend the next 3 weeks there, housed in the old Nissen huts, learning basic English before being shipped off to Melbourne to work on the farms. This process was repeated several times and as the hostel slowly turned into a refugee camp it became obvious that it was time for us to leave.
The Vietnamese were actually lovely people, mostly from farming villages, very simple and poor people. One of our friends had a young son with fiery red hair and the Vietnamese had never seen anything like it before, they thought he was good luck and wanted to touch his hair and kiss him, all totally innocent but his father wasn’t impressed and told them to keep away from his son.
One of the refugees came up to me one day and asked me, in broken English where the gold ring shop was, I eventually realised that he wanted a jewellers as he pulled a handful of gold wedding rings from his pocket, he couldn’t bring any possessions with him on the boat so he had traded everything he owned with other villagers for their wedding rings, to be sold for cash in Australia, very clever.
Some friends of ours had bought a house in a suburb about 15 miles north of the City, on the coast but the last suburb before the bush began, so it was relatively cheap to rent and build there . We went to look at their house and fell in love with the area, it seemed a fair way out of the city but it was so untouched, there were empty beaches and kangaroos grazing at the end of the street.
We found a house that someone wanted to rent privately for 6 months, we decided to take it, and so in July, after a fantastic 6 month holiday, we packed all our belongings into the wagon and moved out.
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