Perth Voice Interactive

BOARDED up brothels on Roe Street are some of photographer Pippa Tandy’s earliest memories of growing up in Perth.

Remembering Perth’s red-light district as a teenager, she tells the Voice: “You hurried past.”

Then Perth, not Northbridge, it was known colloquially as “the Latin Quarter”, an area of gambling dens and unsavoury characters, where ordinary citizens were not encouraged to linger: “It was genuinely sleazy, from my memory, not the genteel sleaze [of today],” Tandy says.

Factories and the sex industry rubbed shoulders with shops, cafes and the homes of mostly Italian and Greek migrants. The now trendy Re Store was where emigres filled flagons with locally made wine.

Tandy’s latest exhibition The William Street Project, is aimed at capturing the atmosphere of the past, overlaid with the present.

“The moodiness you get on William Street.”

Having experienced the area at its toughest, Tandy is happy these days to walk the streets at night, including a recent wander in the small wee hours of Sunday.

“If you stay out of people’s faces you are okay,”

“I turned into William Street and could hear the sound of breaking glass—at three in the morning.”

Liquored up punters were spilling out of nightclubs, queuing for kebabs and looking for transport home, at a time when less intrepid souls avoid Northbridge.

“If you stay out of people’s faces you are okay,” the 62-year-old says, adding, “my fear is being run over”.

The exhibition follows the people on William St over several 24-hour periods. Day-time shoppers, and shop-keepers, office workers hurrying along the pavement to and from work, the weekend night-time crowds—and the sun coming up as the early morning street cleaners, mop up the night’s carnage.

“I work all along the street in all kinds of interiors from the well-known Bird near the Horseshoe Bridge to my dentist next door to the Perth Mosque,” Tandy says. Different times of the year yield different moods, the streets sombre in the rain, or dazzling with sunshine.

“In winter people are scurrying, in summer they are loping.”

Tandy had started the project as a technical challenge, “an exercise to develop my photo skills with urban subjects”.

“[But] the street took over and opened up all kinds of ways I had never imagined possible.”

The William Street Project is on at The KURBgallery, 312 William St, Northbridge, December 15–31, with a chance to talk to the artist Saturday December 21, 2.30.

by JENNY D’ANGER