ANYONE who’s booked their wedding at Harold Boas gardens in 2015 may have to think again. The heritage-listed and picturesque gardens’ lakes are badly leaking and look likely to get a $1.4 million repair job, starting in January. Perth city council staffers concede it’ll have a “major impact on wedding bookings”. Unless brides want excavators,…

DENHAM “BOB” BOULGER is 81 and full of beans. He spent three days trudging around Vincent in the rain—hiking up stairs, avoiding rottweilers and assiduously door-knocking—to collect 142 signatures and trigger a special electors’ meeting on council mergers. The sprightly octogenarian wants Vincent’s boundaries to remain intact, unlike Vincent city council which has officially proposed…

MAYLANDS Labor MP Lisa Baker has enlisted Channel 7 in her battle against a Dan Murphy’s liquor barn planned for Maylands. The 990sqm bottleshop—part of a redeveloped $3.5 million Peninsula Tavern—has proved unpopular with both Bayswater city council and Maylands Ratepayers’ and Residents’ Association, which say access to cheap grog contributes to anti-social problems throughout…

A SLOW point has been installed by mistake on Palmerston Street because Vincent council workers were using old plans. Whoopsy. The choke point forces cars heading in one direction to halt while those going the other way continue: it cost between $5000 and $10,000 to put in. Councillors had voted 7-1 in February 2013 to…

AUSTRALIAN troops withdrew from Afghanistan last year but for many the memories are indelible. Maylands’ Dorsa Nazemi-Salman has just returned from a 13-month stint in Herat, western Afghanistan, where she worked for the Red Cross as a protection aid worker. The 34-year-old was in charge of Herat Provincial Prison, the country’s second largest gaol, where…

THE restoration of Walters Brook in Mt Lawley will be celebrated with a community planting day. The Swan River tributary—effectively a Water Corporation drain—had been heavily eroded by fast-running water and contained little of its original vegetation. In 2013 Vincent city council started a $173,360 facelift by re-contouring banks, installing gabion baskets (wire frames filled…

THE DE RUYTER family is planning to open a multi-million dollar wine bar-cafe and live music venue in Maylands. Three-storey “Lyric Lane” would have a licensed function room in the basement— earmarked for live music and comedy—and a cafe-bar on the ground floor. The top two floors would be used for office space and limited…

NO, Michael Sutherland isn’t ordering NASA furniture for his speaker’s chamber, nor launching a burger chain in space, he’s chatting with busker Claude Woodward. The Perth-born “Sonic Manipulator” has been touring the world for years with his bastardised synths and homemade instruments, bamboozling crowds with bleeps and blips. After a successful stint in England where…

EVERY doll has a story, Noongar dollmaker Geri Hayden says. “I grew up on a reserve in Brookton,” she says. “All my old nanas used to make dolls out of materials. “What they did was any cloth, clothes or a little baby rug or whatever, they’d get that and wrap it up, tie it up.”…