Perth Voice Interactive

FLORENCE, Evelina and Rose check out Vincent council’s new all-ages playground which has just opened on the corner of Sydney and Haynes streets in North Perth.

Part of the Haynes Street Reserve development, the playground is the first area to be opened to the public and includes a log scramble, cubby, basket swing, tightropes, stilt steppers and limestone boulders.

Deputy mayor Susan Gontaszewski said North Perth residents had been waiting a long time for their park. “Our public open space strategy found we did not have enough parks in North Perth so we wanted to create more parkland for the residents,” Cr Gontaszewski said.

Vincent will also add grassed areas, garden beds and native plants around the reserve.

ONLINE multicultural radio station Global Chat Radio is on a mission to keep Western Australian migrants connected with their culture, but needs more volunteers to make it happen. 

Founder Franco Smargiassi, who migrated from Italy as a child, describes WA’s culture as “rich” but says over time those who have migrated to Australia have been slowly losing connection with their heritage.

Mr Smargiassi spoke standard Italian to his children while they were growing up and now rues not using the dialect of his hometown Vasto.

“My children tell me that within a generation, my dialect back in Italy will have disappeared forever from this world,” he said.

That loss would be “devastating”. 

To encourage migrant families to be proud of their backgrounds, Mr Smargiassi founded Global Chat Radio in 2015,  giving them a platform to share their culture amongst each other and the wider community. 

Volunteer Nirmal Singh migrated from India in 2014 and met Mr Smargiassi while working as a project officer with Kaleidoscope Initiative, which helps migrants become job-ready. 

Mr Smargiassi invited him to conduct some interviews, giving him a platform to share his passion for helping others learn about different cultures, along with teaching people from multicultural backgrounds about Australia. 

Mr Singh encouraged all Western Australians to take a moment to learn something new about the different cultures surrounding them. 

“There is variation in how we do things, there is no one way,” Mr Singh said.

“That is why we should respect each other and learn about each other.”

GCR, which is based in Tuart Hill, relies on volunteers to create and present their own programs, sharing personal stories and migration-related issues 

“We need more volunteers to make things happen,” Mr Smargiassi said.  Anyone can volunteer through the Global Chat Radios website at https://global-chat-radio.webnode.page/

“EVERYBODY has a backstory” and artist Alun Bartsch brings his subjects’ tales into focus in his first solo photography exhibition Backstories.

Bartsch, a Coolbinia local, had a 30-year career in advertising and now works in TV and film production. Work has taken him around the world, to Turkey, Spain, Italy, Greece, China, and back here. 

Between the carefully curated commercial shoots he walks the cities to find human subjects for his more impromptu creative work, reportage-style street photography.

Bartsch, who describes himself as “a writer with a passion for photography. Or perhaps a photographer with a passion for writing” isn’t content to let the picture tell the story alone: He pens captions for each image, elucidating their stories and struggles in a few stark sentences. 

Humble

The subjects are varied, but often humble: A Sicilian barber of 65 years’ experience who served generations of Randazzo men, a fishermen’s net maker in Denpasar, a seasoned Aboriginal stockman in Broome.

For his first exhibition Bartsch has collected a retrospective of his street photography images – the happenstance backstories he stumbled across – paired with a new series of curated characters chosen specifically for their backstories. 

There’s an antiquarian bookseller losing his eyesight, a woman tattooed with a vengeful fictional character in an act of empowerment after childhood trauma, and a ballerina on crutches as her career is put on hold for a knee reconstruction.

They’re all shot from behind. No “back” story intended, Bartsch says: He finds the photos from behind, relying on a single pose or prop pointing to the backstory, removes the distraction of faces and expressions.

In shooting these new characters, Bartsch has kept some of the serendipitous elements of his street photography to keep the images raw and the people real. 

He uses no lighting setup, only whatever ever-changing available light is around. There’s no photoshopping, and he shoots in monochrome; he believes black and white better captures emotion, and colour can distract from stories.

Backstories runs April 21 to May 12 at Gallery Central at 12 Aberdeen Street Northbridge, with a performance on April 29 featuring music from The Drowners and Paloma. 

by DAVID BELL

A HUGE patch of Bayswater’s industrial zone is yet to be connected to modern sewerage, which is holding the district back, threatening trade jobs, and possibly poisoning the groundwater.

Instead of pipes the industrial zone inhabitants mostly use septic tanks or aerobic treatment units, which aren’t always suitable for modern industrial uses and are a turn-off for big industrial employers. 

Long-term resident Arthur Hinds, an experienced health inspector, has been campaigning to get action on the issue for a few years now. 

He’s warned the council that sewage seeping into the groundwater is likely contributing to fish kills.

“Look your kids in the eyes and tell them ‘we have failed’, because I can’t take my children to the river,” a furious Mr Hinds said at a 2020 council meeting. “I can’t take my grandkids to catch a crab, I can’t take them to catch a fish ‚Äì because the river is polluted.

“London had a sewer in 1866. We are in 2020 and we are still shitting in the ground. Bayswater has been dumping shit in the river for 135 years. Do something about it.”

But the project’s expensive and the council’s attempts to get the Water Corporation to help fund them have hit a catch-22: The Water Corp doesn’t prioritise “infill projects” as there’s not much uptake of development there. But development’s stymied by the lack of pipes.

Bayswater councillor Josh Eveson put up a motion at the March 28 meeting requesting the council CEO and mayor campaign to get state government funding in the 2023/24 budget.

Cr Eveson said installing a modern sewerage system “unlocks the significant growth potential of the Bayswater Industrial Area, an industrial area that is underdeveloped, unkempt, and environmentally concerning.

“This isn’t a new thing, sadly, and for decades the BIA has been overlooked as an important contributor to our local economy, one that could deliver much needed growth and local jobs.”

Only 33 per cent of the vast land holdings in the BIA has actually been developed, in a big part owing to the lack of pipes. 

He said the council’s recent Waterwise strategy had identified “the high density of septic tanks throughout the industrial area was considered a large source of the elevated nutrient levels found in outflow in the Swan River”.

Cr Dan Bull agreed they needed to look after Bayswater’s industrial areas, and said installing proper sewerage would help “protect inner-city blue collar jobs.

“It’s super important that people who work in trades in those industries are not pushed to the outer suburbs. And so thinking about the development of this area in a way that protects those kinds of jobs and trades, is super, super important for the inner-east.”

Mayor Filomena Piffaretti said “this is a real priority for the City of Bayswater.

“It will create jobs, it will bring better use for the land… it’s well overdue and we need this to happen ASAP.”

The vote was unanimous and they’ll now pen letters to four state government ministers – planning, lands, water and health – to seek funding.

by DAVID BELL

AFTER a three-year break the popular Mount Hawthorn Hawkers Market returns to Axford Park for a pop-up preview this Friday April 14. 

Vincent council’s found a new operator in Roz Collins, whose events company In the Bag Promotions has run the Saturday morning Kyilla Community Farmers Market.

They’re fitting in one pop-up hawkers market before the traditional cold weather hiatus hits, before returning in Spring on September 29. The street food sellers roll out their fare from 4.30 – 8.30pm.

Photo by Danica Zuks

AN eagle-eyed ratepayer has called out Vincent council for plagiarising so heavily from the City of Townsville’s CCTV policy that it’s own draft version quotes Queensland legislation that’s not relevant to WA.

Brendan Bensky, who’s got an interest in privacy policy, says aside from the red faces such a gaffe should produce, it’s made him question whether the council has the competency to run a CCTV network and deal with the complex world of privacy.

Councillors unanimously voted at their April 4 meeting to put the revamped CCTV policy out for public comment. The old policy needed amendments to cover recently installed CCTV systems in Leederville and the Mount Lawley/Highgate town centres, and recording devices worn by rangers. 

Mr Bensky wrote to all councillors this week pointing out: “Your new policy references the Information Privacy Act of 2009, and the Right to Information Act of 2009. However, these are Acts from Queensland – the QLD Information Privacy Act of 2009, and the QLD Right to Information Act of 2009.”

He compared Vincent and Townsville’s CCTV policies side-by-side and found that aside from small differences, “they’re materially identical”.

“I don’t know what’s more shocking,” Mr Bensky wrote to councillors, “that the City plagiarises policy from another state, or that no one in the City can correctly identify the prevailing privacy legislation to which the City is aligned?”

It’s not unusual for councils to copy text from each other.

Mr Bensky later told the Voice it was an indication of “how backward we are in WA without privacy legislation covering local governments”.

He says Vincent instead has a privacy policy that voluntarily aligns with the Commonwealth Privacy Act, but there’s no legal teeth to deter breaches. 

He’d previously raised concerns with the council over how it handled private data collected through its electronic parking permit system, which uses numberplate recognition and stores a parker’s information on a council database. 

“The City had no privacy competence at the time. Nothing seems to have changed…” Mr Bensky wrote to councillors.

Vincent’s not alone in its patchy IT security: Most of the 15 councils in a 2021 audit failed hacking tests, but their names were kept secret to not expose vulnerabilities to hackers. 

In December 2022 WA attorney general John Quigley announced new state privacy laws were in the pipeline to try to better protect personal data. 

The law is set to include rules for how the WA public sector and contractors handle personal information, require mandatory notification of data breaches, and establish an independent body where people can bring complaints about privacy breaches.

CCTV rulesVincent’s copy-pasted policy is due to be advertised from this week for 21 days of public comment, then it’ll go back to councillors who’ll vote on whether to adopt the new Townsvincent CCTV rules. 

We put Mr Bensky’s critique to the council, and got an emailed response attributed to acting mayor Susan Gontaszewski: “Any submissions received at the conclusion of the public notice period will be presented to Council for consideration prior to the policy being formally adopted.

“Vincent has received some initial feedback from the public relating to the content of the amended policy, which will be addressed as part of the usual process.”

In 2020 a WA auditor general report found Vincent’s computer systems had many “high risk” flaws that left it open to hackers, and the council embarked on a 24-item plan to fix critical vulnerabilities. 

As of the most recent auditor general report in 2022, several “moderate” risks were still present, including that 17 terminated employee accounts still had access to council finance and payroll systems, and a confidential “database security” issue and a “remote access” risk, both deemed too high risk for their details to be made public.

Most of the remaining risks are listed to be fixed by May 2023.