Perth Voice Interactive

WEST PERTH’S ageing but tidy Murray Hotel has been bought by the state government to house around 30 homeless people.

The purchase comes as the timeframe for completing the government’s flagship “Common Ground” long-term supported-living facility in East Perth has been pushed back another year to 2025 and other homeless facilities remain at high levels of occupancy.

Labor’s state housing minister John Carey said in his announcement of the Murray Hotel purchase: “As a housing-first supported accommodation service, this accommodation option will provide intensive wrap-around supports to help people who are sleeping rough access appropriate, longer-term housing.”

The government spent $5.15 million on the building which still recently operated as a family-run hotel, and is now seeking a tenderer to run the support services there.

It’ll mostly cater for single people but have a few rooms for couples.

As of December the Boorloo Bidee Mia, the 100-person facility set up in the old YHA hostel at 300 Wellington Street, was at 92 per cent occupancy. 

The government also opened Koort Boodja in mid-2021, another interim measure with a 30-person capacity.

As of last summer’s count there were about 190 people sleeping on Perth’s streets.

When the government’s silver bullet Common Ground was first announced in December 2019 and construction was meant to start in the 2021/22 financial year.

An attempt to find a tenderer to build it fell flat mid-2022 when no satisfactory contractor was found, leading to a second search being launched in late 2022.

by DAVID BELL

TWO HUNDRED flood risk hotspots have been identified around Vincent, with works underway to address the most urgent.

Lynton Street in Mount Hawthorn was turned into a canoeable river in 2021, and nearby Menzies Park was a lake for a day.

In recent year’s Vincent’s copped a heavy downpour of criticism from residents who feel the flood response has been too slow. 

Residents opposite Beatty Park had a years-long struggle before the council installed a flood wall in 2022. A year earlier they’d purchased their own sandbags and built a makeshift dyke to stave off heavy rains. 

Low-lying Leederville too, suffered in 2021. Residents there have gone as far as clearing council drains themselves, buying their own pump, and bricking up their boundaries to keep water at bay.

Mount Hawthorn resident Lesley Forey fronted the final council meeting of 2022 to query what was happening with the drains in her suburb, asking if the pipe’s diametre was still adequate for modern rain levels and if the pipes were still within their service life.

Vincent has $425,000 on the books this year to map out which bits of the drainage system are struggling most and to get started on priority upgrades.

Mayor Emma Cole told Ms Forey: “This spot in Mount Hawthorn is probably our number one priority in terms of drainage in the City of Vincent.

In a media release this week the mayor announced upgrades would start in Lynton Street, East Street and Sasse Avenue. 

Climate

“Our climate is rapidly changing so it is important that we are ready to adapt,” Ms Cole said.

“We need to ensure our essential infrastructure, like drainage, is reviewed and upgraded in response to changing weather and storm frequency.”

The council will also run the numbers on whether it should keep spending $160,000 a year on external contractors to clear out drains, or whether it’ll be more efficient to have an in-house team and equipment.

be regularly monitored and unclogged when needed. 

One North Perth resident told the Voice he hadn’t seen regular unclogging: In 2022 he says workers cleaning out a leaf-laden drain near Beatty Park found a wallet which had been stolen from a nearby residence in a burglary.

“The funny thing is that the burglary took place 10 years ago,” our source said.

by DAVID BELL

A WEE win in Vincent’s war on water was marked last weekend when residents gathered to celebrate a new floodwall at Beatty Park.

It’s been a long campaign by residents to get a wall to prevent run-off from the park, starting shortly after homes on Emmerson Street were flooded in the great storm of 2010. 

They came close to similar flooding catastrophes in later years. Residents spent some rainy nights unclogging drains in the carpark between the park and their properties to keep their homes dry.

An expert’s consultant report in 2017 recommended a wall to prevent park runoff from hitting homes, but the plan seemed to be forgotten for years.

Residents Steve and Suzanne Burke and Ray Stevenson kept up the campaign with many delegations to council requesting the work be completed. 

They’ve credited the efforts of the three newest councillors who were elected in 2021, Ron Alexander, Ross Ioppolo and Suzanne Worner, for getting the wall across the line. 

A motion moved by Cr Alexander to get on and build the wall won unanimous support from council in April 2022.

“This is our grand opening of our 10-year wall,” Mr Burke said last weekend. “I’d like to thank Suzanne [Worner] and Ross [Ioppolo] and also Ron [Alexander] … for all their efforts to get it where it is.”

by DAVID BELL

AUTHOR Shirley Eldridge was better placed than many to deal with revisiting past trauma, but still found reliving the events of a 1967 murder “horrific”. 

Eldridge’s background is in counselling psychology. She’s worked at Lifeline, trained counsellors, and run suicide prevention courses overseas before settling in Perth and turning to writing.

But even decades later, telling the story of her friend and colleague Mima Joan McKim-Hill, who was abducted, raped and murdered in Queensland in 1967, was painful given how close she was to the events.

“More than once I got up from the computer and got a glass of wine and thought, I can’t do this,” says Eldridge.

Persevere

She found ways to persevere. Breaks, wine, friends, a Jungian analyst. And “very deep breaths… it had to be done.

“It was ‘put the big girl pants on’, and be a counsellor to some of these people,” even when the conversations were hard, talking with McKim-Hill’s family members who hadn’t found closure, or having to interview difficult figures from her past she would have preferred to never speak to again.

McKim-Hill’s murder is still officially listed by police an unsolved case. 

But Eldridge’s efforts decades later helped renew police interest in the case. 

Eldridge says through extensive investigations, quiet conversations with police investigators, correspondence with her home region’s local newspaper, and a proxy-confession from a suspect’s daughter, she is satisfied the killer was identified in 2009. She says he died the weeks before police planned to arrest him in South Australia. 

A few years passed but Eldridge couldn’t move on. It was hard “to hold information that no one else holds,” she says. She would go on to pen the story of her friend and the failed police investigation in her 2016 book Mima: A Case of Abduction, Rape and Murder. 

It was written out of a sense of duty to set the record straight with the new information uncovered, but it wasn’t cathartic.

“I hate that word,” she says. “I had relived an horrific event. 

“I wallowed in the horror for a couple of years but thought, knowing now new information, that I had an obligation to share.”

Writing a nonfiction book about a shocking event can look like the opposite of the type of therapy typically given to people who’ve gone through trauma. 

Trauma therapy usually isn’t about remembering exact details: the facts of an event don’t matter compared to the person’s feelings and thoughts about their experience. 

But when writing a book to set the record straight, “the facts were critical,” Eldridge says. 

Horrific

For many difficult experiences like finding her friend’s empty car and some of her discarded clothes, Eldridge feels she’s lived them out three times: First in 1967, again when the detectives and profilers interviewed her, and again in preparing the book.

“Seeing all of that was horrific” then, Eldridge says, and “it’s confronting reliving it. And it was reliving it”.

As the Society of Women Writers WA recommences its writing classes for 2023, Eldridge will again revisit her experience researching and writing the book, and share ways writers can tell authentic stories about traumatic events, remain objective, and be mindful of their own self-care. 

Eldridge says when writing fiction, authors should also keep an eye to their mental health, as fictional stories often draw authenticity from real experiences.

“The motivation for writing is often a traumatic event,” she says. “Miscarriage, loss of child, victim of domestic violence, witness to or victim of an accident.

“Caring for self, as well as the characters in the memoir… is essential.”

Eldridge didn’t find catharsis, but she found some sense of closure after the book was released.

“I came home from all the launches,” she recalls, and gathered the years of notes, correspondence, everything she’d used in her research. “I packed everything in a box.

“I had a little ceremony. I put Mima to bed myself. That’s peace for me. She’s packed away forever. I’ll never unseal that box… there she is in the bottom of the cupboard… and she’s okay.”

The SWWWA’s next classes start February 1 at Citiplace Community Centre at the Perth Railway Station, and Eldridge appears at the February 8 class Basic Psychology for Writing Characters, $20 for members and book via swwwabookingofficer@gmail. com

by DAVID BELL

TWO sculptures by WA artist Addam have been unveiled in Hamer Park and Inglewood Oval as the capstone on the park’s $6.3 million redevelopment.

Addam’s work melds sculpture and jewellery and this is her first public art commission. Addam was selected by Stirling council to team up with veteran public artist Rick Vermey as a mentor.

The works are inspired by flora that grows nearby at the delicate patch of bushland in the Inglewood Triangle: Araa evokes the local spider orchid, and Ember is based on the banksia menziesii.

Stirling council allocated 2 per cent of the construction cost of its major capital works towards public art.

The $6.3m redevelopment was mostly completed in April 2022 and involved new versions of the Moyle Pavilion and Hamer Park Clubrooms, after local sports clubs identified an was about eight years overdue.

WITH warm weather seeing people flocking back to the beach, this week the archivists at Vincent Local History Centre continue the series on memories of summer by bringing us back to a time before the beach was a popular swimming spot. 

BEACH culture is synonymous with Perth, but this has not always been the case.

Most people did not look to the sea for recreation until the 1880s, when the opening of the Perth to Fremantle railway made beaches more accessible. 

Cottesloe Beach pioneered the new form of seaside fun. 

After World War I, City Beach became more popular with the introduction of a plank road in 1918.  

By the 1930s, swimmers could paddle and promenade at a range of beaches along the coast, from South Beach to Scarborough Beach.  

Today, a trip to the beach for Vincent locals is just a 20-minute drive or an hour-long bus or bike ride.

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, going to the beach was a slower, more complicated outing.

Life-long West Perth resident Marie Slyth recalled the intense preparation and excitement of her family’s annual summer camping pilgrimage to Coogee Beach in the 1940s and early 1950s.  

“Every year we used to go to Coogee Beach with dad… that was our Christmas holidays,” Ms Slyth said.

“Usually, it was two weeks but sometimes on rare occasions, it was three weeks. 

“We’d pack up all the tents, bars and poles for the tents, the flies you put over the tents and all the hessian flooring and then you’d have a little miniature water cooler.

“When we got down there, we had to help dad pull all these things up. 

“Every other year I remember it used to rain at least one night, or one day there’d be a storm.”

Ms Slyth said her family used to go fishing, where they used to throw from the shore as there was no jetty.

“After a couple of years dad used a little rowboat, which I insisted to be called ‘the Marie’,” Ms Slyth said.  

“I used to help dad row into the deep (sea) and we’d throw the line and catch fish and bring them in and have them for breakfast sometimes. Mum had to always scale the fish, but she used to like to come fishing too.”

There was an old wreck off Coogee Beach where Ms Slyth’s family used to walk, climb up the side and look at the water in the middle section.

“In the very clear water, you could see coloured fish – football fish we used to call them – with coloured stripes on them, and climb through the portholes on the boat,” said Ms Slyth.

“Sometimes we used to go in the evening and sit on the beach on mats.”

Read more about Ms Slyth’s childhood memoirs at the Vincent Local History Centre or online at https://librarycatalogue.vincent. wa.gov.au/client/en_GB/search/asset/362/0