Perth Voice Interactive

ELIZABETH QUAY was once known as Gumap, Mount Eliza was Kata Moor, and Claisebrook Cove was a freshwater stream called Goon’goong’up, and so narrow you could step over it. 

A new exhibition Gnarla Boodja Mili Mili (Our Country on Paper) at the Museum of Perth tells the stories behind 31 Noongar names for places around Perth.

It draws on research done over the past five years by the Aboriginal history unit at WA’s cultural industries department, which partnered up with the museum to deliver the exhibition. 

The research produced an online map launched in September 2019, and now the exhibition takes them into the physical realm and accompanies the stories with early portraits of Noongar people, paintings, early translation dictionaries, artistic impressions of how the land might’ve looked, a model of the colony’s early days, and with a soundtrack of kids from Bibra Lake primary school pronouncing the Noongar names.  

Museum executive director Reece Harley took on the project as his first solo curatorship.

“At the time of the colonists’ arrival in 1829, Indigenous languages and knowledge were essential for the survival of the colony,” he says.

“Aboriginal place names tended to describe the usefulness or importance of that location, whether it was a good place to cross a river, to hunt, or to access clean drinking water. 

Hollow tree

“For example, ‘Gabbee Kalga’ was the name of a large hollow jarrah tree which held drinkable rainwater, and its surrounds where grass trees grew in abundance. The tree is said to have been located about 200 metres north-west of the Queen Victoria Statue in Kings Park. In Noongar language Gabee means water and Kalga (commonly spelt Balga) means grass tree.”

Another is Kooyamalyup, one of the names given for the camping ground at the foot of Kata Moor/Mount Eliza, that means place of the frog camp. The name corresponds to a diary entry from early colonist George Fletcher Moore who wrote of spending an afternoon there with a Noongar boy who showed him how to dig up the ‘kooya’, frogs, prized for their tasty eggs.

Some places had multiple names, and often the Noongar names don’t correspond to modern sites as the land’s been changed so much. “Goodinup” describes the springs that used to flow into a large pool of water at the west end of 

the Perth Foreshore. It was a favoured campground for the Whadjuk leader and peacemaker Yellagonga. The modern street name is “Spring Street”. 

Mr Harley says in the early days “colonists were eager to learn these Aboriginal names and interpreters regularly published columns in early newspapers giving dictionaries of place names and common words”.

He says understanding the original place names gives a greater connection to history and culture, and adds “I hope our exhibition helps to rekindle this flame and encourages the people of Perth to learn more about the history of their city”. 

The exhibition’s on at the Museum of Perth until the end of the year (8-10 The Esplanade, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm), then the panels will be available to go on tour.

BROWSING the shelves of Fremantle Library for the latest bestseller recently, local resident Charlie Dortch says he was “bewildered and affronted” to come across a copy of one of the most infamous books of all time: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 

The former curator of anthropology at the WA Museum, Dr Dortch said his outrage grew when his 15-year-old granddaughter revealed Mein Kampf was also on the shelves of the library at John Curtin College of the Arts. 

“Let’s not mess about: the book is the Nazi bible and should not be on the shelves of any library apart from those used by researchers of political history,” Dr Dortch said.

“Among these I would include the State Reference Library and all university libraries, but not school or municipal libraries.” 

Written while Hitler was in prison from 1923/25, Mein Kampf is both an autobiography and a political manifesto. Now widely reviled for its virulent anti-semitism, the book has also been criticised for being badly written and incoherent.  

The library defended the book’s inclusion on the shelves. 

“The aim of any library collection is to make accessible materials to support a broad range of views and to enable their communities to make their own informed decisions,” a spokesperson said. 

“Fremantle library, and public libraries generally, adhere to the Australian Library and Information Association’s policy on free access to information.” 

This policy is based on Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression. 

However, Article 29 of the declaration states freedom of expression can be limited if it threatens the “rights and freedoms of others” or the “just requirements of morality”. 

Peter Wertheim, Co-CEO of the council of Australian Jewry, warned the book encouraged prejudice against the Jewish community, a phenomenon on the rise.

“On February 25, 2020, the director-general of ASIO Mike Burgess warned about the rapid increase in neo-Nazi activity in Australia,” Mr Wertheim said.

“We would ask any public library to consider carefully the use that such groups would make of the editions of Mein Kampf that they currently make available.”

In 1945, the book was banned in Germany, but the copyright expired in 2016 and it entered the public domain. A critical, annotated edition became an unlikely bestseller. The copy held by the Fremantle library isn’t annotated, but has a critical introduction and afterword, unlike many of the free-to-download online editions. 

Leigh Straw, a history professor at Notre Dame, said critical editions could be useful in understanding Hitler’s thoughts, but only when read alongside credible histories of the holocaust. 

“It’s a very poorly written book which only came to any prominence in Germany because of the rise of the Nazi Party,” Dr Straw said. 

In addition to Mein Kampf, the library contains many WWII histories and commentaries. The online-catalogue page offers a collection of “self-education anti-racism resources”. 

But to Dr Dortch, these other texts don’t make the presence of Hitler’s book acceptable. 

“I am among the scores of millions who need not read the not very intelligent words of the hellish deceiver who did far more than any other individual to instigate the most hideously cruel war in modern history,” he said.

by LOTTIE ELTON

PERTH will be hosting the only live screenings oft the Muslim Film Festival this year.

Festival executive producer Tarek Chamkhi said the Covid risk made gatherings in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney too problematic this year, but Perth was still going ahead “due thanks to the state government for the measures which have made us all safe in this beautiful state”.

Films will be shown at Backlot Theatre, the state library theatre and the Canning Town Hall.

Festival director Joanne McKeown says they’ve picked 55 films from 24 countries: 

“We were surprised with the huge diversity of Muslim communities worldwide, from the African continent, to Iranian villages, to the streets of Chicago, the freezing prairie of the Russian Federation, and last but not least the kebab man from the outback of NSW.”

The Kebab Man tells the story of Ahmad ‘Al’ Karanouh, who left Lebanon amid the war and moved to rural NSW where he took a punt on a pop-up kebabbery to cash in on the Coonamble rodeo and eventually became the town’s mayor.  

“We hope that watching our films will break down prejudice and misconceptions about Muslims and illustrate their diversity in Australia and worldwide,” Ms McKeown says. 

With so much of the film world locked down and so few places to screen new movies, the MFF screening here has been international news.

Perth got a shout out in Iran’s English-language newspaper The Tehran Times, owned by the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization. It reported several new Iranian movies would screen only in Perth “due to coronavirus and the resulting unusual circumstances”. 

Iranian films on show include Maryam Mohammadi’s Unlock, a documentary about the 300-year-old lock making industry in the town of Chaleshtar in southwest Iran.

Iran’s coronavirus situation has had an unexpected impact on the film scene, having led to the reopening of drive-in movies. They were banned following the 1979 revolution as cars were considered to give couples too much privacy. 

In May an outdoor theatre in Tehran was allowed to show the first drive-in film in 40 years with Exodus, the story of a group of cotton farmers who drive their tractors to the president’s office to protest the government dams that killed their land.

The local sessions are September 5 at the state library theatre, September 6 at Backlot, and September 19 at Canning Town Hall, tickets or online stream passes via muslimfilmfestival.com.au

‘Behind these numbers are the very real stories of people who have fallen through the cracks.’

PERTH lord mayoral candidate Basil Zempilas wants to turn the upper floors of Perth’s carparks into overnight shelters for homeless people.

Mr Zempilas’s “Pop-up Places for Homeless People” policy is based on a recently-trialled Brisbane model developed by the not-for-profit group Beddown, and has received qualified support from advocates and business owners.

Each night when office workers head home, Beddown volunteers set up blow-up mattresses and bedlinen to provide a safe place for homeless people to bed down. Support services such as counselling and health checks are also made available.

Mr Zempilas, who’s been briefed on the issue by homeless services, supported the McGowan government’s “Housing First” program but says there’s a lag before people get a permanent roof over their head, whilst emergency accommodation like St Bart’s and The Beacon is overflowing.

“If there are no beds there, people end up on our streets,” Mr Zempilas said.

“I aim to adopt the approach or partner with Beddown, from Brisbane, to turn our carparks into safe places for people who are homeless to take refuge from the cold and the danger of sleeping rough.

“It works in Brisbane, it can work here.”

Mr Zempilas said lockers would be provided to people using the car parks at night so they could store their belongings during the day, which helps prevent them being stolen or destroyed, and stops nooks and crannies in the city getting clogged.

The media star’s new approach comes as a stark comparison to a column last year when he spoke of forcibly removing homeless people from the CBD: “The look, the smell, the language, the fights – it’s disgusting,” he wrote.

The turnabout caught one homeless advocate on the hop: “That’s not the worst idea around,” he said with some surprise.

Shelter WA CEO Michelle Mackenzie was aware of Beddown’s initiative through a national homelessness network, but says she’d be wary of deviating resources away from the Housing First model, which has a proven track record overseas.

She says the carpark model might also struggle to provide a suitable place for extremely vulnerable young women – particularly those from Indigenous backgrounds – if it put them in close quarters with people who might trigger responses from previous trauma.

Ms Mackenzie said Victoria and New South Wales had taken all rough sleepers off the streets during Covid-19 and provided them with accommodation in under-used hotels, and had recently invested more money into the system with the aim of getting people into housing before they ended up back on the streets.

While the McGowan government tried that at the Pan Pacific hotel, Ms Mackenzie said despite the manager’s “heart of gold” the hotel wasn’t suitable to cater for its unusual clients’ needs. But she says it’s an option the government shouldn’t abandon.

“It’s a solution that has a bit more dignity than a carpark,” she said.

A local commercial landlord who’s had homeless people camped outside one of his properties “for a couple of years on and off” says having somewhere to refer them would be a huge relief.

Intervene

Despite being sympathetic to their plight, he said he was regularly finding syringes, drug sachets, rotting food and faeces outside his building. “I was literally dry retching cleaning it up on Monday,” he said.

He’s sought help from police, but has been told they won’t intervene until a crime is committed, while the security company he hired won’t let its staff go near the homeless group because of threats.

The owner, who didn’t want to be named, said tenants have been actively trying to break long-term leases because of the mess they have to step over every time they arrived for work, which would be devastating for his “mum and dad” investors already struggling because of Covid-19 business closures.

“How they are going to administer it is up to them, but the concept of having somewhere you can direct people to – if someone is coming up with a pro-active approach to move these people to somewhere in an evening, that’s really great.”

By STEVE GRANT

PERTH council electoral rolls not covered by the Power inquiry need to be audited to root out voting fraud, a former Perth city councillor says.

Reece Harley was a councillor from 2013 to 2020 and after reading the August 11 inquiry report says the council needs to review electoral rolls from 2013, 2015 and 2017 and refer any suspicious activity to police. 

“Without a full audit it is impossible to know just how many electors were fraudulently enrolled to vote or how many former councillors or council candidates might have been ineligible to stand,” Mr Harley says. 

“Any instances of suspected enrolment fraud that the City uncovers must be referred to the WA Police.”

Sham

The inquiry uncovered evidence that sham voters were common, and controls were so lax they risked affecting who won elections given there were just a few dozen votes between winning a seat and losing out: “It was a common practice for candidates and council members to organise for companies owning or occupying property in the city to enrol people to vote who had no business or organisational connection with the company,” Mr Power found.

Businesses are supposed to be allowed to nominate two voters to represent them so traders still get a say in council matters. But at least one business owner interviewed by the inquiry had no idea his companies had been enrolled to vote by a candidate. 

Some nominees, when contacted, were unaware they’d been registered to vote, because their ballots were piped directly to a candidate’s post office box then filled out without their knowledge.

The inquiry focused on the case of former councillor Keith Yong, found to have organised for “at least” 45 ballot papers to be sent to PO boxes he had access to ahead of the 2017 election (some were noticed by city staff ahead of time, and he lost, but no action was taken. The inquiry says staff should’ve investigated it further or referred him to police or the WA Electoral Commission). 

The report says there’s evidence Mr Yong wasn’t the only one.

The inquiry had Royal Commission powers to demand councillors hand over boxes of documents, and found “some of these boxes contained numerous completed and partially completed enrolment forms for companies owning or occupying property in the City of Perth”. 

Mr Harley has looked over past electoral rolls and has provided the City of Perth with several examples of “anomalies,” including nearly a dozen votes going to a single office suite instead of the two normally allowed. 

The Voice asked the council if they’d review previous rolls. We hadn’t heard back before going to print, but were previously told the city wouldn’t be weighing in on issues raised by the inquiry report until commissioners formulated a proper response to the local government minister.

However the council has taken up a recommendation from the inquiry to ensure a more legitimate election this time round, and is now requiring occupier nominees show actual proof of a lease before allowing them to vote this time round. 

The inquiry does not have prosecution powers and its “findings” can’t declare whether someone’s broken a law, leaving that up to other authorities.

By DAVID BELL

A LOCAL active transport advocate warns the WA government’s long-term cycle network will pit riders against cars on busy roads.

Andrew Main, who’s spent years dealing with councils and government departments advocating for safer streets for humans on foot and on bikes, says the plan won’t hit its aim to increase the number of people riding.

He says it puts many routes on distributor roads with high volumes of traffic, and bike riders won’t like it due to “conflicts with vehicle drivers, and the noise and air pollution from vehicles”. 

“The aim of the LTCN should also be to minimise conflict between drivers and riders, because when you introduce conflict between these two user groups, bike riders will generally lose out,” he says.

Cheaply

Mr Main says other countries like the UK and places in Europe have had a lot of success getting people riding through lower traffic neighbourhood streets, making them safer by encouraging only local traffic. It can be done pretty cheaply by closing off a road with a pocket park or just some hefty planter boxes (the latter having the advantage of being cheap and movable). 

Along with making it safer for bike riders and walkers it cuts down on rat running. Barcelona’s in the midst of closing two thirds of its roads to through traffic in this way. 

Mr Main says “this approach is far less expensive and quicker to implement”.

Each suburban council has been asked to endorse the LTCN, and only routes outlined in the path will be eligible for funding for the next year.

The routes in the LTCN are only “aspirational” and just mark where matched state funding might be available – they’d still have to go through the usual approval process before any paint gets sprayed or lanes go in.

Mr Main’s submitted his thoughts to Vincent council, though only a couple of his earlier suggestions made it into the amended plan endorsed by the council last week (such as removing the unpopular route through Hyde Park). 

At the August 18 meeting Cr Joanne Fotakis moved that the council request the WA government chip in more funding for bike lanes, upping the WA Bicycle Network grants from 50 per cent of the cost to 75 per cent given how councils have been especially hammered by Covid-19. Her motion said councils having to pay 50 per cent for a state network that’d be used by many people just passing through, rather than residents, “places a disproportionate and unfair level of burden on ratepayers to fund the network”.

They unanimously voted to write to the WA Local Government Association and see if it would lobby on behalf of councils to get a bigger state government spend. 

Perth council commissioners also endorsed their patch of the LTCN this week, without complaint. WA’s transport department proposed two routes cutting north/south through Langley Park, but those were downgraded to “indicative only and subject to change,” depending on what’s in an upcoming Perth Waterfront Master Plan.

By DAVID BELL