Perth Voice Interactive

A GROUP of local line dancers have collected scores of bras to send abroad to countries where they’re unobtainable.

Bras are highly sought after in some nations, particularly in humid climates where they help prevent rashes, fungal infections and abscesses caused by chafing under the breasts.

But in countries like the Solomon Islands they’re difficult to find.

Some second-hand shops occasionally have them, but otherwise they have to buy them from Chinese Trade Stores, whose bras are usually not big enough for the well-endowed islanders.

Maternity bras are impossible to find, despite being an important accessory for nursing mums who otherwise end up with milk-spotted shirts.

Pauline Walshe runs her Scooters Modern Line Dance Company out of the Loftus Centre in Leederville and when they’re not yeehaing, her 70 members like to help out charities.

Busty August

“If you can reach out to a lot of people you might as well make the most of it,” Ms Walshe says.

The bootscooters’ fundraiser for this month is “Busty August”, and so far they’ve collected 89 bras to donate to the charity Upliftbras.

Upliftbras only sends bras where they’re requested and makes sure not to compete with local businesses.

In July Scooters ran a bingo fundraiser, and with the Loftus Rec Centre waiving the venue hire they collected $1000 for the Belgravia Foundation, which helps people with disabilities play sport.

Ms Walshe says this month they’re going to do “Spectacle September,” collecting second-hand specs for the Mobile Eye Camp to send to Northern Laos and Sri Lanka.

She’s already got an idea for the next one: “Knitted Knockers for October!”—which involves knitting prosthetic breasts to insert into bras for people who’ve had mastectomies.

If you happen to have a few old bras lying around, upliftbras.org has a list of drop-off points.

by DAVID BELL

FLOREAT ATHENA Football Club kept Vincent council in the dark about a $3 million federal grant to upgrade Litis Stadium at a meeting two days before it was announced.

The club has been struggling to convince the council to offer a long-term lease of the stadium at Britannia Reserve across the freeway from Lake Monger for the last three years.

It met with Vincent mayor Emma Cole and her executives last week to invite them to the launch, but refused to provide details about the size of the grant or where it was coming from.

“The City of Vincent and Football West were not consulted or included in this funding process,” Ms Cole says.

“As the landowner of Litis Stadium, on behalf of our community, and as Football West is the state sporting association and also a major stakeholder, this was quite a surprise.”

Ms Cole didn’t attend the funding announcement last Saturday and says despite Vincent being painted into a corner where it risks being seen as an ungrateful landlord, the council is sticking to its guns.

Excitement

“While the city acknowledges the efforts and excitement of the club in obtaining this funding commitment, it does not alter our position on the club’s short-term lease and the work that needs to be undertaken to inform any future facility options and associated tenure arrangements,” Ms Cole says.

Last year the club spent $100,000 preparing a master plan for Litis in an attempt to convince the council to  give it a long-term lease.

Instead it got two years so the city could prepare its own master plan, with council staff flagging that the era of one club having exclusive use of a public space was coming to an end.”

“Shared use,” was the catchword in council reports.

The council also wants the club to prove it is financially sustainable, has a management plan for the stadium and provides a wider community benefit before it’ll commit to a longer lease.

Ms Cole said there was no way Britannia land would be sold off for Claremont Oval-like residential redevelopment.

“There’s no way the city would sell the land…we’re currently trying to make the most of every bit of public space,” she told the Voice.

by DAVID BELL

SATURDAY’S funding announcement of $3 million for Litis Stadium was also something of a balls-up for the federal government.

with last week’s leadership crisis resulting in no representative being on hand for the big announcement, despite the potential electoral fillip.

Former finance minister and WA senator Matthias Cormann had signed off on the funding grant, but by Saturday’s announcement he’d already resigned his position when his faction was out-manoeuvred in the battle over the prime ministership.

With no one to replace him, the announcement was left to One Nation’s WA senator Peter Georgiou who’s staff gleefully decorated Floreat Athena’s stage with big party banners and even compered the event.

“[The grant] will go a long way in securing tenure and redevelopment for what has been the home to this club for many decades,” Sen Georgiou staffer Peter Kapsanis told the crowd.

Sen Georgiou said after being approached by Floreat Athena members concerned about the dire state of the club’s building, he lobbied Sen Cormann for funding.

“I took my case to the minister, or should I say former minister, who’s also by the way a big soccer fan, coming from Belgium, and after months and months of lobbying, knocking on his door, ringing him up, and talking to him about this, I’m very happy to announce today at the Floreat Athena Soccer Club that on behalf of myself and One Nation we have secured $3m.”

This week Mr Georgiou criticised Vincent council for being cold about the announcement: “Is the council wanting to jeopardise where the next Tim Cahill or the next Samantha Kerr comes from?” he said.

“This is not about politics, this is about engaging with the local community.”

VINCENT councillors have voted unanimously to allow swings, rope ladders, tree houses and decorations on verge trees.

The city put the proposal out for public consultation, but only 20 people responded, with 80 per cent saying they supported the initiative.

However “there were some concerns raised around risk and potential for insurance premiums to rise, as well as damage to verge trees,” noted council staff.

Councillors also gave the green light for residents to have raised garden beds, pathways, benches, decorations and lighting on their verges.

Ms Cole says the change follows an “embarrassing” incident last year when a family had to take a tree swing and rope ladder down from their verge after a resident submitted a written complaint to council, highlighting they weren’t permitted.

Tree houses

Resident Liza Mazzella says she has a “little free library” on her verge and loads of native plants, installed as part of the city’s Adopt a Verge program, which encourages locals to ditch “water guzzling lawn” for natives.

“The council takes people’s names down and then twice a year they’ll get the bobcat driver onto their verges and remove old weeds and bring in mulch and give you 20 free native plants,” she says.

Her verge was a runner-up in last year’s council garden competition.

Ms Cole says the new policy allows residents to make use of verge space for practical uses like veggie gardens.

“When it comes down to risk we’ve got to explore where the risk is and what the problem is we are responding to,” she says.

“Our insurer told us we’ve had zero claimed accidents coming from tree swings or landscaping features on the verge.”

Under council guidelines, verge tree attachments must be on safe branches that don’t protrude into, or swing above, any road or path.

Platforms, structures and rope ladders won’t be allowed on trees under power lines.

by MOLLY SCHMIDT

CAR stackers are meant to be the future of parking, but locals aren’t keen on having two built on Lord Street saying they’re too big and ugly.

The Fabcar caryard at 266 Lord Street applied to Vincent council to build two car stackers, one like a big ferris wheel (14.4m high) and the other like an elevator that collects cars from ground level and places them in the 22m stacker.

The stackers are intended to save space compared to a sprawling carpark – they could fit 30 cars in the same footprint as four parked on the ground.

But a lot of Lord Street locals don’t want to live near one. Fifty people put in submissions opposing it, and just six were in favour.

One submission called the stackers “ugly,” which council planners translated into bureaucratese as having “a detrimental impact on the amenity of the adjoining properties and streetscape” .

Councillors agreed and rejected the application.

THOUSANDS of Australians will be doing the downward dog this weekend to raise funds for the 48,000 homeless women across the country.

The Yoga4Dignity event is run by Share the Dignity, a charity that distributes sanitary products to homeless women.

Founder Rochelle Courtenay says three years ago she read an article about disadvantaged Australian women having to use socks or wads of newspaper because they couldn’t afford sanitary products and she couldn’t believe this was happening in “a country like ours”.

So in 2015, she and her local community started collecting packets of pads and tampons to donate, and Ms Courtenay says once they had 450 packets, they were hi-fiving each other.

“But in reality, when 173,000 women turned to homelessness services for support in the last year alone, 450 packets was nothing,” she says.

Three years later Ms Courtenay’s idea has grown to a charity organisation that’s distributed 1.5 million packets of sanitary products for women in need across the country.

She says even then, they’re only able to help about a quarter of the women who need it.

“In Katherine, one lady told me she had to use bits of torn off foam mattress because that’s all she had,” says Ms Courtenay.

This Saturday (September 1), Ms Courtenay is calling on all women to roll out their yoga mats and partake in Yoga4Dignity.

To get involved head to sharethedignity.com.au

by MOLLY SCHMIDT

A SELF-GUIDED historic walking trail around North Perth’s town centre launches this week.

The tour reveals how the suburb developed between the early 20th century and World War II and is an initiative of the local town team, North Perth Local. It got funding from Vincent council for the digitally-aided walk, which shows off 16 significant sites.

They’ve created a map available at their website and then each location has a link with research and historic pictures.

This Saturday (September 1) the tour will be launched at 10am at Albert Square on the corner of Albert and Angove Streets, with a special guided tour by local Tom Di Chiera – custodian of the soon-to-reopen, 64-year-old, family-owned sandwich deli Di Chiera Brothers.  His dad Antonio and uncle Giuseppi were co-founders of the iconic Italian deli.

Highlights of the history trail include:

• The old North Perth police station, built in 1907 with the “blood and bandages” style of white and red brickworks characteristic of police stations of the day (it’s also seen in the South Perth and Victoria Park stations);

• The Rosemount Hotel, built in 1902 to cater for a growing and thirsty population. Originally built of brick and iron in the federation filigree style, in 1937 a whopping £12,000 was spent extensively renovating it into the art deco style.

• The Rosemount Theatre, opened in 1923. It ran for 30 years before the upstairs gallery was remodelled into a bowling alley, and Rosemount Bowl is still open today making it the oldest bowling alley still operating in WA.

North Perth Local’s website at http://www.northperthlocal.org/walk has the map and all the historic info.

OPIUM dens, brothels and mafia killings…

Perth journalist Sean Cowan is shining a light on Perth’s dark history in his new crime tours of Northbridge.

He’s well qualified to be a guide, having spent 14 years reporting on organised crime at The West Australian.

Mr Cowan says Perth’s seemingly morbid crime obsession is nothing out of the ordinary.

“Look at some of the most popular TV shows: Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire… they are all based around shady, underworld stuff,” he says.

“People have this fascination with crime and crime investigation and when you pair that with places they know about, but didn’t know played a role in a crime that had real underworld tones, it is a logical thing that people have a real interest in it.

“I love history and write about crime, so for me, the two go hand in hand.”

Mr Cowan’s two favourite Perth crime stories are connected to Roe Street.

“It’s little known that down Roe Street was the hub of Perth’s opium dens at the turn of the century.”

He says it was “just like the American movies” and “people could walk in and get a feed of noodles, play cards, gamble, get a hookah and then at the end of the night they could lay out on a mat and smoke opium quite openly”.

“You smoked until you passed out and then a few days later you’d come to and move on, and someone else would take your mat and pipe.”

Mr Cowan says the early brothels on Roe Street laid the foundations for Perth’s prostitution scene in the 1970s, and the still unsolved murder of brothel madam Shirley Finn. She was found with four bullet holes in her head at Royal Perth Golf Course in 1975.

“Most people leave with a vibe of “wow, I didn’t know about that”, because this is the stuff you can’t just Google and find out about,” says Mr Cowan.

He says Perth’s crime scene is a bit less bloody than Melbourne or Sydney.

“In Sydney you had the razor gang wars of the 1920s, where people were killed left, right and centre, and in Melbourne you had all this underbelly stuff that has captured the nation and been made into a TV series.

“We had an underworld killing in the European Club when George Wallace was killed by a Perth man, and a mafia-style killing in Russell Square.”

The walks were organised by the Centre for Stories in Aberdeen Street.

by MOLLY SCHMIDT

A TRAVELLING exhibition honouring the people who stood up for Jews during the Holocaust has come to Perth, focusing on the rescuers and survivors who migrated to Australia.

I Am My Brother’s Keeper was created by the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre “Yad Vashem,” based in Jerusalem.

It commemorates more than 26,000 people recognised as having put themselves at risk to save Jews, with this exhibition focussing on the 30 families who came to Australia.

Steve Lieblich from the Jewish Community Council of WA says “the Jewish community in WA includes many survivors of the Holocaust. And so, as a community, we’re acutely aware of the lessons of that dark period, because we’ve been personally affected, directly or indirectly.

“When we became aware that this exhibition was available to us, and that it honours the inspiring stories of heroes in that dark period, we determined to share it with all Western Australians and made arrangements to exhibit in the Perth Town Hall.”

Several of the rescuers and their descendants came to Perth.

Netherlands-born Mettina Venema-Kaspers was recognised by Yad Vashem in 1998. With her husband at sea during the war and two children to look after, she hid several Jews in her home in Diemen near Amsterdam.

As the war drew to a close the Germans raided the house and the Jews were spotted, but ironically the searcher was called away by a comrade before making an arrest. The Yad Vashem records say “the Germans never returned and the fugitives survived the war.”

The Geerling family are also recognised in the exhibition. Walter and Nancy Geerling hid, fostered, and eventually adopted a Jewish boy into their family. His name is Henk Piller and he now lives in Perth.

Mr Lieblich says “by sharing these inspiring examples, we aim to promote harmony amongst the diverse population of WA. We hope the exhibition will inspire us all to be vigilant for discrimination or bullying today and encourage us to speak up rather than remain silent.”

Nazi Germany didn’t progress to the Holocaust overnight: It was a build-up over years. Genocide research professor Gregory Stanton’s book The Eight Stages of Genocide traces the arc of atrocities through the earliest stages, the first step being when “people are divided into ‘them and us’.”

Mr Lieblich says “we need to recognise what it is when it seems innocuous.

“We need to be sensitised enough to speak up before it gets to that point … whether that’s done in private conversation, or comments on social media, or everyday interaction.”

I Am My Brother’s Keeper was opened by premier Mark McGowan on August 28, and runs until September 14 at the Perth Town Hall, open 10am to 3pm.

by DAVID BELL