Perth Voice Interactive

HIGHNITCH didn’t make it.

Tangled up in fishing wire and a trailing plastic bag, the dolphin’s body was discovered on the banks of the Swan River in Como on Tuesday.

Last week the Voice reported that the parks and wildlife service unsuccessfully tried to remove the wire from her dorsal fin (“High drama”, Voice, August 18, 2018)

Infection

Department officers are now looking for her calf Splash.

They initially thought it was too young to survive, but have now estimated that Splash is about 18 months old and might have a fighting chance if it can latch on to another adult dolphin.

Parks and wildlife reported Tuesday that “the entanglement was more severe than expected… a plastic bag was entrapped in the fishing line. The dolphin’s skin was also showing signs of an infection that may have impacted the healing of its wounds”.

Highnitch was a long-term resident of the river: The first recorded sighting of her was in 2001, and one of her babies was discovered dead near Point Walter the following year. She was seen trying to support the dead calf and push it along for a few days.

Highnitch had another baby in July 2011, two years after a spate of dolphin deaths when six died within four months.

The state government ran a naming competition for the calf and the winning entry was “Highhope”; but sadly she only survived for two years.

Highhope had been dismembered by a shark but it wasn’t clear if the shark killed her or if it ate her post-mortem.

Infant bottlenose dolphins generally have a high mortality rate: 20 to 30 per cent will die in their first year, but the rate of first-calf deaths is much higher compared to infants born to experienced mums.

Highnitch still has an adult daughter, Daniele, who is regularly seen in the river and was often spotted swimming with her mother.

Highnitch’s body was taken to Murdoch university to determine the exact cause of death.

Parks and wildlife are asking anyone who spots Splash, just over a meter long, to give the calf a wide berth but to report the time, location and direction of travel to Wildcare Helpline on 9474 9055.

by DAVID BELL

A NEW speakeasy-cum-barbershop on Beaufort Street was approved by Vincent council this week.

City planning staff had recommended councillors reject the application for the Blind Pig Speakeasy at 559 Beaufort Street because it didn’t include any parking bays.

Applicants Bootlegging Wolves were looking at having to provide 27 bays to comply with the council parking policy or pay almost $100,000 cash-in-lieu.

The cash-in-lieu is used at a later date to fund public parking or other transport options to compensate for the lack of bays.

But Vincent deputy mayor Susan Gontaszewski tabled an alternative motion to approve the bar with a maximum of 100 patrons and $42,300 cash-in-lieu over five years, which was approved by council.

Public health

She said it wouldn’t need 27 bays because it’s on a high frequency bus route, there’s public carparks and a taxi rank nearby, and people are increasingly using rideshare services to get to bars.

She noted there’s also a condition they install bike parking.

Cr Ros Harley said it was a bit of a concern council’s policy required parking at bars: “I think there’s a fundamental issue with combining the need for carparking with an alcohol or liquor outlet….for me the linkage between them is a worrying one.”

One big point in the bar’s favour was that it’d have a barbershop at the front, as Beaufort Street has become more of a night-time precinct over the last decade and now has fewer businesses open during the day.

Cr Jonathan Hallett, a senior lecturer in public health by day, said; “I’m not a big fan of increasing the number of alcohol outlets in the city, particularly when we’re talking about some of the town centres and the number of small bars” but the day time activation was a plus.

Mayor Emma Cole says: “One of the issues we have identified is where small bars wholly take over retail, it can have an impact on our day time activity in our town centres…I think this was a really clever way of keeping that daytime interaction whilst having a speakeasy concept behind the barbershop”.

by DAVID BELL

PERTH’S burbs are full of bees and a new research project aims to find out how many species there are using DNA barcoding.

Bee scientist Kit Prendergast has been surveying native bees in WA’s urban southwest for more than two years.

The region is a biodiversity hotspot and she’s identified about 150 species in Perth alone.

The majority of Australian native bees are very different from the introduced European honey bees: “Most of them are solitary and don’t make honey, they don’t live in hives or large colonies, and each female can reproduce,” Ms Prendergast says.

But species are hard to identify by sight: “Some of them look so similar you can only tell them apart by looking at the genitalia under a microscope.

“Then there are cryptic species – they look extremely similar but are still in fact genetically distinct,” indicating they do not interbreed.

In some cases the male and female might look so different you’d never guess they were the same species, unless they’re seen breeding.

DNA barcoding is a surer tool for identifying species: DNA is extracted from a bee’s leg and the DNA from a particular gene is sequenced. Each species has a unique DNA sequence which acts as a “barcode”.

“It will really help us understand the diversity of bees we have in WA,” Ms Prendergast says.

Her ‘Barcoding Bees for Biodiversity Assessments’ project has been awarded $5000 from the NSW-based company BeeInventive. They’re donating all of the profits from their flow pollinator house – which allows honey to drip out of hives into waiting containers with less bee disturbance than traditional harvesting – to eight not-for-profit, pollinator projects in Australia and the US.

“With this funding I’ll able to identify species with confidence,” Ms Prendergast says. “In Australia much of our species have not been described, and so by DNA barcoding them I’ll be able to create an inventory of the biodiversity of bees in the ‘burbs.

Remnant bushland

“This is very important so we can identify hotspots of bee biodiversity and see what environmental factors enhance the diversity of bees. Our cities are expanding, so we really need to make sure we protect our pollinators as our human population grows.”

Most native bees are reliant on remnant bushland: The smaller ones, some as little as 2mm long, have a much shorter flight radius than European honey bees and can’t travel far to remnant pockets of native vegetation.

“If they’re isolated from other bushlands, they can’t just fly to another one: for most native bees their flight ranges are only 500m or less”; Ms Prendergast says.

But suburban gardens can provide some respite if they have the right plants.

Native bees seem to do okay co-existing with European bees provided they’re not all competing for the same few plants: “If we keep clearing keystone native plants like the marri, jarrah and native pea plants, which are especially common in the bushland remnants, then there’s not going to be enough foraging resources for all of them to go around.”

by DAVID BELL

SIXTY dads and kids rode en masse to watch the East v West Perth WAFL match at Leederville oval on Saturday August 18.

The event was organised by the Mountain Goats, aka the Mt Hawthorn Fathering Project, which aims to make men into better dads, and has been running at Mt Hawthorn Primary for just over a year.

“I rode with my three-year-old daughter on the back of my bike down the safe active street, listening to her giggle the whole way there,” said Mountain Goat member Dan Loden. It was great fun and great to see all the kids enjoying the novelty of riding on the road”.

He says the safe active street – the new name for the bike boulevard down Shakespeare Street – gave them a pretty clear run unbothered by traffic: “The cars we encountered were travelling slowly and stopped to let us pass and I felt safe the whole way.”

The Mountain Goats have a few more dad events in the pipeline, and they’ve got a page up at facebook.com/mhmountaingoat

THE Voice was barely in letterboxes when UWA cancelled last Friday night’s talk by controversial US doctor Quentin Van Meter.

UWA’s decision to host the talk sparked an outcry from UWA students who had planned to protest, and more than 9000 people signed the online petition “UWA, don’t host anti-LGBT hate on campus!”

But the university announced it had pulled the plug on the talk on Friday morning, with just hours to spare.

“We have been advised the risk surrounding the event has been elevated to a higher level, which mandates a more robust event management plan.”

The uni’s statement said organisers could not provide that management plan, so the event was cancelled under its booking policy.

Archaic

“The University holds firm on the principles of freedom of expression and maintains its position that it does not wish to set a precedent for the exclusion of objectionable views from the campus,” the statement read.

Before the cancellation the Australian Medical Association WA’s president Omar Khorshid said the statements put out by Dr Van Meter’s group “in regards to transgender topics are archaic, outdated and completely contradict most reputable research in this area.”

“We do not want to shut down discourse on these topics, and universities are the best placed institutions to discuss conflicting ideas.

“However, these messages are anti-health, devoid of any robust evidence and could ostracise an already vulnerable group of people.

“The AMA (WA) urges any concerned students to make their voices heard and rebut the assertions put forward by this fringe group using peer reviewed studies that are available.”

Instead, those students concerned about the talk neither had the satisfaction of having their uni come out in support of them, nor the chance to rebut Dr Van Meter.

Protestors were disappointed it was cancelled based on a technicality, instead of its content.

Lead petitioner Thomas Drake-Brockman called it the “wrong response” on the part of the uni.

A student doctor, Drake-Brockman tried to deliver the printed petition to the vice chancellor Dawn Freshwater but was stopped by security from entering the VC’s office, and had to hand it over to the UWA executive while standing outside.

by DAVID BELL

RICHARD OFFEN has been busy since retiring from Heritage Perth last year.

As well as giving countless talks on WA history, the former executive director has just released his new book Lost Perth, a fond tribute to the buildings we’ve sadly lost over the past 130 years.

It’s well documented that the demolition-friendly 1960s and 70s claimed many of Perth’s historic buildings, but Mr Offen reveals the build-demolish cycle stretches back to the 1880s.

He notes the first cultural demolition happened way before any building was pulled down: “The displacement of the Aboriginal people, who until that time had enjoyed unbroken access to the land, is perhaps the first loss that should be acknowledged in this history”.

The earliest significant building to be demolished was the first government house in 1887.

Described as being designed in a “well proportioned but rather stark form of classical architecture,” the columned house was unbearably warm in summer and icy in winter.

When WA governor Arthur Kennedy arrived in 1855 he was thoroughly unimpressed and a board of inquiry was set up that found the carpentry was so poor “that it would be much more advisable to erect a new building than to attempt to repair the present one”.

The present government house was built, and the old one limped on as a private residence until its demolition in 1887. There were other early demolitions: St George’s Church was pulled down in 1891 and Alpha Cottage, the first private residence on the sandy track that was St George’s Terrace, was razed around 1896.

“Certainly in the 60s there was the protest about the removal of the Barracks, there was the fight to save His Majesty’s Theatre and the Palace Hotel, but before that people had no compunction: If it wasn’t fit for service, you just knocked it down and built something better,” Mr Offen told the Voice.

“They didn’t have the—and I’m loath to use the word—sentimentality about buildings that we have today. They were far more pragmatic.”

Despite protests and our growing fondness of the past, Mr Offen notes the demolitions continue to this day: The Michelides Tobacco Factory on Roe Street was knocked down in 2014, and the Loreto Bell Tower on the corner of William and Francis Streets went just last year.

But the history buff is sanguine about our future heritage: Through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, the rate of loss slows, and he’s encouraged by changing attitudes.

He closes the foreword in Lost Perth by saying; “we now have different attitudes and the evident interest in our past and our architectural history is, to me, a great encouragement that the decisions of our future will be better informed.

“From the demise of these iconic places we can learn; if history is for nothing else, it is for guiding our future.”

Lost Perth is out now “in all good book shops”.

by DAVID BELL