Perth Voice Interactive

VINCENT council is set to spend $285,000 on festivals and events in the next financial year.

Potential big winners in the draft budget are:

• North Perth Local – $35,000 to run the Angove Street Halloween event and 6006 in the Park festival at Woodville Reserve.

• Leederville Connect – $50,000 for the Light Up Leederville Carnival

• The Mount Hawthorn Hub – $45,000 for their Streets and Lanes Festival, which brought in a bumper crowd of 70,000 people on May 7 this year.

The Beaufort Street Network discontinued its large annual festival in 2015 and instead hold multiple events throughout the year.

The network is earmarked to receive $40,000 from council for Artisan Markets, the Heritage Trail, and its “Staged on Beaufort” live music series at the Mary Street Piazza.

Staff have recommended councillors give Pride WA $10,000 to run Fairday, but that event has yet to be confirmed.

It didn’t go ahead last year “due to a lack of funding”, according to the council report, “and Pride WA are actively seeking sponsorship and corporate partners to ensure this October event can succeed”.

Pride WA asked for $20,000, but Vincent staff recommended $10,000, so they’ll have to get out there and start shaking their tins.

Revelation Film Festival is in line to get $25,000, having already raised $16,261 through crowdfunding donations.

St Patricks Day is set to get $25,000, The Rotary Club of North Perth’s Hyde Park Fair $20,000, and the Aboriginal Health Council’s Closing the Gap Day has $15,000 allocated.

At this week’s briefing, Vincent council’s community engagement director Michael Quirk said they’d wanted the cash to go to events that were open to the public and not too commercial, hence they’d recommended no cash go to the Beaufort Street Ball since that was seen as “very much commercially orientated rather than community accessible”.

“Secret Walls,” known as the Fight Club of the art scene, where artists compete live against each other, asked for $5,000 but no cash was recommended to go their way.

by DAVID BELL

A NEW online exhibition by the Museum of Perth highlights the historic city buildings lost to the bulldozers in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The majority of Demolished Icons is based on the work of photographer Michael Parr, who runs the Facebook page Lost Perth Found, and painstakingly created before-and-after composite images of the city.

He’s long been interested in archival shots of Perth, and while working in the CBD about four years ago he started looking around for sites of former buildings.

Before long he was bringing his camera along on lunch breaks to try and recreate the shots of where old buildings used to be.

“I like the perspective of reshooting it and technically matching the shot,” he says.

Parr starts with satellite images, trying to figure out how the streetscapes and roads have changed over the years.

Where possible, he tries to match the shadow, down to the time of day and time of year when the original pics were shot (most of them were in the summer, making for a tricky shooting season as winter rolls around).

Sometimes newer buildings are in the way, requiring perspective tricks to match the angles.

“While I’m doing my photos I think, the photographer stood here, I imagine what it looks like with the original architecture here,” Parr says.

When he sees what replaced these grand old buildings “sometimes it’s pretty disappointing … but I don’t want my work to just be focused on what we’ve lost. Sometimes I can highlight what’s still there.

“We’ve lost quite a lot of lovely buildings, that’s for sure. But there is still quite a lot out there. It’s just that people need to look up more when they walk around the city,” he says, with many of the newer shopfronts still capped by intact buildings from the second storey up.

Museum of Perth director Reece Harley says that when people see the photos they are shocked at how many historic buildings were demolished.

“The issues are complex,” he says.

“If you’re looking at the Adelphi Hotel for example which was built in 1937, by the time it came down it was only 50 years old. So a lot of these buildings we look at now, with the progress of time, seem much more important than they were viewed at the time. These were only 50 year old buildings, the maintenance cost was high, and the trend was towards modernism with clean lines.”

The full exhibition with the animated images transitions is online at http://www.demolishedicons.com, and Mr Harley says they’re eager to hear from anyone with suggestions of other lost buildings that could be added to the growing project (get in touch via http://www.museumofperth.com.au).

by DAVID BELL

TWO local photographers have snagged gongs in the state Australian Institute of Professional Photography Awards.

Alex Cearns from Houndstooth Studio in North Perth won WA pet/animal photographer of the year, and Mount Hawthorn’s Kirsten Graham took home the award for WA travel photographer of the year.

Cearns divides her time between her Perth studio — taking clean, pared back shots of beloved pets on black backgrounds — and globetrotting to capture exotic animals in their native habitat.

She takes budding photographers on cruelty-free animal photo safaris overseas, steering clear of any operations where there’s even a hint of animals being exploited.

Her last trip was leading a group through Sri Lanka, photographing everything from elephants to dung beetles.

“It’s a completely different type of photography than what I do for my clients,” Cearns says.

Composite

“In the studio it’s very controlled, with consistent lighting, and I’m in charge of everything, whereas when you’re in a jeep photographing elephants anything can happen.”

The four photos that won the PPA award were a departure from her usual studio work, using composite images, edited and seamlessly stitched together, to tell stories.

Some are understated: Dog with Ladybug is “probably the closest to my day-to-day client work,” Cearns says, with a straight-forward image of a puppy with a surprised expression on its face and one minor addition: “I found a ladybug in the garden and gave her a photo shoot,” Cearns says.

“I felt that by adding her into the scene she complemented the surprised expression on the dog’s face.”

Most elaborate was “Cat with Flower”, a romantic scene of a kitty Romeo presenting a flower to his love.

It looks seamless, but it was created from nine photos blended together.

“I photographed each element individually: cats, flower, frame, background, skirting board, and then all of the images were meticulously composited together to create the final piece,” she says.

“I wanted to enter a quirky image that told a story, and which stepped outside of my comfort zone.”

by DAVID BELL

PERTH council is going to have another crack at trying to get on top of anti-social behaviour in Wellington Square, East Perth.

It’s organising an open community forum this morning, Saturday May 20, from 9.30am on the Wellington Street side of the square.

The park attracts up to 100 homeless people a night during the warmer months, many drawn into Perth from rural areas for treatment at Royal Perth Hospital, or to support relatives.

Jim Meneely from the East Perth Community Safety Group says many can’t afford accommodation, or are simply bought into the city by bureaucrats and then left to their own devices.

Fornicating

Mr Meneely says they’ve tried to convince the health department to divert some of the patients to bigger regional centres which offer the same services (particularly dialysis) but have had no success so far.

“I just can’t understand why they keep doing that,” he says.

Meanwhile Mr Meneely attended a meeting with residents of apartments overlooking a small community park directly opposite the ABC building on Royal Street this week. The residents told City of Perth staff and police that homeless people on their way to Wellington Square were mainlining drugs, fornicating, drinking and fighting under their windows on the way through.

One resident, who didn’t want to be named, said she’d listened to a woman being assaulted and held concerns for her safety, but before she rang police the group moved on so she didn’t bother: “It’s such a regular occurrence,” she said.

During her early-morning walk the next day she came across police establishing a crime scene in a nearby park and discovered that the woman had died from her injuries.

The residents say the troublemakers usually stop by for a couple of hours, but a few have taken to sleeping (and other things) on mattresses in the gardens under their windows.

WA Police say only nine reports have come from the small park, while there’s about 30 a week stemming from the square itself, urging residents to report all anti-social behaviour so officers know to include the site when doing their regular patrols.

Low reporting of crimes was also behind a decision by police to reduce the number of officers in the area a year or so ago, but that decision’s since been reversed.

Perth council CEO Martin Mileham told the Voice at a meeting last week the council was keen to move beyond the brouhaha over lord mayor Lisa Scaffidi’s declarations of gifts and travel and spread the word about the good work its being doing, singling out Wellington Square and the council’s collaboration with police as an example. But when the Voice asked the council’s media department for details about recent initiatives and a background on the issues that led to the meeting, it took them six days to come up with this: “The City of Perth instigated the meeting to provide an avenue for two-way communication between the City and neighbouring business and residents, allowing the community to voice feedback or concerns.”

by STEVE GRANT