Perth Voice Interactive

LUCKY the guinea pig is out of surgery and doing well.

Lucky had a tough start in life, abandoned, almost cooked and then nearly drowned after falling from a bridge (Voice November 29, 2014).

When new owners Jasmine, Robert and Daniel Bagley brought him into their Yokine home they soon found his teeth were getting too long for him to eat, a sign of a previously poor diet.

The folk from Perth Vet Bill Assistance Inc raised enough money for the operation and on Monday Unusual Pets vet James Haberfield trimmed the rodent’s teeth at half price.

His owners report the little cavy’s now eating again, chowing down on post-operation “Critical Care” mush, starting off with a syringe but now eating off a spoon.

Lucky apparently loves the nutrient-rich goo so much he skittles straight across the room like a big furry bullet whenever he hears meals are being prepared.

by DAVID BELL

THE entire electorate of Perth has been wiped off the National Broadband Network rollout map.

The Coalition government says, hand on heart and hope to die, that it has nothing to do with Perth being a Labor seat.

Suburbs that were to get connected, including Morley, have been dropped.

Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull says Perth should be grateful the NBN’s still rolling out in some areas, since the rollout was “dead in the water” when he took over.

Favours

Perth MP Alannah MacTiernan reckons the new schedule favours Liberal seats.

Dropped from the schedule are suburbs with monumentally crappy internet speed, she says.

Ms MacTiernan says copper wire is so far-gone in some suburbs that Mr Turnbull’s “NBN-lite simply won’t work. She thinks that may also be why they’ve been dropped.

Labor’s NBN would have taken optic fibre to the home. Mr Turnbull’s uses a mix of fixed wireless and fibre-to-the-node (a box in the street), with the distance between the node and the home utilising existing telephone copper.

Earlier this year the Voice found residents in Bedford—a stone’s throw from the Perth CBD—with internet so slow they could barely email, let alone have kids work on graphics-heavy school assignments.

NEIGHBOURS who don’t like smashed bottles, yelling and drunks peeing on their property have thwarted a bid by Mt Hawthorn’s Pirate Bar to extend weeknight opening hours to midnight.

Vincent council this week unanimously rejected the application, with mayor John Carey saying the small bar should never have been approved in the first place.

Last year his council allowed it to open but restricted its hours.

The Pirate appealed the restrictions to the powerful but unelected WA state administrative tribunal, which extended weekend hours to midnight Fridays and Saturdays.

Pirate Bar captain Paul Mavor says closing at 10pm school nights “has caused significant frustration and dissatisfaction amongst patrons on a regular basis”. He adds many customers live nearby.

But next-door neighbour Laura fronted the council to say she and her partner had been excited to move into the area pre-Pirate and had “invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it the perfect home”.

The bar has introduced “noise, litter [and] unacceptable antisocial behaviour by drunk patrons,” she says, including smashed bottles, yelling, and this week a drunk urinated on her boundary wall.

“I don’t think the bar that opened was the bar we were promised,” Cr Josh Topelberg says, noting it hadn’t scored the “runs on the board” to earn later hours.

Councillors suspect the owners will appeal the rejection to the SAT.

by DAVID BELL

DESPITE toiling in the hot sun all week Con Merkouris, 77, reckons he’s the happiest bloke in Perth.

He’s restoring 300 metres of the old stone wall at the Greek Orthodox church on Charles Street, starting at “half-past-six in the morning and not stop for a second!”.

Mr Merkouris recalls jobs were scarce when he was young, so any time he’s working, he’s happy.

Plus, he laughs, “if I stay home, the missus says ‘fix this, fix that!’”.

The well-muscled septugenarian has been in the building trade since he was 10, but spent some time as a boxer before coming to Australia in 1974.

He says he can’t believe kids’ attitude to work these days, taking jobs for granted and having no pride in their work.

“This will last for 40 years!” he boasts, brandishing his trowel.

by DAVID BELL

RESIDENTS at St Elmo apartment block in Mount Hawthorn can already hear neighbours flush the loo through their walls. Now they’ll soon have the joys of noise from a small bar to add to the cacophany.

The application still has to get the thumbs up from the strata, but this week a divided Vincent council narrowly approved plans for Red Dust photography studio owner Paul Parin to open a small bar in a ground level space.

Cr Matt Buckels, who deals with sound-proofing in his civilian life, says modern tech can adequately soundproof the building so residents aren’t bothered.

While Cr Buckels relies on modern science others turn to ancient tenets: “To me it comes down to a principle that’s been around since Roman times: caveat emporum,” Cr James Peart said. We reckon he was actually aiming for the Latin phrase caveat emptor meaning “buyer beware”.

“It’s very unfortunate that people have purchased properties without considering that the town planning scheme allows something like this,” he said. “It’s a learning experience… if you looked a bit closer maybe it wouldn’t come as a surprise. I do have sympathy for the residents who may not have thought about it.”

Cr Emma Cole said it was a toughy but she didn’t see the council having strong grounds to knock it back. A small bar fitted a street that already has places like The Cabin running late.

Mayor John Carey and Crs Laine McDonald, John Pintabona and Ros Harley opposed the bar but lost the vote.

Mr Carey said an eatery had previously been earmarked for the site. ”The residents didn’t know this would be a small bar,” he said. If the bar was across the street he’d approve it, but he couldn’t give it the thumbs up in this building.

He said owner Mr Parin may have the best intentions but he found it hard to believe the bar would keep shut all its doors and windows during summer.

Cr Harley said her vision for Mt Hawthorn didn’t involve residents having to close their balcony doors to escape noise from a bar.

Cr Pintabona suggested the owner pack his suitcase and open a bar where residents wanted one.

The bar still needs strata approval and a licence from the WA liquor department.

by DAVID BELL

KYILLA primary school’s Jasmine Prince has been raising money with her scouts group to help the turtles off Lombok.

The 12-year-old’s only ever seen a turtle in an aquarium up till now, but soon she’ll join a trip to visit Bolong Turtle Sanctuary on the tiny island of Gili Meno to help the reptiles.

“When the turtles hatch they have to make it to the ocean, but it’s hard because of the strong currents on the island, the crabs and the seagulls, and the people on the island,” she says.

The sanctuary relocates green sea and loggerhead turtle eggs to the sanctuary where birds and poachers can’t get to them. They then raise the turtles till they’re big enough to make it in the wild on their own, and look after injured turtles.

The scouts have been raising money for equipment such as fishing nets and freezers to catch and store the turtles’ food. Kyilla kids raised $364 for the project at a free dress day.

Along with feeding the turtles, catching fish for the turtles to eat and scouting out nests, Jasmine and her pals will be cleaning the island to make it safer for the turtles: “They eat plastic bags,” she says, because the turtles think they’re jellyfish.

Jasmine’s been a cub and member of the Tuart Hill Yokine Scout Group for about five years all up.

One of her biggest achievements so far is a 50km walk over a weekend to earn a scout badge, lugging a pack that weighed 9kg.

by DAVID BELL

FIVE months of hard yakka has transformed a rundown West Perth warehouse into a modern urban church.

The Lord helps those who help themselves, so the congregation of Sonlife Church dug deep and ran fundraisers to pull together $200,000 to fully refit the dusty old space in the old industrial district.

Contractors were brought in to do the plumbing and wiring, but six church members with trade skills and 100 enthusiastic labourer parishioners did the rest.

“There’s less than half-a-dozen guys who are handy,” Pastor Binh Nguyen chuckles. “We would have worked five hours a day after our normal work.”

The church has been around just a few years but has moved all over the place. “We’ve been quite nomadic,” Pastor Nguyen says. “We started in our living room.”

It then moved to a hall in Dalkeith, a UWA lecture theatre, and then to the Loftus recreation centre for eight months.

The shifting’s proved difficult at times: Pastor Nguyen once counselled his flock in the Loftus cafe, not the best surrounds for a church member needing pastoral advice.

Now with a five-year lease on the Cleaver Street place, this is the first time the church has been able to put up its own sign. And since all previous venues were closed for public holidays, this will also be the first year it’s able to conduct a service on Christmas day. “We’re very excited, we’re going to have a very simple one hour service at 10.30am,” Pastor Nguyen says.

“The congregation love it. They love that there’s a permanent home and we’re not moving from community centre to community centre.”

by DAVID BELL

WHILE out on patrol in Leederville this week the Voice came across three-year-old Livia Elsa Pistani (right)intently testing out a tricycle from the Vincent bike library.

The newly opened bike library was set up to let residents take bikes for the day or over the weekend to give them a spin (with a small fee for out-of-towners).

It operates out of the Loftus community centre and there’s more info on the Vincent website.
Little Livia was pretty chuffed with her trial trike, once she figured out how the brakes work.

AFTER a whirlwind trip around the nation Fitzgerald Street’s independent games developer SK Games is wrapping up its tour at home with an exhibition at Kurb Gallery.

The quirky microbusiness develops unique arcade games designed for easy pub play with buddies, mounting them in ramshackle cabinets with a post-apocalyptic DIY aesthetic (milk crates loom large in the cabinet designs).

While on tour they made it into the big-time PAX convention, where they showed off their games at surrounding venues to conventioners looking to relax with a few rounds of their unconventional games like Cog and Balls.

“Business development-wise the tour’s been pretty important,” SK Games owner Louis Roots says.

“The feedback we’ve got from people, watching people play [the games], that’s been helpful.

“The tour’s a big punctuation mark on the end of our first year.
“Where we go from here, how do we make some money? That’ll be interesting.”

Their unusual cabinets are free to play at Kurb Gallery from December 6 to 11.

by DAVID BELL

IF you’ve grabbed an early Voice and you’re a volunteer you may want to get down to Government House by 4.30pm.

To celebrate International Volunteer Day a garden party is being held in the grounds of Government House, hosted by new guv Kerry Sanderson AO, who’s also the patron of Volunteering WA. It’s not all cucumber sandwiches and earl grey though: Volunteering WA says it will make at the party an “important announcement about ground-breaking research that will influence the future of volunteering in WA.”