Perth Voice Interactive

DEMOLITION of the historic Seventh Avenue bridge in Maylands will start next week.

It was closed Wednesday in preparation for the work.

Traffic will be diverted via the Third Avenue bridge and the Caledonian Avenue level crossing.

There will be a reduced speed limit of 40kph in the vicinity of the Seventh Avenue bridge during demolition.

The new $9.3 million bridge is expected to be ready next May.

WA Main Roads spokesperson Sam Xanthis says the bridge carried just 3500 vehicles a day and no significant congestion is expected during closure.

“We have been widely advertising the closure in advance and expect many road users to take an alternative route,” she says.

Bayswater city council and local community groups have selected a public artwork to commemorate the bridge’s historic past.

Main Roads refused to release an image of the chosen work, but local Dominic Cuscuna says it will incorporate timber from the original bridge, constructed in 1913 as a wooden trestle and deck bridge to carry horses and carts, vehicles and pedestrians over the railway line.

The replacement will span more than 80 metres and include footpaths, accommodation for four rail lines, bridge guard rails and increased capacity.

The Third Avenue bridge in Mount Lawley will be demolished as soon as the Seventh Avenue bridge is complete, and should take eight months to complete.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK

AROUND 200 drummers will bash their pig skins in a Perth drumathon to raise money for children’s cancer research.

Funds from Drumstrong—a six-hour drum marathon in East Perth—will be donated to the children’s leukaemia and cancer research foundation.

All instruments will be provided and drummers can choose to either make a gold coin donation or be sponsored.

Drumstrong organiser Simon Faulkner says the event is open to everyone.

“We have triangles, cymbals and basic instruments that anyone can play,” he says.

“It’s just a fun day where you can stay for long as you like and have a bash in a drum circle.”

Now in its second year in Perth, Mr Faulkner says they are aiming to double last year’s total and raise $5000.

The event is part of the global fundraiser Drumstrong, which will see drummers from across the globe unite to fight cancer.

Perth participants will be able to play along with overseas drummers via a Skype video link-up.

Countries signed up include Kenya, Ukraine, Japan, England and the United States.

Some US groups will playing for up to two days without a break.

Drumstrong will be held at Sir Charles Court Band Room, 65 Nelson Crescent, East Perth on Sunday from 12-6pm.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK

DEVELOPER Innocento Tizzano is appealing Vincent council’s refusal to allow him to install a gym on the ground floor of his troubled Fitzgerald Street project.

The four-storey block’s construction had been plagued with troubles, the council heard in March.

Parked cars had been damaged, 10-litre paint tins had fallen from the third storey, staining the road, and some of the development wasn’t compliant with what the council had approved. Public art went missing and stone slabs to finish the building’s exterior turned out to be too heavy.

Cr Josh Topelberg said “this building is a shocker,” and the council voted down the gym request, sceptical of the developer’s claims it would be so small it wouldn’t add to parking congestion.

Amongst Mr Tizzano’s supporters was former mayor Nick Catania, an old family friend. Mr Tizzano has appealed to the state administrative tribunal, the unelected but powerful body that has the authority to override the decision of the elected council. A SAT directions hearing last week sent the matter to mediation.

by DAVID BELL

REMIDA’S open day mannequin auction last weekend raised $2000 for cancer charity No Matter What–The Evie Charitable Association.

North Perth couple Alison Elgar and Michelle Rogers started the charity after their daughter Evie died of cancer. The plucky 11-year-old’s motto was “cancer sucks”.

For the auction the pair teamed up with Remida WA, an arts group that collects discarded industrial odds and ends for artists and schools. Every year they divert hundreds of cubic tonnes of industrial discards away from landfill and reusing it as art materials.

Three-hundred turned up on the weekend to Remida’s West Perth HQ, auctioning off the mannequins brightly decorated with discarded gear to kick in $2000 to the charity kitty.

PERTH wunderkind Adam Taggart has been named in the Socceroos’ extended 30-man squad for the World Cup.

The 20-year-old Newcastle Jets striker won the Golden Boot after scoring 16 goals in a breakout 2013-14 A-League season.

Before moving to the NSW outfit, he played for Perth Glory from 2010-12, making 10 appearances.

Football West CEO Peter Hugg says Taggart has a chance of making the final World Cup squad: “He’s now got a friendly and a two week training camp in which he can make a claim to go to Brazil—he’s certainly in the mix,” he says. “We’re delighted for Adam but at the same time feel for players like Rhys Williams who have missed out because of injury.”

Taggart has four international caps, receiving his first at an EAFF East Asian Cup qualifying tournament in Hong Kong in December 2012.

Australia will play South Africa in a friendly in Sydney on May 26 before departing for Brazil two days later. The final 23-man squad will be announced June 2.  Australia’s official World Cup slogan is Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK

SELF-DESCRIBED Mt Lawley paedophile Harry Holland is appealing a child pornography conviction, arguing his Rockspider magazines have social history value.

Police found three issues of the magazine in Holland’s house in 2010.

Also known as both Colin Nugent and Emu Nugent, Holland has owned the magazines since the mid-1980s.

While the publications have no images of children being abused, they include stories describing sex with boys aged between 10 and 16 and illustrations of naked boys.

Under WA law, written material is included in the definition of child pornography, which is material that depicts a child engaging in sex or in a sexual context “in a way likely to offend a reasonable person”.

Convicted

Holland was last year convicted of possessing child pornography and was fined $3000.

He is appealing to the supreme court, saying the magazines were published during the gay liberation movement era and were designed to promote discussion of paedophile issues such as the age of consent (21 for males at the time), treatment, and negotiating legal issues.

He says the publications have social history value and the law provides a defence for material “of recognised literary, artistic or scientific merit” and “that the act to which the charge relates is justified as being for the public good”.

Holland’s attempt at last year’s trial to present three expert witnesses attesting to the magazines’ scientific value was denied by the presiding judge.

This week, prosecutor Carmel Barbagallo told the Supreme Court the stories in the magazines “are child pornography without any scientific merit whatsoever”.

“It’s not as though they are theories or have some medical value to them, they are simply stories that are child pornography.”

She said the State would seek to have the magazines destroyed.

Justices Graeme Murphy, Robert Mazza and Wayne Martin are considering whether to allow Holland’s appeal.

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TERRY LEAHY from the University of Newcastle, whose PhD is in child-adult sexual relationships, says the magazines “are very likely the only copies of this publication remaining from that time and as such are a significant part of Australia’s historical and social record”. “The period covered by these journals was unique. The sexual revolution as it was then called…was being claimed for paedophilia. Not just in Australia but internationally, paedophiles linked their own problems to the repression of children’s sexuality and supported the rights of children to sexual expression…”.

STEVEN ANGELIDES from La Trobe University said Rockspider was “part of the social and political sexual liberation movement that swept right across western societies in the 1970s and early 1980s”. He said Rockspider “is an historical artefact of a very different social and political period”. “I recognise that copies of the magazine Rockspider have literary and scientific merit and that it is in the public interest, and for the public good, that Rockspider be available to be studied. To destroy such historical records would make important scholarly work impossible.”

GRAHAM WILLETT from the University of Melbourne said, “however shocking some might find this material, it is of inestimable importance to historians, sociologists and all those interested in understanding our society and its past in all its diversity”. Of the naked drawings, Dr Willett said, “clearly no child was harmed or exploited in the production of these images”. “While it is possible that some readers may find some of the stories and images sexually titillating in the context of the magazine as a whole and in the context of the historical and political period, this aspect is simply insignificant to the assessment of the value of the magazines.”

by DAVID BELL