Then there’s Perff! When we were there, the black swans were AWOL, as were the quokkas on Rottnest Island.
What can we say about Perth? We gazed fondly and sentimentally at the old Bond tower of course, but really, where Sydney is a Zegna spiv, Perth is a pensioner in a double-breasted Lowes suit.
Fremantle, right on the edge of suburban Perth, is nice, though. Its CBD full of life day and night. If for some unfathomable, wholly unlikely-to-occur, will-we-top-ourselves-or-move reason the Institute had to move to WA, it would move to Fremantle.
It has cafés, bookshops, young people with fluorescently-coloured hair, old, crumbling terraces.
Fremantle is also the point of departure for Rottnest Island, windswept and uninteresting.
Captain Dirk Hartog, who discovered and named Rottnest Island after the quokkas, mistook them for rats. It’s anybody’s guess what pills Dirk was or wasn’t taking at the time, but quokkas don’t look like rats. They’re midget kangaroos and bigger than even big rats by a factor of three.
While quokkas are supposed to infest the island, we managed to see only two, or maybe only one. Maybe the first quokka we saw had hopped to the other side to the island through the middle while we cycled the long way around. In that case,the second quokka would in fact have been the first quokka. It’s very hard to tell with quokkas. So lacking in individuality. Maybe that’s what did Dirk’s head in.
Even the man who drove the bus had noticed how few quokkas there had been about that day.
He blamed it on “the recent weather”.
There were, he said, “well over ten-thousand quokkas” on Rottnest.
It may be that the Institute has an issue with wildlife. Loyal readers of this blog will remember the Institute’s experience with moose in the USA and the grizzly bear that turned out to be not even a coyote but somebody’s elderly dog.
The next day the phenomenon repeated itself. We took a ferry all the way from Perth to Fremantle, a trip of well over an hour, and there wasn’t a single black swan to be seen on the river named after them!
It may have been the recent weather.
