Western Australia: Perth And Beyond
By
Leonard Zwelling
We have been fortunate to have visited Australia twice before. I believe that we were here in the mid-2000s when we also took in New Zealand (the most beautiful place on Earth) and then again in 2007 when we visited our son who did his junior year in college abroad in Melbourne and Sydney.
Once the BW decided that Singapore was on her bucket list, I began to look at a globe for places near Singapore that we might want to see. In our previous travels to Australia, we had not gotten west of Ayers Rock.
“How about Perth?” I wondered.
So here we are on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. It too, like Singapore, is a major port city with modern skyscrapers. It too has botanic gardens. Now we have seen our third on this trip. Where the two in Singapore seemed man-made (and were), this seems rather native, but not a whole lot more interesting to someone who really didn’t like the first semester of Biology 1 as a Duke freshman which was all about botany.
We did get to see some of the historic buildings of Perth and its sister city Fremantle. The theme here is that the older structures have all been repurposed. Even the old synagogue in Fremantle now houses four restaurants with stain glass window menorahs as decorations.
The following day we drove north up the coast to Cervantes to visit a huge lobster catching and processing operation and have the products for lunch. This is rock lobster (a tip of the hat to the B52s). These crustaceans do not have big front claws. The meat is a bit sweeter with less cholesterol. The processing plant is driven by automation, science, and hard, manual labor. The lobsters are shipped out live by plane and arrive within 30 hours of having left the water in Australia. Ninety-nine percent of the lobsters go to Mainland China.
The next day we were picked up at our hotel, which, continuing the theme of repurposing buildings used to be the Treasury Building, and driven to Cape Lodge, two and half hours south of Perth down the western coast. Cape Lodge lies halfway between Dunsborough, a beach village to the north, and Margaret River, a larger town to the south. The lodge is idyllically located next to a lake in the woods and provided a needed day of rest after all that running around Singapore and Perth.
The following day, a new driver arrived and we started south down the coast through an area that looked like Northern California to view vast vistas of the Indian Ocean, spotless beaches with surfers, and a shark patrol system using a helicopter. We visited a very old lighthouse that tried (but often failed) to keep wooden ships off the reefs. The town of Margaret River itself has been likened to Carmel. Perhaps a bit, but it seemed less refined, more touristy, and far busier.
We had lunch at a vineyard back up the coast. There are many of these dotting our route as this has become a very popular wine producing region with some bottles fetching prices above $800 each. We just ate, but the food was fantastic as it had been at the lodge the night before. This really does feel like Napa and is a foodies’ and wine connoisseurs’ paradise. Many people from Perth have second homes here and some of the homes overlooking the beach are beautiful. This is a different Australia than we had ever seen before and far more interesting. At least I felt that we had seen something new and unique and not just another garden and city scape.
Oh yes, in a small roadside grove we saw a small gathering of kangaroo. Finally—Australia!
Upon arriving back in Perth, we did one of our favorite things to do in foreign cities. We had dinner at the home of the local Chabad Rabbi, Shalom White. We have had Shabbat dinner at Chabad in Saigon and in Tokyo. The menu is usually the same, chicken and many side dishes. This rabbi has eight children, only five of whom were home at the moment. His wife is Israeli. He is from Sydney,. It was during dinner that I came to appreciate the immense effect the killings at Bondi Beach have had on the Jewish community in Australia. There are fewer than 120,000 Jews in the whole country and anti-Semitism had been allowed to go unchecked in the eastern part where the majority of the Jewish population live. The rabbi noted that the Jewish community of Perth had worked with the civil authorities to nip anti-Semitism in the bud there. Sydney and Melbourne had not done as good a job and the Bondi Beach massacre occurred in that context.
This was reiterated to us the next morning when we attended services with Rabbi Kit Ettlinger at the progressive Temple David where she also discussed the downstream effects of Bondi. This feeling in the Jewish community is reminiscent of the feeling around 9/11 in the States, or even 10/7. The impact here has been profound and not widely covered in America.
On our final night in Perth, we participated in the city’s Fringe Festival by watching a Billy Joel tribute pianist and singer Matthew Hadgraft go through the most popular of Joel’s songs. The Aussies are pretty hard partyers and were having a blast dancing and singing along.
Today, we head to the other side of the continent and Brisbane. It is about as far to Brisbane from Perth as it is from New York to L.A. We will be fifteen hours ahead of Houston before the end of the day. I think we are going to a very different world.
