Living on the Edge: Observations from the Darling Scarp

Living on the Edge

Observations from the Darling Scarp

At first glance I thought they were skylarking apprentices, warming up with a playful joust
prior to a finger-numbing six-thirty start. But the sharp sun rising over the scarp was
playing tricks. On closer inspection I saw the pugilists for what they were; two Western
Grays going toe-to-toe on the compacted building site, more Sumo than Queensbury, both
teetering dangerously close to the retaining wall and its three metre drop. A casual glance
at me, a sneaky bit of biffo after the bell and they were gone, loping up the hill and back
into the scrub: Foreman and Ali bouncing off to the National Park before tomorrowʼs
second round.

The suburbs end with our street and the bush begins. Nothingʼs official, but the evidence
stacks up, even without Googleʼs damning map. We live on the fringe. We are neither up
nor down. And we are the last street on mains LNG. Itʼs as if the company literally ran out
of gas when it looked up the scarp, and seeing the gneiss and granite it would have to
break through, decided to call it quits. The water company is made of sterner stuff. It
hangs in for another twenty or thirty kilometres or so, before it too eventually loses heart,
leaving the grunt work to tanks and bores. Even that bastion of the can-do Industrial Age,
the railway line, packed up and went home some time ago, leaving the curiously well
maintained Swan View railway station behind. There it stands in weatherboard and brick
on the edge of the John Forrest National Park, all eager and cute, like a scrubbed-up
orphan on open day. The abandoned track is now the bridle trail that swathes up through
the hills and into the national park itself. Four hundred thousand bricks of Victorian railway
tunnel lie a kilometre or so inside the park, offering a three hundred and forty metre walk
from entrance to sunlit exit; Danteʼs Inferno, yet not without hope. It is dank and dark
enough even in the summer glare to give my daughter a chill of excitement when we walk
it.

To live on the fringe means to live on the edge of something. But on the edge of what?
The view from my back verandah down the coastal plain to the cityʼs towers gives me a
sense of metered, mechanised distance. Perthʼs night time lights allure me with late
modernityʼs promise of commerce, progress and leisure. But the view up the hill from my
front door, broken as it is by the scarpʼs final push, is a reminder that we also live on the
edge of something primal and vital. There is a mean streak east of the fringe which cannot
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 Living on the Edge: Observations from the Darling Scarp

be tamed by meek green signs that read “Kalgoorlie 570” or “Meekatharra 750”. A two
hour walk down the hill in the heat of summer would require a stop-off at every corner deli
to buy water. A two hour walk up the hill in the same conditions could well kill if one took a
wrong turn. To live on the scarp is to live in a state of limbo - a meeting point of the wild
and the tamed. The city draws our interest, but we cannot afford to turn our backs.

The scarp was thrown up by inconceivable forces millions of year ago. In the few short
years since European settlement we have chipped away at its surface, pocking it with
quarries and timber mills. Faced with the need for building materials the nineteenth and
early twentieth century pioneers pillaged most of its ancient hardwood - the national park
being a notable exception - marking out their patch with place names such as Mahogany
Creek and Sawyers Valley. The leaner, tightly packed regrowth is but a parody of that tall
timber, lulling Sunday drivers and weekend 4WD clubs into a sense of “the natural”. But
what took humans effort and iron to achieve, the environment can do without raising a
sweat. Our forebears hid the evidence of their over-enthusiastic milling in Perthʼs buildings,
along Fremantleʼs jetties and packed onto European-bound ships. The overkill was laid out
in railway sleeper rows throughout the SouthWest. Beyond the reach of decent rains
however, the land to the north and east of the scarp had no tall timber to hide. “Trees? No
trees here,” it says, “None that would interest you anyway.”

What drives our interest in the land? Our European history, rooted as it is in the quest to
conquer and tame, suggests an unabashed commercial interest, a utilitarian contract
between us and a compliant land. We are primary producers after all, first sheep and
wheat, now minerals. Yet white Australia has, to a large extent, failed to see design in the
landscape; any sense of a spiritual purpose or ontological foundation. American writers
and artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on the other hand, saw
something holy and other when they gazed out over the canyons and grasslands. Robert
Hughes muses that “If American nature were one vast church, then landscape artists were
its clergy.”1 During Americaʼs early days Western Christianityʼs still robust spirituality had a
role to play in informing humanityʼs relationship to the land, and American writers and
artists drank heavily from Jacobʼs well. Hence from the outset the New World was referred
to in deliberately eschatological terms. The Puritans were coming to the New Jerusalem as
their early place names betray. Even the Deists of Americaʼs eighteenth century revolution

1 R. Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (London: The Harvill Press, 1997) 139
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 Living on the Edge: Observations from the Darling Scarp

saw the opportunity to “start a new country up”2. That they did so under the auspices of
neoclassical Reason rather than Religion was not enough to quell this sense of the land
shaping the eternal destiny of the new arrivals. By the time Australian pioneering had built
a head of steam however, Deism itself had withered on the vine, leaving behind the
meagre, anaemic husks of pragmatic secularism. The result has been a “can-do” attitude
to the land divorced from any grand narrative. This loss explains not only the two
countriesʼ different approaches to their physical landscapes, but to their political
landscapes as well. The inauguration of a new American president is, in the country that
trialled the separation of church and state for the rest of us, a deeply spiritual event. What
a contrast to the swearing in of an Australian Prime Minister! The recent effort was akin to
an embarrassing shotgun marriage, signed off in a registry office that forbad confetti.

Here on the scarp the admittedly successful results of our pragmatic approach to the land
have been in evidence most weekends since the start of the current mining boom. Early on
Sunday mornings, when the roads are generally emptier than usual, huge groaning prime
movers piggy-back ore trucks up and down Greenmountʼs killer gradient; giant metal snails
making a slo-mo dash to safety before the sun really gets going. They stop to take a
breather at the top of the hill in a purpose-built siding near Hovea, allowing up to one
hundred trailing motorists, ant-like in their impatience, to make up for lost time. Upwards
they go, past our Lilliputian homes, heaving up to the mines, their gargantuan Tonka
payloads as shiny as Christmas. And downwards they crawl, bearing broken-toothed,
battle weary veterans, coated in MidWest pindan, snorting and limping their way to the
heavy industry strip in the Swan Valley for repairs.

It seems the world cannot get enough of our land. There is so much land out east of here
that we are digging it up by the huge yellow bucketload and shipping it overseas to anyone
who makes a decent enough offer. The Karara Ridge in the stateʼs mid-west is one
hundred billion dollars worth of iron ore that we are offloading to the Chinese.3 Singapore
has increased its land mass by twenty per cent since the nineteen-sixties due to sand
dredging, some of it illegal.4 Yet five decades of sending soil offshore hasnʼt so much as

2 REMʼs song, Cuyahoga, tells of the forefathersʼ failed attempts to start up something new, using the
Cuyahoga River in Ohio as a cautionary tale. It was the scene of a massacre of native Americans, then later
ity experienced a rare river fire due to the high levels of toxic material it contained.
3 P. Barry, ʻChinaʼs Quarryʼ The Monthly 59 (2010) 36 - 40
4 http://www.dredgingtoday.com/2010/02/14/sand-war-singapore-vs-neigbours/ sourced Sept 1 2010
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made a dent in Australiaʼs size. Each night my wife and I watch the planes fly overhead,
returning from the mine sites. They tilt and plunge right over our rooftop, wings holding
balance in the scarpʼs buffeting easterlies like a tightrope walkerʼs arms. They settle at eye
level, before disappearing down into the flats to offload drillers, blasters, engineers and
assorted mining industry dung beetles. They will strain their way back over us tomorrow
morning with a fresh payload ready to dig some more. Meanwhile the city skyline grows
more pronounced as the vast wealth generated by mining takes shape in concrete, glass
and steel.

While there is no end to the mining boom east of the scarp, what would Perth not give for
twenty per cent more lebensraum west of it? The varicose northern and southern corridors
snake up the coast, but here to the east the scarp sits as a stubborn reminder that, for all
the space we have, we are filling up quickly in a concentrated area. In the hills five and
one acre lots are considered a birthright, but down on the flats it is all fifteen metre
frontages and four hundred and fifty square metres of suburban dream. Even now the
dream is getting smaller and more perpendicular, with projections that the average block
will soon be two hundred and eighty square metres. We look gingerly over the edge at the
teeming masses and pray they stay there and leave us to our fringe and our space.
Which, it must be said, they generally do. Faced with the prospect of smaller blocks,
overcrowding and freeway logjams most Perth people donʼt even blink. The hills are rarely
considered a viable option.

The main discouragements to moving up the hill are literally elemental: earth, air, fire and
water. All four are present down there of course, but the scarp is where their rougher
country cousins hang; trailer park trash, bored, disrespectful and living in limbo. Out east
the elements come into their own; vital and alive, lean and muscled, ready for country
work. Down west in the suburbs they are respectable; toned down, smartened up for the
CBD. Up here, however, the earth is ornery, the air prone to outbursts of violence, the fire
vicious and spiteful and the water loose and unfettered: Spoilt children finding it hard to
share their playthings with others.

Earth
The scarpʼs earth is not so much contrary as plain uncooperative. To build a house in the
Perth hills is to play dice with open-ended site costs. No builder trying to make a quid will
provide a quote for what is essentially unknowable terrain. Huge granite lumps lurk below
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the surface, ready for unsuspecting prey; greenhorns mostly, who wanted a lifestyle
change, but have failed to account for what lies beneath. The national parkʼs sharp rises
are littered with these granite marbles, scoured clean and exposed by strong wind and
rain. These magnificent dense masses can be seconded into a sculpted landscape. They
give presence, direction and focus to a five acre bush block. Unearth just one below the
surface of your building parcel, however, and its time to call in the rock breaker, a large
dump truck, and the bank manager. In Perth the wise man builds his house upon the sand.

Up here we learn to live with rock. A tip of granite pokes out of the top of my front lawn, the
summit, I like to imagine, of some submerged Everest. I think about digging it out from
time to time, usually after my mower blades yelp on its edge. And that is just the piece I
see. Large rounds of my lawn die every summer, the roots cooked as the rock beneath
heats up. No amount of water, wetting agent or mulch will keep the combover of grass on
top alive. Meanwhile, down the hill, neat, vert squares of lawn invoke literal green envy in
me.

And if it is not the rock creating havoc, it is the clay it rests in. Each year under the hot sun
eye-popping cracks appear down walls and across lintels, as the heat dries out heavy
phyllosilicate soils that sit beneath hundreds of cheap, poorly drained brick veneer houses.
Gaps as wide as a human hand can appear, mirroring the mosaic fissures in the scarpʼs
sun-parched stream beds. They crack and strain themselves; wider, wider, waiting on
tippy-toe for autumn rain. Then finally, when rain comes, they slump exhausted and
relieved as the water swells the ground again. The earth up here has weight to it. I have
helped bury a young man in the Mundaring cemetery on a grey winter afternoon; black
toadstool umbrellas gathered around the gravel-edged plot. The rude shock of wet clay on
wood struck a more final tone than any sympathetic trickle of sand ever could. Heavy, wet
and malleable, it is the very stuff from which we are formed.

Air
When it comes to the prevailing winds in Perth the Fremantle Doctor has all the fans. The
Doctor is a media darling, mentioned in the same dispatches as Franceʼs Mistral and the
Sirocco of Northern Africa. It receives gushing bylines from sports commentators calling
the international cricket at the WACA, where it can quite literally swing a match as it cuts
across the pitch. It has spiced up many a sailing regatta out in Gage Roads west of

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Rottnest. It is the cooling balm of a fierce summer afternoon and the salve that renders the
city bearable from January to March.

By contrast the early summer easterly coming off the desert, on through the Wheatbelt and
down to the scarp is Perthʼs dirty little secret. By the time this nameless urchin has
reached the flats it does little more than bitch and moan, ruffling hair and kicking paper
around. Up here, though, it is all pure rage. For those below the scarp, Perthʼs desert
easterly is known as a hot dry wind, the classic oven door blast that crisps lawns and melts
school children. Coastal dwellers strain their necks for the Doctorʼs countering, cooling
visit, its arrival signaled by a haze rolling in off the sea. The Fremantle Doctor settles in the
western coastal suburbs, as do all sensible doctors in this city. From my verandah I can
see it drift in as far as the CBD, making house call after house call, but rarely paying us a
visit.

By the second summer on the scarp we had realised that the easterly had it in for us. In
the eleven ensuing years we have endured the rough hands of this, the Doctorʼs
capricious counterpart, a self-schooled outback quack with cold rough hands. Well past
sunrise it packs the icy iron punch of a runaway train, screeching down a thousand gullies,
uprooting trees, flinging recycling bins around and boxing the ears of anyone braving a
morning walk; a vandal kicking cans down roads and making its mark on fences. It is
noticeable first in the weeks prior to Christmas, though this yearʼs series of dominant high
pressure cells over Western Australia may well bring it early. What starts each night as a
low growl at ten pm rises to a banshee wail by four am. Many residents on the scarp say
they feel the tension rising in their bones on its first night of howling. The trees pick up the
tension and prepare themselves for the worst. “You lousy wind!” I yell, as I retrieve the
snapped purple shoots of my roses. “Shhhh” call the tops of the trees in panicked unison,
“It might hear you.”

And it is the trees that are shaped most by this brute of a breeze. Driving up Greenmount
Hill it is noticeable how almost uniformly the native vegetation in particular, strains away
towards the west. The flora has turned its back to the bully, flicked up its coat collar and
feigned disinterest, all in the hope it can ride out the buffeting until it spends itself by late
January. The largest and most impressive of the locals wear their scars with pride, all torn
limbs and curved spines; war pensioners back for another year. The smaller timbers have
more flex, playing it like a game. These are the rookies yet to experience the real action at
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the top of the tree line. The exotics, by contrast, look more out of place than ever when the
wind kicks in. Frivolous date palms, naive soft-stemmed frangipanis, hollow-chested
poplars; they all take a beating each night and are left bewildered and exhausted by
lunchtime, settling down in silence to lick their wounds as the cold gale dies down. But the
wind hasnʼt finished with them yet. Just when the sun really gets going, the easterly
changes its mind, heats up and comes roaring back, wilting the soft-leaved non-natives
like cheese under a grill. This one is no crowd pleaser.

Fire
Fire is an exposer. In The Bibleʼs New Testament St Peter utilises the image of fire to
describe the coming Judgement Day: “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the
elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” For
the Greeks fire was different to the other elements by degree alone. But in Peterʼs Jewish
background it was essentially different. Fire was a strange other that, in reflecting the
nature of Israelʼs YHWH, exposed everything before it, sin and folly in particular.

In Australia fire is still an exposer. Fire lays things bare. And in an age when being true to
yourself is the highest good, fire exposes the folly of those who, for the sake of getting
back to nature, relax around what is still an untamed environment. Put simply fire exposes
the naivety of those fringe dwellers who choose to pitch their tents in the scarpʼs middle
class enclaves. These locales, with deceptively verdant nomenclatures such as Darlington
and Glen Forrest - names that reek of Old World safety - are dumping grounds for bushfire
fuel. Steeply sloped and heavily wooded hillsides are dotted with pole homes and rammed
earth caverns, lifestyle dwelling for the comfortably well-off. Replete with grass-trees,
granite boulders, quolls, possums and kangaroos, the five acre wooded block is a decision
seemingly made all the wiser in the light of the urban crush developing below. Up here the
shires permit you a building parcel on your block. The aim is to ensure that, while enough
land is cleared for living, the rest of the block remains as authentic as possible. And since
capital “A” authenticity ranks as a primary motivating forces in western culture today,
residents are happy to go along with this. Who knows, perhaps such proximity to the
natural will unearth a primal purity hitherto suppressed by the dehumanising suburban
grind you have fled.

For many city office workers who live in the hills this is the yin and yang of their existence.
The drive back up the hill each evening away from the concrete, glass and deadlines is
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somehow a journey towards the real you, the noble super-ego that only a setting like the
bush can reveal. However the bush has an id of its own, more destructive, base and
hungry than any human mind can conjure. And fire is its natural outpouring. As the 2009
Victorian fires taught us, despite our great technological advances we are not in control.
Faced with the shrieking beast that is a well-fueled bushfire Victorian residents fled, some
of them too late. Yet throughout semi-rural and hills communities in Australia there remains
a breezy optimism that such an event is not going to occur, not this year anyway, and even
if so, then not here surely.

Here, in the last street of suburbia, I once caught a glimpse of fireʼs glowering psyche. Like
Moses on Mt Sinai however, it was just that, a glance at the back parts of the strange god.
A blaze blew up in the small peninsula of bushland that juts into the back of our cul-de-sac.
The first I knew of it was as I sat reading a New Scientist article on the Canberra bush fires
that destroyed almost five hundred homes and razed the National Observatory. The
smokey whiffs given off by the article were Pulitzer worthy. Until I realised that these
smokey whiffs were coming from outside. I stood on my wooden verandah, in front of my
wooden house and watched in horror as ash rained down on me from the roaring flames
not fifty metres away. I had no plan, no strategy, no idea where the wedding album was.
The fire bounced off the back fence of the houses opposite, frustrated by the lack of fuel
on the bridle path, yet straining and snapping at its leash via the tall overhanging trees to
the east. The helicopter came and doused it, though not before several houses were
evacuated and a line of fencing destroyed. The smell hung for days.

It was only when I walked up through the burnt out area a week or so later that I saw how
fire not only exposes our folly, but our sin as well. There on the hillside, blackened and
grey with ash and denuded of foliage, the dirty little secrets of local residents were
uncovered for all to see; sheets of abandoned asbestos, bicycle frames, hundreds of beer
bottles, thousands of still-bound bundles of advertising never delivered. What had seemed
pristine environment was revealed to be a dumping ground. This centuryʼs greatest sin,
environmental pollution, lay starkly exposed for all to see. It would be months before the
first autumn rains were to arrive, bringing with them, if not fig leaves exactly, then at least
some green shoots to once again hide the shame of our nakedness. St Peter continued
his letter by asking its recipients: “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind
of people ought you to be?” People of wisdom and purity; that seems to be the prudent
response to the exposure that a fire can bring.
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 Living on the Edge: Observations from the Darling Scarp

Water
When asked their preferred place of residence Perth people invariably say “by the sea”. At
least that is what one must assume when comparing real estate prices. Perth people love
proximity to water. New money loves the ocean and its heady champagne spray, while old
money has a penchant for the lower reaches of the Swan River, stained wine-red by
tannins and warmed to room temperature in shallow tree-lined bays.

The scarp, by contrast is moonshine and poteen, a distinctive brew distilled in the hills.
Water up here is all subterranean and rumour. Springs dash out of hillsides, splashing
unannounced onto granite before bounding down a slope and off into a reed-fringed gully.
Waterfalls bloat in winter, carousing through the National Park with echoey shouts,
intoxicated with winterʼs excess. Even that no-nonsense hills wowser, human
infrastructure, gets a bit tiddly after a decent rain. Burbles of water pour incessantly from
natural springs concealed by driveways, lanes and roadside verges. Upon visiting the hills
one sunny winterʼs day my mother remarked at the terrible waste of water by residents
who had left taps or sprinklers running. How odd it was for someone living on the sandy
coastal plain to experience the pleasure of run-off, the point where the clay has drunk so
much it can no longer hold it in and belches it out through each and every orifice. Down on
the flats the water simply slips through the cracks in the sand and disappears beneath,
never to return.

The sight of steep hills driveways pouring water on an otherwise dry day is a great comfort
in a city known for shortages and sprinkler bans. Sadly the winter just ended offered no
such relief. My mood darkened each early morning as, during my walk, my Lagotto dog
stayed stubbornly and mournfully dry, despite his breedʼs Italian name; “the water hound”.
Most days he rooted around in vain for a stream to splash in, contenting himself with
puddles that were more mud than water. On many mornings my shoes and shorts were
soaked by dew from the walk-trailʼs long grasses, testament to another clear, crisp night.
This year the earth has gone teetotal, and the first telling signs are in the hills. The
Mundaring Weir is only thirty-five per cent full and summer is still to come. Like the fear of
visiting a terminally ill loved one I am in a state of denial. I have refused to walk to the
national park falls this winter. To do so would mean to encounter boulders, usually
submerged at this time of year, sticking up like hipbones through the thin skin of water that
remains. The main deniers, however, are those on the coast, where recently a rapidly
expanding shire was found to have overshot its water usage by more than one billion litres.
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When you donʼt see it, and all you are doing is sucking it up from the Gnangara Mound
aquifer then life can continue as normal. Large swathes of oval must remain green. Land
releases denuded of every tree must be replanted with young and initially thirsty natives.
Fountains must be dug and filled. The estates must retain their natural look, and if nature
will not come to the party with adequate water, then the shire must come to the rescue.

Have I done the scarp justice? Hardly. Have I viewed it with perspective? Not at all.
Perspective is for those who live down there on the flats, who observe the scarp as “up
there”. They can state with Newtonian exactitude: “The hills, oh yes, we know the hills.
Dry and dusty in summer, freezing in winter. Miles from the ocean. Why would anyone
want to live there?” Besides, any perspective I did have, dimmed over time. The clear
window a migrant looks through upon arrival in their new homeland gradually fogs. No, I
have neither done the scarp justice, nor given it perspective. I have however learned to
enjoy its contrariness, its violent mood swings, its interminable stubbornness to human
intervention. I have come to appreciate its refusal to yield too quickly to humansʼ desires,
its efforts to keep its honour intact. I find strange comfort in its moody elements and the
way they heighten Perthʼs temperate, flattened weather pattern. It is these I have tried to
convey. The Darling Scarp may not be the vast cathedral of Robert Hughesʼ American
landscape, but at the end of a painful twelve months in which illness very nearly claimed
me, and from which the path to recovery was slow, its rugged, wind-blown, rock-strewn
landscape was, to me, a chapel of solace.

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