10 March 2000

Had a quick look round Perth city this morning and then went to one of the large regional shopping centres (Westfield Cannington) this arvo. There is much more to see here than we originally thought, so we will probably stay in the Perth and Fremantle areas for an extra couple of days. Presumptious and unfair of me to say so (and I'm probably wrong anyway) but Perth people seem to me to be obsessed with youth. Nowhere else have I seen so many older people (particularly men) dressed in such modish clothes and wearing such modish hairdo's and jewellery (rings, bracelets, studs, etc). I don't mean just well dressed, but aggressively, youthfully fashionable. I also noted an unusual number of Asian and Eurasian women and girls - don't know what the reason for this might be. The architecture of the city is a mixture of old and new and there are a lot of new buildings done in the older style so that it is sometimes difficult to know whether a particular building is old, or just old style. I suppose for that reason the city struck me as fairly superficial, but it is still alive and vibrant for all that. The shops and businesses are the same as we have in the eastern states (Myers, Coles, K-Mart, Woolworths, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Hardly Normal and all the others) but there are also a few home-grown ones, such as the Harris Scarfe chain of department stores (they were in Geraldton also and, I think, in New South Wales years ago).

Tomorrow, more sightseeing. Possibly around town (the Botanical Gardens), then maybe down to Fremantle, or North Fremantle and up the northern beaches area around Cottesloe.