Goodbye to Perth

Over the last four days, we have had lots of fun exploring some more of Perth and spending time with our grandsons.

I had offered to cook fish for lunch for the family on Good Friday, and if I say so myself, we had a nice meal of Barramundi in lemon cream sauce.. It was all eaten with both Orin and Koa asking for more..After lunch, we walked over to the local park where we kicked a ball around and played together.

The boys are very smart little kids. They are both fluent in English and Japanese. I was supervised very closely as I worked on the puzzle game ‘Wordle’ with suggestions and instructions coming from both sides.

Along the way, I found an opportunity to stop in Perth’s CBD to take a few photographs when there were few cars parked in the street. Perth Has a nice mixture of new and old buildings.

One of the buildings that caught my eye was a new luxury hotel named the ‘Adnate’.  We know of Adnate, the artist, from our visits to the various painted silos in Victoria. He is a gifted artist who works on large scale surfaces. There in the middle of Perth’s CBD is a 24 storey mural that he has recently completed and has the hotel named after him.

On Saturday, Jill and I drove out to the town of York in the Perth Hills. It is a small, historic town beyond the city limits where the buildings have all been beautifully preserved and the ambience is quite classy.  York was the first township to be settled in the Avon Valley and is full of really beautiful old buildings. It is one of the best preserved and restored nineteenth century towns in Australia.

Flowing past the town is the Avon River. It is famous for hosting the international annual white water rafting event, the Avon Descent. Each year, hundreds of canoeists and power boaters tackle the gruelling rapids and rocks pools of this 133 kilometre course from the picturesque farming township of Northam to Perth.

The river begins as a tranquil waterway flowing through the nearby town of Northam and is crossed in York by a pedestrian suspension bridge. The river is a tributary of the Swan River.

Jill spied a cafe back in the main street  named ‘Daizeys’  that looked good for a light lunch. Well, a light lunch is what we ordered, but it came out after such a long time that it might as well have been dinner. In a way, this was fortunate as we had a booking for dinner with all the family at a Greek restaurant back in Perth and our light lunch (even late)  hadn’t ruined our appetites for such a grand meal.

On our way back to Perth, we drove through a forested area where the iconic Xanthorea or ‘Grass Tree’ plant was prolific. When I was a kid these were commonly known as ‘Blackboys’ but that name is no loner politically acceptable. These plants were featured in a series of children’s books by author, Ted Prior. In the stories, a character named Grug began his life as the top of a Burrawang tree that is very similar to these plants.  Resembling a small, striped haystack with a face, he is fascinated by the world around him and solves everyday problems creatively and without fuss. When dancing instructions are too difficult to understand, Grug invents his own dance and calls it “The Grug”. Our kids loved these stories and, now, so do our grandkids.

On Sunday, Yuki made us a traditional Japanese lunch with seaweed (Nori), rice, raw fish (sashimi), vegetables and Miso soup. It was quite delicious. We sat around and talked all afternoon while the boys played with the blocks that we had obtained every time that we shopped at the Woolworths supermarkets. All our efforts in collecting the little packages each time we checked out were well worth it.

Today, was our last day together before we return home tomorrow morning. We spent all day at the newly renovated Western Australian Museum. It is a very grand building with a number of room that each have an individual theme. One was centred one WA’s animals, another on local minerals and another on Immigration – how the state has developed from its original ingineouls inhabitants to settlers coming from many parts of the world. I rather liked the room titled ‘Reflections’ as it had lots of exhibits from the 20th Century and I could relate to most of them – even the leather school satchel that I had as a kid.

In the original part of the museum was a very ornate hall (complete with Blue Whale Skelton) that was once the city library.

At the end of the day, we said our goodbyes and returned to our hotel ready to pack and get to the airport tomorrow morning.