Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday.
It’s just a rumour that was spread around town
By the women and children…
— Elvis Costello, “Shipbuilding”
If there’s one lesson from Western Australia’s mining boom, it’s that money can buy you everything — except an imagination.
A decade and a half of hyper-accelerated growth, wealth and corruption has left Perth with a bounty of riches but a dearth of ideas. As fun as it is to expand highways into infinity to keep pace with our comically improbable suburban sprawl (Perth is now the longest city on earth, hilariously), the average punter starts to wonder where all the money is ending up, and why it feels like elsewhere.
At the height of the boom’s hazy peak, the Colin Barnett government distracted from its growing economic disparity by building a few public works, most notably Yagan Square and Elizabeth Quay, locally known as “Betty’s Jetty”. These two quasi-desolate nowhere zones have come to embody the boom’s failures and the lack of inspiration from those who managed it: one a pain to access, the other a grim slog through the worst of Perth’s urban decay and poverty, as if designed by an architect with a fetish for on-the-nose metaphors.
These projects succeed solely as perfect encapsulations of the gap between the boom’s promise and the stark reality of living among it if you missed the gravy train — or were thrown into its furnace to keep the engine running. Costly monuments to broken promises and fumbled opportunities: unkempt graveyards with empty mausoleums engraved with the names of contractors, consultants and con artists of a golden yesteryear that’s remembered like a fever dream.
The boom created a unique greed that necessitated a unique stupidity: one now indelibly linked to the state’s identity, function and future, lurking in every jetski, SUV and unpayable mortgage.
Nothing has embodied this stupidity like the $100 million Perth Surf Park as proposed by Aventuur, the “leading developer and operator of integrated surf park developments”. According to its website, its team combines “deep surf park expertise, investment rigour and passion to drive exceptional outcomes”.
But what might pass as exceptional elsewhere seems more like the rule here.
The park is set to be the largest in the southern hemisphere, with 150-metre-long waves and the potential for something called “beast mode” surf, the beasts from which might compensate for the black cockatoo habitat that will be destroyed in the park’s construction.
Perth has been hankering for a surf park for a while. Aventuur was announced as the developer for this park in 2021, after beating competitor URBNSURF — which built the Melbourne wave pool — for the contract. URBNSURF had planned to build a $30 million surf pool on parkland in the relatively well-to-do riverside suburb Alfred Cove way back in 2019, but was scuttled by intense opposition from the community.
Aventuur’s park will be built in the not-as-well-to-do inland suburb of Jandakot, for the tubular sum of $100 million. The park would take up 5.78 hectares, could require up to 5.26 hectares of native vegetation to be cleared, and 3.15 hectares of Banksia Woodlands of the Swan Coastal Plain — a state-listed priority ecological community and habitat of said endangered cocky.
The environmental consultants Aventuur hired found that ripping up the banksias in which the cockatoos forage could pose a risk to the threatened species. But last July a federal environmental assessment determined that the risk was insignificant and that the project did not need assessment.
WA’s Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) came to the same conclusion, even though submissions made during a public comment period overwhelmingly urged otherwise. Only 150 of the 1096 submissions pushed for no assessment, but there’ll be no assessment all the same. The EPA said “the vegetation is of low to moderate foraging habitat for black cockatoos”. So that’s that.
But beyond the environmental impact, what’s also striking about the Perth Surf Park is its fundamental silliness, a continuation of a silliness that’s dictated Perth’s progress for almost two decades now. Y’see, Perth with money is a little like a mule with a spinning wheel: sure, we know how we got it, but danged if we know how to use it.
There is something mordantly comical about building a wave park in a place globally renowned for its pristine beaches and choice surfing spots. Of course, not everyone can access said beaches, such as those in our far-flung satellite suburbs, a reflection of the idiocy of our urban planning, the underfunding of public transport and public spaces, and the steady erosion of community and culture via the vast alien mindstate spawned by the atomisation of people sprawled across the state like butter over too much bread.
A wave pool at the arse end of the earth is a fitting folly to kick off the boom’s next era, which exists somewhere between a nang’s headrush and a meth comedown. The burnout from the unshakable churn of the mining industry and the Remora businesses (and governments) that live off its scraps is embedded into the very operation of the city and the state, a kind of bone-tired wariness that’s meant to carry us beyond a finish line that’s always being moved back — no backdowns, no break rooms.
The privatisation of this land’s true untouchable beauty, and the relief it offers — our coke-white sands and blue-green ocean — is a perversely gnarly way to admit you’re out of ideas. But such is life when you’re a champagne cork swirling in the current of an ever-tumultuous rip.
It’s too late to bail from this big kahuna, and what’s a waste-of-space surf park to a place that’s learnt to love being dunked over and over?
You learn to like drinking seawater when you’re thirsty enough, after all.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a Perth resident and just tired of the ridiculous, ill-considered projects that fail to account for environmental impact or the fact that we have the best beaches in the world (and I grew up in Southern Africa, so I know good beaches). We fail to make use of our best assets. For example, Fremantle remains a busy port with truck after truck driving to and from it every day, leaving an eye sore on what should be a jewel in the crown and pushing trucks through areas that can’t safely support them. We could move our port to Cockburn (Cockburn wants it) and turn Fremantle into a hub. We could turn what is now an ugly series of containers at Rous Head into something gorgeous as was done with the Victoria and Alfred in Cape Town. But no, that would mean upsetting vested interests (the same interests that are still upset that the Roe bypass that was set to destroy wetland didn’t go ahead).
There are also plans to knock down the old bridge in Fremantle and build a new one. Sure, the bridge needs to be replaced, but why knock it down when it could be turned into a High Line, still permitting bikes to cross. Lack of imagination.
I don’t know how we encourage imaginative thinking. We have plenty of creative people here – just not the government wherewithal to implement anything that would be transformational without being environmentally destructive.
Yes, the Freo bridge is a fine example of this lack of imagination, despite a strong and vocal groups of locals encouraging a better outcome.
FWIW, I’d welcome a place to learn to surf without sharks.
When ever I see a decision involving big money that doesnt make sense by normal considerations of whats best for the community I suspect there is a hidden force acting on the decision makers. That hidden force is most likely corruption. Some where, somehow someone with decision making power has been given a secret benefit by someone who stands to make a big profit out of this.
Isn’t it wonderful how environmental agencies at every level will wave through an expensive and pointless vanity project over the corpses of whatever endangered animals or plants get in the way?
It seems likely that at some point in the past the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos did something awful to somebody very important in WA, who since then has regarded them with an implacable hostility seldom seen since Cato the Elder was in a snit about the Carthaginians. WA is something like the size of western Europe and yet every time there’s a major infrastructure proposal it’s almost certain to be placed slap-bang on the tiny area where the last Carnaby’s cockatoos are trying to hold on. Coincidence? It’s almost comparable with the determination of the NSW government finally to see off the menace of the last remnants of those damned koalas infesting the place.
‘Cocky don’t surf, and we think that he oughta.’
So Perth’s got plenty of affordable public housing then? Green spaces near where people live? Shelters for women and children fleeing domestic vioence? Public schools with facilities rivalling those of private schools? Arts precincts for the benefit of the masses? A public health system without match?
No, I thought not.
Fact check. Perth is not globally renowned for its choice surf spots. It’s shadowed by Rottnest island. Perth Surfers have to drive about an hour south to reach decent surf. The park is perfectly located in a city full of surfers who have moved away from WAs surf zones for work.