It’s a typical summer night in Perth, and I’m standing at the top of the stairs overlooking the train station to Yagan Square, watching four tween-teens huff nangs on a rickety picnic table. I’m overcome by a wave of nostalgia — homesickness, even — for scenes, places and picnic tables I didn’t think existed anymore. But here they are, like it’s 2003.
The mining boom changed Perth, a lot. The money came thick and fast and the tsunami of wealth that came with it remoulded the city, in shape and spirit. Words like “redevelopment”, “rejuvenation” and “reimagination” were bandied about like passcodes for a mythic speakeasy: whisper them at the right doorway and a Valhalla of urban renewal will be revealed.
It didn’t pan out like that, of course — not exactly. Certain unprintable words come to mind when I think of the Barnett government’s many backhanded, wheeler-dealer boondoggles it pulled off for this city, and this state, with its seemingly bottomless bounty.
Yagan Square, more than the infamously lame Elizabeth Quay or the criminally miscalculated Fiona Stanley Hospital, became the most bitter of these many disappointments. Named for Yagan, the Indigenous Noongar warrior who was betrayed, murdered and beheaded by settlers in 1833, Yagan Square began construction in February 2016 and “opened” in March 2018 under the reign of then premier Mark McGowan.
Connecting Perth’s CBD to Northbridge, Yagan Square was a much-needed, I-can’t-believe-it-took-them-this-long piece of urban rejiggering, designed to correct the disconnection between the city’s two major (see: only) hubs. The $73.5 million project was a collaboration between architects, the government and the Noongar community.
Writing in Architecture Australia in 2019, Emma Williamson, a co-founder of the Fulcrum Agency, wrote that “Yagan Square’s intrigue lies in its engagement with the site’s future and its past”. She continues:
Yagan square has not been designed as a single, totalising gesture. Rather it invites curiosity and exploration, revealing stories over time … rather than creating an iconic singular object, the project team has developed a space of deep and layered memory, with each element having symbolic significance in the narrative. It is a place that can be returned to, time and time again.
Aboriginal Elder and Noongar man Richard Walley liaised between the Noongar Whadjuk working group and the design team. The digital tower at the entrance to the square (which now plays ads for everything from reality TV to mobile gambling apps) included 14 “reeds”, intended to represent the site’s original wetlands and the 14 language groups of the Noongar nation.
At the heart of the Square is the Market Hall, originally a hub of cafes, bars and restaurants — safe investments for anyone wanting to take advantage of all the foot traffic. The building looks a bit like a structure Darth Vader would build for his accountant to work in, and its complete and utter failure was the first sign that Yagan Square’s promise of community and renewal had faltered.
McGowan’s border closure did no favours to the Market Hall’s eateries, but the demise of the lunch-and-dinner hub as a concept is likely more closely linked to ill-considered design and mismanagement. It was a matter of stairs: travellers enter and exit via them in similar train station food courts; here, the stairs went around the side.
Rents were also high, business was all but non-existent, and the square soon became a hotbed of drunken violence and destitution, solidifying into what one friend who cleaned the public toilets nearby described as a “rancid vibe”.
In an irony so lazily inevitable it borders on cynically unbelievable, Yagan Square quickly became the centre of Perth’s homeless crisis. A spate of deaths (namely overdoses), assaults, robberies and “riots” joined any headline to do with the square, and the anecdotal evidence gave a queasy hop-skip shuffle to the gait of those passing through, be it for work or a night out.
There was a shrug of acceptance, in a sense. By the time Yagan Square had arrived and collapsed, the city and state witnessed the false promises of the mining boom, and the Otomo-esque urban malaise and dislocated chaos it built into Perth. The Hay and Murray Street malls have the air of a post-apocalypse dystopia, and Carillon City — once the city’s pulsing retail hub — has been so empty for the past three years that a wetland has been installed in its former food court as an art installation.
Yagan Square has continued to operate as a sort of ironwork Picture of Dorian Gray, embodying WA’s moral decay while the coffers of the rich and powerful continue to bloat. When the pop-up cop shop opened in the square in 2021, it was like an unpoppable boil erupting from the city’s worn and cratered face. Who needs to support something when it’s cheaper to police it?
But this is all due to turn around, or so the same pundits who heralded the square’s opening say. Eleven new storefronts are set to open in the abandoned Market Hall over the next month, and 250 staff are to get it going. Edith Cowan University’s new campus is almost finished being built on the square’s west side, and it seems inevitable that the thousands of students it will bring to the area will buy their lunch in whatever burger joints and noodle houses open up.
Still, it is hard not to see Yagan’s Square as another monolith of successive governments’ failures to cash in on the windfall that was/is the mining boom. Architecture is not infrastructure, and craft beers are not culture: what the square needed to thrive was already lost in the shuffle of untold billions — a sense of soul and self that the city auctioned off to BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside and the rest somewhere at the turn of the century.
No matter what the future holds, the intervening years have existed in the neverscape between profit, promise and loss, so to huff a nang on a picnic table on a hot day is, in many ways, only natural.
Ooh a Perth article! Thanks, that was great, its amazing what the government gets away with in the darkness here. The Mary celeste like emptiness of yagan square makes it a great cycling route, as long as you miss the bodies and broken glass. I have been watching its decay with interest for years. Great bit of wankitecture quoted there too, hilarious.
ECU does look interesting though… at least it’s not just another monument to consumption.
You have to love that bit about the fourteen reeds that represent the wetlands that Yagan was built upon. Wonder how many species went west after that happened? Perhaps at Toondah Harbour, after they drain the wetlands to put up millionaires’ holiday homes, someone will erect a silhouette of an Eastern Curlew as a sop to those with vaguely environmental leanings.
Nothing new here. Mining booms have been changing Perth for good and bad since the 1890s with the discovery of the ‘Golden Mile’ at Kalgoorlie. As with Melbourne before that and Sydney before that.
Hopefully a hungry student revival is in the offing for poor Yagan. Still, Perth had turned even further inward by the time we left in late 2022. Encouraged by an atavistic leade, the parochial white bread attitude was worn as a badge of honour. Even the daylight lynching of an Aboriginal boy seems to have been swept under the amphetamine impregnated carpet. Can’t say I have any affection for the place despite a 30 year stretch.
Thanks Mr Marlborough. All information re Perth is so totally under the control of Kerry Stokes it’s a shock to read something true about the place.
Yes, Yagan Square has been a failure. Yesterday my husband and I sampled the new train which left from Optus (Perth) Stadium. It was a ridiculously hot April day. The stadium is a beauty. Its construction was met with massive disapproval from Perthites but there is no doubt that the finished result is amazing. So there is some hope for future developments ?
The mandating of public transport to the stadium was an incredible achievement, and the pedestrian bridge was a construction debacle, but has turned out great.