If you or a friend is ever contemplating a visit to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, Steven and I heartily recommend the large, two-bedroom apartment we stayed in on two separate occasions for several days apiece. Located very close to the massive Kings Park, our unit at the Kenata-Fairway Apartment Hotel had a well-equipped kitchen, complete with yummy snacks galore, an in-unit washer and dryer, and the most thoughtful and generous hosts who were of immense assistance, helping me out when we learned the post office didn't open before we needed to leave for the airport.
On our way to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, we passed by the historic, newly named Brass Monkey Hotel for obvious reasons! It was formerly known as the Great Western Hotel.
In a commanding public civic space across the street stood the tall, stylized figurative sculpture known as the Wirin statue, created by local Noongar artist and sculptor Tjyllyungoo. Nearby were modern architectural features and views of high-rise buildings in the central business district, or CBD.
Wirin is the Noongar word for spirit and represents the eternal sacred force of creative power that connected all life of Mother Earth, or boodja. The nine-meter-tall sculpture unequivocally embodied the spirit and culture of the Noongar people.
When we visited Yagan Square, Perth's major public and cultural space in the CBD, on our first day touring the city about two weeks previously, we hadn't caught this view of the impressive outdoor staircase.
A few minutes before reaching the museum was Perth's 'forgotten' Red Light District, known as the Rue de Roe! Madame Josie, born Marie Louise Monnier and also known as Princess Josie de Bray, was the most famous of Perth's women in the world's oldest profession. Born in 1881 in France, she owned and operated popular establishments on Roe Street from World War I into the 1940s. One venue was Josie Villa, known for its lively atmosphere, bright lights, and piano music that played throughout the night. Her businesses had secret entries, such as one through a nearby service station.
Photos from the State Library of Western Australia:
After Josie returned home to France in 1937, World War II kept her trapped in Ste. Nazaire, where she became a German POW for a time. She returned to Perth in 1949 and passed away in 1953, five years before the Red Light district closed. A photo of the Red Light area on Roe Street, just before the brothels closed on August 17, 1958.
Present-day Roe Street:
Still on Roe St, we walked past the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, a modern performing arts venue, home to the Heath Ledger Theatre, named after the Perth-born actor.
I was amused to read that a 12.4 ton Mundrabilla iron meteorite, 'as big as a car,' had been rumored since 1944 to be lying somewhere on the Nullarbor Plain. You'd surely think it wouldn't be that tough to find such a massive rock, would you? You might recall that we'd seen a 3.5 ton chunk of the same meteorite in Albany's Museum of the Great Southern several days earlier.
We saw plenty of signage for the Red Light District, the Boola Bardip Museum, and the State Library, but had a devil of a time finding directions to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, or AGWA. The city planners should get their act together, as not everyone would be as determined as we were to search for it!
We both heaved a sigh of relief after we finally found the entrance! In front was the monumental steel sculpture Between by Australian-born minimalist sculptor Clement Meadmore.
Peeking out from the top was another unusual sculpture that we'd explore later!
Paola Pivi, from Milan, Italy, created these playful images after taking a trip to Alaska to report on the Iditarod dog sled race in 2005.
Spirit Man Purukapali and Moon Man Tjapara, from 1967:
Easier to relate to, and more pleasing to me, were paintings in the Attachment Styles Gallery, whose theme was Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art. It displayed works from the 19th to the 21st centuries that demonstrated how artists have articulated connections between individuals, communities, and their environments. I'll forgo the psychobabble in the description so you can simply enjoy the paintings for themselves!
These further works by Pivi caught our attention, if not our admiration, necessarily.
The I Am Gallery, featuring works by Aboriginal peoples, dovetailed with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, supporting self-determination, cultural continuity, and involvement in decisions that shape daily life.
Judith Yinyika Chambers created Making the Warakurna Warburton Road in 2020 to commemorate the direct route built by men, women, and children from both places. Chambers was a young girl who recounted moving camp daily as the road was constructed.
In Whalers, Christopher Pease layered Noongar iconography over 19th-century prints to "reveal their mix of truth, omission and propaganda." The painting represented how the whaling industry caused havoc to Noongar life and reshaped their relationship with sea life.
The more 'conventional' Aboriginal art, like these pieces from Arnhem Land, expressed identity through relationships to ceremony, Country, and cultural design traditions. Arnhem Land is home to many Aboriginal groups, including the Yolpu, whose cultural and language groups span coastal and inland areas. Their art often includes bark paintings in natural ochres and repeated marks that carry ancestral knowledge. On our first trip to Australia in 2015, Steven and I bought several 'dot' paintings, but I don't recall knowing they were linked to their forebears.
Spirit Man Purukapali and Moon Man Tjapara, from 1967:
Even though we were still drawn to the 'traditional' or 'safe' style of Aboriginal art, I was glad to be exposed to more cutting-edge works in the gallery that often expressed a disaffected voice.
Fiona Foley conceived Hedonistic Honky Haters #1, an activist group formed in the 1960s in response to the Ku Klux Klan, the American white supremacist, far-right extremist hate group. It sent chills down my back.
Easier to relate to, and more pleasing to me, were paintings in the Attachment Styles Gallery, whose theme was Modes of Belonging in Modern and Contemporary Art. It displayed works from the 19th to the 21st centuries that demonstrated how artists have articulated connections between individuals, communities, and their environments. I'll forgo the psychobabble in the description so you can simply enjoy the paintings for themselves!
When I saw Impressionist works by Frederick McCubbins, born in 1855 in Melbourne, I wondered if one of Australia's great painters might have wanted to be pigeonholed in the Attachment Gallery.
Letters, Lies & Alibis was a 2004 collage by Louise Paramor of romance novels published by Mills and Boon. The accompanying description said that the stories were linked by a desire to find a satisfactory partner and to live happily ever after. Naturally, there was "much negotiating around the attachment styles of the romantic protagonists." The gobbledygook went on so long that any pleasure I might have gleaned from the work disappeared. Again, that couldn't be the artist's intention, could it?
George Pitt Morison painted The Foundation of Perth to mark the centenary of the ceremony that named the town and proclaimed the existence of the Swan River Colony. It was included in the gallery because the declaration established a "formal attachment between the (British) Empire and this place that was and remains the home of the Noongar people."
Though I wasn't a fan of Pivi's ground-floor works, I Don't Like It, I Love It on an upper floor did grab me. The installation of 999 hanging trays containing glycerine colored with food dye was both eye-catching and fun to walk through! Before going any further, however, we had to have a briefing from the security guard. That was definitely a first in any gallery! He instructed everyone to be ultra careful and not touch the trays so the liquid wouldn't spill. Imagine taking a young child through this piece of 'art'!
The guard mentioned that the AGWA commissioned the space and asked Pivi to make a piece, and this is what she designed!
I don't think I would have come up with the concept by myself that we could ruin the beauty we discover in the world if we're not cautious in our movements, and therefore mindful of our impact on the world around us.
I doubt that I was 'supposed' to, but I did blow on the water to see how it rippled!
My last look, as we weren't able to walk back through the intriguing work:
As we started on the rooftop Sculpture Walk, it soon brought us to The Caller, whose head we'd just caught a glimpse of from ground level. German artist Gerhard Marcks cast the bronze work in 1981, inspired by the herald's voice calling out in the Iliad. The voice was said to be as powerful as fifty voices together. The layout of the installation was frustrating in that there was no possibility of viewing the face from the roof - too bad it didn't revolve, so we could have some idea of what it looked like.
Originally commissioned for Radio Bremen in 1967, the sculpture came to symbolize humanity's call for peace. Another copy was installed atop the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, just before the Wall came down in 1989.
Pease's 34-meter-long and five-meter-tall printed metal and light-based Target, subtitled My country, my family, was made between 2020 and 2021 and was based on an 1827 drawing of Fraser Point, not far from AGWA, by Frederick Garling Jr. Pease expanded the small landscape into a vast panorama of the area, based on his knowledge, historical documents, and reference material he uncovered during his research. It was the largest artwork the AGWA commissioned. We didn't realize initially that the painting also extended around the corner!
We read that Pease included new objects in the foreground to mark the land and show colonization's impact. The meaning of the repeating motif of concentric circles changed with context. They could mean a waterhole, a site of attack, or a campfire site. Pease was influenced by Jasper Johns, particularly his Target series painted in the mid-1950s. The repeating hexagonal pattern symbolized Noongar body-paint markings and the AGWA building's architectural design.
Though Garling's English vision of the landscape dominated during the day when we visited, LED lighting illuminated certain parts of the work at night, bringing the Noongar connections to land and Country to life. It would have been so neat to see it at night, too!
The descriptive panel talked about two central figures, but I admit that it took me a long time to finally pick them out!
The 1956 bronze Reclining figure by Henry Moore was a charming addition to the Sculpture Walk. I hadn't realized that Moore created so many reclining statues because he had firsthand knowledge of the human body, as he massaged his mother's aching body, which suffered from rheumatism. You could see how the statue held both looseness and tension, and how it perfectly complemented the landscape.
Back on the ground once again, we couldn't help but smile at the Unfolding Lives sculpture, as its design reminded us of games we played in elementary school. However, this had a more sinister meaning, as Australian artist Judith Forrest said it was a public memorial dedicated to the "Forgotten Australians" who experienced harm in institutional care during their childhood.
Western Australia is famous for having some of the world's most stunning beaches, with Perth known for its ten designated beaches. In reality, however, it was just one long blissful coastline of white, sugary sand jutting up to the Indian Ocean's aquamarine waters. With such a large choice of beaches to choose from for our last afternoon of fun in the sun, we selected Cottesloe Beach's 1.5 km stretch of glorious, soft sand, shadowed by the heritage-listed Norfolk Pine trees.
While trying to find the name and artist behind this sculpture next to the beach, I found very similar ones in Toronto, Estonia, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. How small the world is, as Steven and I will be at that last spot on our upcoming trip, so I'll be sure to look for that version!
While Steven found a deserted spot to lie in the sun, I walked along the beach and found more interesting shells for our grandchildren in San Francisco and Chicago.
Up ahead was the iconic Indiana Teahouse, an unmissable landmark overlooking the Indian Ocean. The original one dated to 1913, but the current version was only thirty years old.
After being gone for 90 minutes or so, I walked back to join Steven and cajoled him to go for a drive toward the teahouse. I also wanted to show him the historic Cottesloe Beach Hotel that I had seen right across the road from the beach. Known locally as "The Cott," it had been built in the Art Deco style in 1937.
Cottesloe was more than just a relaxing beach. It was a suburb with plenty of exciting food and drink options.
The Cottesloe Lifesaving Club was the birthplace of Surf Life Saving WA in 1909.
Cottesloe led directly to the vibrant suburb of Subiaco, also well known for its dining and drinking options, and it was on our way back to our apartment. Up ahead was the historic Subiaco Hotel, built around 1897 during the state's gold rush era, and now one of Perth's most iconic pub and eating spots.
As we were leaving bright and early the next morning to fly to Broome in the far northwest part of Western Australia, we only had time to admire Subiaco's "in spots" from the car.
What a fabulous time we'd had exploring Perth and parts of the coastal and inland areas of southwest Western Australia over the last two weeks! Perth was far more exhilarating than we imagined beforehand, with scads of opportunities to delight everyone. The small chunk of the Outback we toured on our mini getaway from Perth reinforced just how huge a continent Australia is.
Next post: Perth's Murals!
Posted on August 27th, 2026, from another scorching day in Littleton. I can see how Steven has had enough of this almost nonstop, desperately hot weather since June, and would like some cooler weather. It shouldn't have surprised us that our utility company just announced it will forbid residents throughout the Denver metropolitan area from using sprinklers to water lawns and plants, effective October 1st. Only hand watering will be allowed because of our severe drought conditions. Please take care of yourself and your loved ones.
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