Western Australia - Sun and Surf

Travel to Perth, a report by Simon Busch in The Guardian.

Whether it is cheaper than therapy I don't know, but revisiting your past by aeroplane at least means you can get a ticket out again. I was quite an intellectual child and felt thoroughly deracinated when moved, at the age of 12 or so, from the relatively urbane environment of Sydney, on the east coast of Australia, to Perth, 4,000km away as the kookaburra flies across the flat, arid, lonely interior of the continent to the opposite, western shore.
Perth was not only the most isolated city in the world - as far from its nearest neighbour, Adelaide, as London is from Istanbul - but also, I found, populated by alien-seeming beings. These were perma-tanned, muscular creatures with sun-bleached hair falling over wrap-around, reflective sunglasses, who seemed to be almost evolutionarily adapted to the fortnight-long stretches of 40-degree heat and, by their slightly bow-legged stance, poised on their surfboards even when they weren't. What they apparently lacked was an affinity for literature; what they evidently lacked - they told me so, with a characteristic raucous obscenity - was an affinity for the socks and sandals that I, at first, unselfconsciously wore.

But, some years after going west, I discovered a wonderful retreat in the form of the shire of Margaret River: a hamlet and its surrounds three hours' drive down the coast from Perth in the cooler clime of the south-west. Now, making that drive again 15 years on, having since left Perth for Melbourne and then London, but returned to Western Australia for a week, the sharp, sulphurous smell of the eucalypts by the side of the road sent me, as smells will, spiralling into a disquieting zone of temporal uncertainty.



You can find the full article here.