True Girt

by David Hunt

This was the Age of the Beard, where men were men and so were some of the women.

THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE IN THE Apple Isle, an isolated speck in our southmost seas where the genetic distance between any two people is relative.

The Wiradjuri’s sacred sites and hunting grounds were suddenly overrun by farmers, felons and their strange white fluffy animal totems.

The settlers lived in leaky tents on a coastal island for over three months, but things were looking up when Perth was founded on 12 August. The new capital was inaugurated when Mrs Helen Dance, the wife of a settler captain, ceremonially chopped down a tree. Mrs Dance’s symbolic demonstration of nature’s inability to stand in the path of progress is still honoured by today’s Western Australian mining companies and marina developers.

The city, which didn’t start work on a sewerage system until 1891, earned the unflattering sobriquet of Smellbourne.

Nothing shows the lack of cooperation better than the colonies’ adoption of railway tracks of different widths. Mark Twain, when forced to change trains at the Victoria–New South Wales border, wrote, “Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth.”