17 November, 2016. 11:23
ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A SHIVER WENT DOWN Amy Henderson’s spine when her indoor cricket captain suggested the team get a drink in the Eastern Suburbs this weekend. For a moment, she wondered why in the hell anybody would want to do that. Then the 19-year-old student remembered she wasn’t home in Perth, she was in Sydney.
Perth’s eastern suburbs have a similar stigma to Western Australians to that of Western Sydney, which has long been a dumping ground for the nation’s most ambitious and destitute. They’re both places where dreams are won and crushed, where you can arrive with nothing and leave with riches beyond your wildest dreams – or end up receiving the pipe in a 7/11 toilet for a pat on the back and wrinkled $20 note.
“I just had to laugh, you know,” said Henderson. “Growing up in Peppermint Grove, you don’t see too many ‘easties’ as we call them. Maybe you see them, or Troy Buswell, leaving prison when you’re out having an edgy breakie in Freo or something like that, but you don’t see them day to day.”
“Not like Sydney.” she said.
The commerce/law student went on to explain to her teammates that the Eastern Suburbs in Perth are very different to the ones in Sydney – a fact that shocked and appalled the Sydney-natives as they walked out of the NSW Cricket Centre in Moore Park.
“I was shocked that the people of Perth would stand for that. Having new arrivals and Muslims in their Eastern Suburbs. The councils and local government around here simply wouldn’t stand it,” said part-time wrist spinner Emma Collins.
Equally horrified was opening batsman and vice-captain, Molly ‘Cranky’ Rochester, who grew up in Sydney’s east.
“The one thing that my friend from Dubbo and I have in common is that we both saw our first Muslim immigrant on a Year 7 geography excursion to Western Sydney to study urban renewal – that and we’re both upper-middle enough to go to a private boarding school.”
“I’ve also heard Perth is full of South Africans. How hard it must be for people like me living over there,” said Rochester.
With additional reporting from The West Australian.
Dear Sirs,
As a Western Australian I must congratulate you for bursting free from your usual eastern parochialism and tackling major issues which are of great import in a place which is actually useful. Despite your ongoing and annoying theft of our GST money, this is at least one small step towards your eventual redemption. I salute you.
Yes, problems on our eastern flank have long been a source of concern. I remember saying to Mr Anketell back in the days when we were feverishly labouring to erect the fences we were convincingly passing off as being there for rabbits that the damned things weren’t high enough and that Easterners would find a way to get over them. And so it came to pass. Once that year’s east winds started blowing the useless arseholes started drifting our way again and soon piled-up and overflowed the wire. Once across, our options were very limited. The ones that that got blown towards, and trapped up against the side of, places like Kellerberrin Hill were admittedly quite easy to shoot – although convenient examples of serendipitous topographical assistance aren’t as plentiful as they should be, and old Bob Maynard and his two brothers Ted and “Maggot” farming just outside York had a successful poisoned bait programme for Easterners that ran for years and even won the Premier’s Award for Excellence in 1896, but apart from the ones that we could manage to funnel into Sawyer’s Valley and gas it was inevitable that eventually Easterners would arrive in sufficient numbers to get to the top of the Darling Range, catch sight of the promised land, and tumble off the edge and begin accumulating at the foot of the hills. Throw in a wind change around to the sea breeze and it was always going to happen that they’d eventually accumulate in such numbers that they’d form suburbs, begin breeding, and ultimately start agitating for a postal service and their own night cart. It was, and remains, the worst lapse in Western border security since Captain Fremantle slipped past those lazy, incompetent blacks on sentry duty way back in ’29 and deposited several boatloads of undocumented settlers onto the beaches here.
One of the saddest aspects of this sort of infestation has been seeing the impact it had on wildlife. There are few things more distressing and heart-breaking than watching quokkas pack up everything they own and attempt to swim to Rottnest Island because they just can’t handle being overrun by people with a Sydney accent and no realistic prospects of ever being useful. We have high hopes that if global warming can be arrested and the Earth can enter the next period of prolonged glaciation, the sea levels should drop sufficiently so we can begin to put some serious distance between ourselves and Armadale. This new-fangled globalisation business has much to answer for.
I should also point out that your otherwise highly valuable human interest story about life and struggle in foreign parts contains a small error of terminology; people from Peppermint Grove do not ever have an “…edgy breakie (sic) in Freo…” – they take tiffin in the Conservatory or on the Sundeck. I assume this unfortunate mistake was due to slap-dash sub-editing.
Regards
Ron Muppet
I don’t quite believe my eyes what I have just read.
Manifestation of snobbery, nationalism and religious prejudice.
I don’t believe the characters described are anywhere near to upper or even middle class. Such views bear no class at all.