Australia: Perth

Perth was where Lady Luck smiled on me, and gave me not just one job, but two. A couple of weeks into my stint at the city's Acorn dealer, the head honcho from Acorn New Zealand, whom I'd met when working for Acorn in Melbourne, was visiting Perth to talk to the dealer about developments in the company, and to reassure them following the closure of the Melbourne office, which had been announced not long after I struck west. Much to my surprise, he only went and offered me a job at Acorn in Auckland for when I got to New Zealand, which suddenly opened up huge possibilities for my ongoing travel plans. It's not what you know, it's who you know...

Exploring Perth

So I worked during the week, and spent the weekends exploring Perth and its surroundings. Highlights of this wonderful city – well, edited highlights anyway – follow, in no particular order:

• When I first arrived in Perth, I contacted a friend of a friend called Glen, who kindly offered to put me up for a week of barbecues, golf, drinking and gambling. The Saturday I spent in his company proved to be particularly interesting; Glen, his friends and I headed out to the pub in the afternoon for a few drinks, and ended up having a bit of a flutter on the horses. A lot of pubs in Australia are also bookies, with sports-friendly TVs dotted around the place and a separate counter for betting; it's quite unobtrusive, and good for the bookies' business, obviously. Anyway, three of us – Glen, Rick and me – went in for a tiny flutter, putting A$2 each into something called a trifecta (which I didn't understand at all) where we each picked a horse from the same race, and if those three were the first three across the line, ignoring the ordering of the three, we'd win.

  Incredibly our second race (of three) came up; we'd accidentally picked the first three in the race, and our A$6 bet won us a whopping A$365! I couldn't believe it, but when I got handed A$100 cash and we still had a drinking pot of A$65 between us, I soon got the hang of it. It was typical beginner's luck – I don't bet, even on the Grand National, and I was the one who filled in the winning slip. After a win like that, how could we fail to celebrate?

  But that was just the beginning. Gradually everyone left the pub to go home for supper except for the three of us, so Glen rang up his mate Tyler to see what he was up to. It turned out he was off to play cards at this bloke's house, and we could come along if we wanted, just bring the beer. Red rag to a bull...

  I don't know much about cards, but I remembered the rules of blackjack from way back, and luckily that was the game rather than poker, which I don't understand at all. The three of us who won on the horses were there, with Whitey (the guy who owned the house) and a bloke called Digger. I'd have been quite intimidated if I hadn't been so merry, and I was a bit concerned when I came away with A$75 more than I arrived with, but nobody seemed to mind that I was looking suspiciously like a hustler. When we left at 4am, I'd managed to drink all night, eat a huge pizza, and still come out about A$150 up on the whole day. I couldn't believe it...

• On quite a few occasions I visited Kings Park, a luscious botanical garden that overlooks the centre of Perth, with a breathtaking vista of gleaming skyscrapers, the deep blue Swan River, and the greenery of Perth's trees, all laid out at your feet. One particularly memorable visit involved an afternoon of sitting under a gum tree, writing articles, followed by a deep red sunset that lit up the skyscrapers in the weirdest way – as Kings Park is to the west of Perth, I was between the sun and the city. Slowly the city lights came on, and within an hour the view has turned into a classic cityscape by night. It was really rather memorable.



• The centre of Perth is quite compact, and you can walk around it pretty easily; there's a number of historical buildings, but not quite as many as in the eastern state capitals, as Perth took considerably longer to develop. It's the most remote capital city in the world, and it wasn't until gold was discovered in Kalgoorlie in the late 19th century that things started to take off. Still, places like Government House (surrounded by walls and trees, though unfortunately closed to the public) and St George's Cathedral (a large, red church dwarfed by skyscrapers) are worth the visit. With such a small population, there's precious little traffic or pollution, and parking is a dream.

• Work has its perks, too. There's a rather posh public school in Perth called Scotch College, where every pupil has a Pocket Book computer (just like mine), and I've been commissioned to write an article about them. The teacher in charge of the computer department, who also happens to be a housemaster, invited me out to dinner one Friday night; Barney (the housemaster), his wife Candy and I went to Fremantle, and had a very entertaining meal on the 'cappuccino strip', the main drag in Freo. It's little things like this that make what I'm doing so different to the 'year off before university'-type round the world trip. I'm getting paid to write articles, and I'm also getting invited out to dinner; I can't lose! One thing's for sure: Barney's going to get a pretty damn good write up...

• So, lots of entertainment, conversation, food and drink... and a nice warm feeling – a stark contrast to the hostel that weekend. For the first time since using hostels, I'd found a place with a really sound bunch of people: not too many naive Poms, some interesting Aussies and a good location, close to work and close to the beach. But there's always a bad side, and Scarborough's bad side was called Clayton.

  Clayton was the local loony; it's part of the hostel culture to have at least one misunderstood alcoholic, with a string of disastrous love affairs behind him and a problem with reality. Clayton had already gained a name for himself in the hostel with his irrational mood swings, and after the news hit of the gun massacre at Port Arthur, we were all a little wary of the man. Anyway, when I returned to the hostel on Saturday afternoon, Clayton was crashed out in the corner of one of the communal rooms in the hostel, obviously after a heavy session the night before. That wasn't anything surprising.

  The fact that he was still there, immobile, well into the evening caused little concern, until someone tried to wake him and found that he was totally out of it, and had blood all down his face. The hostel manager called the paramedics, and when they got there Clayton was totally spun out: shaking like a leaf in a typhoon, unable to hold a glass of water... he was a wreck. They found a prescription for Prozac in his room, which they thought he might have tried to overdose on, and then he was in the ambulance and being whisked away into the night. We never saw him again; poor Clayton.

• The freelance writing has also taken off rather pleasingly, as I've managed to get commissions worth more than £1700 over the next 12 months, and that goes a long way on the road. It seems that all the favours I did other freelancers by giving them a break when I was an editor are turning back to me; now they're in the editorial seat, and I'm getting all the work. I never thought of being nice to people as an investment before, but it's paying off handsomely.

• I also stayed with a lovely couple called Rags and Judy – Judy worked with me at the Acorn dealer – from whom I rented a spare room and good company. It turned out that Rags was really into his sailing, and in a fit of Shiraz Cabernet he asked me if I wanted to come along. It was quite an experience: four men in a yacht, Rags, Bernie, Ken and me, racing round the sea with just the wind to push us along. I sat there, clueless as to how to read the winds, change the direction of the foresail or hoist the spinnaker. I don't know much more now, but I can safely say that yachting is up there with fishing in the 'quiet day out, male bonding' stakes. I've never been in a race where you're constantly competing, but in such a slow, mellow way. Maybe if I can find some sucker with a yacht in Queensland, I'll give it another go.

• I'd been meaning to change the oil and oil filter in my car for some time – whenever I took out the dip-stick it'd be covered in thick, black sludge – and I finally got around to it in Perth. It's the first oil change I've done on my own, and although it's not a major task, it's good to know I can do it. I'd spent the week at work hacking this chemical container into something to catch the oil, and it worked a treat. Lo, Mark the Mechanic! Rags also hacked around with the engine, sorting out the distributor to stop the engine 'pinking' – it had been making a fair old racket when accelerating – and now it's running as well as it ever has. It was good to see that the day's work would have cost me about A$140 in a garage, but only cost me about A$20 in parts in the end.

• I've really got into libraries lately, for some reason; they're really peaceful, and they give you a great idea about what people read and think about in the city you're visiting. You also get an interesting cross-section of the city in the clientele, with students, businessmen, mothers and children... it's a fascinating microcosm, and it's totally free. It's a bonus if the library is beautiful, as with Melbourne, but even the ultra-modern Perth library has a strangely compelling atmosphere. I have no idea how these libraries compare to English ones, as 'library' and 'leisure' are two words that were previously incompatible to me, but I certainly enjoyed whiling away the afternoons, typing away between the bookshelves. I truly am becoming middle-aged...