City of Perth

City of Perth Western Australia.

The fast growing capital of Western Australia has a constantly changing skyline. At dusk on a still winter evening. 

The Town Hall Clock Tower was built in 1868. It is 38.1 metres high, and the face of the clock has a diameter of just over two metres. The clock itself was built by Thwaites and Reed of London. It was originally manually wound, but in 1956 electric motors were added to do the winding. Which is a good thing because it required climbing a 67 step ladder to do the manual winding.

The clock has been maintained since 1932 by the Ennis family. Aside from major costs this was all done as a public service! Three generations of this family, which also operates Ennis Jewellers, have been involved in this work.

The bells were also built in 1868 by Mears and Stairbank, of Whitechapel, London. There are three bells. An hour bell at 305 kg, and two quarter hour bells at 203 kgs each. April 2014.

More info can be found at the Heritage Perth website.

The Grow Your Own sculpture, colloquially known as The Green Cactus, was erected in 2011 in Forrest Place in Perth. Designed by James Angus it was purchased by the WA State Government at a cost of more than one million dollars.

The Bell Tower in the Barrack St Jetty precinct is one of the largest musical instruments on earth. The bells were originally from St Martin in the Fields church in Trafalgar Square, London. These are the oldest bells in Australia, dating back to 1550. The Bell Tower is open to the public.

The Memory Markers sculpture in Stirling Gardens was created by Anne Neil and unveiled in 2005. They are cast aluminium pen nibs, each 3.5 metres high, and are dedicated to the planners of Stirling gardens, the first botanical gardens in Western Australia. It also honours those who recorded the history of the gardens.

 The Wellington St station in Perth is the central hub of a modern light rail passenger transport system in Perth and its suburbs. It has in recent years been extended as far south as Mandurah.

The Wellington St station in Perth in the late 1950s is a far cry from the modern station in the picture above. Then the main locomotives were steam powered, though diesels were beginning to make inroads. Now electric trains are becoming the norm. This picture and the one above were taken at roughly the same place on the station.

The original, eastern, bridge was built in 1959, and was at the time the largest pre-stressed concrete bridge in the world. It was constructed to connect the fledgling Kwinana Freeway to the city of Perth. Since then the freeway has been greatly extended, and the Mitchell Freeway built on the northern side of the Swan River. Increasing traffic meant that another bridge was built to the west of the original bridge in 2001. In 2005 a railway bridge was built between the two road bridges. This was opened for trains to Mandurah in 2007.

The original bridge can be seen on the right of the picture.

The Mundy Regional Park is about 22 kilometres east of Perth on the Darling Scarp, overlooking the Swan coastal plain. The falls themselves are 50 metres high and are formed by the Lesmurdie Brook going over the Scarp.

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