* Summer in Perth and A Maritime History of Australia

I had the good fortune to be able to live for a short while in Perth, Australia a few years ago, in a home I rented from a gentleman and his wife who used it when he spent several months a year there as a member of the Western Australian  parliament.  It was (and still is) a remarkable place, with "Australian mahogany" Jarrah wood floors and a big patio overlooking the Swan River.  Only a block up the hill on Mount Street from the central business district, the home felt quite private, with citrus trees in the front garden.  I could walk another block up Mount Street to King's Park and its 1100 acres of nature preserve.  I lived there for months without ever getting into a car.  My next door neighbors were two of the nicest people I've ever met - staunch political conservatives, of course, to afford the neighborhood - who introduced me to their circle of friends, a diverse set of remarkable people.  Now, I still had long hair back then, well down my back, and I worked as a volunteer in an Oxfam shop downtown, unpacking boxes of stuff made by Oxfam's many hand-craft industry co-ops in India, Pakistan, Africa and other places, so the cultural acceptance of these folks was unexpected after life in the USA.  (One of the highlights of my time in Perth was a party I gave on Australia Day 2003, when my "Oxfam hippie" friends from work and my neighbor's mining industry, senior government and university faculty friends (and since no party is complete without a bagpiper in full kilt, they had one, too) all bridged the so-called "Gulfs of Age and Ideology" as we watched the fireworks together and shared a really grand evening on our adjoining patios.  Australia's ideological gulfs just aren't nearly as deep as those we swim in here.)

The home came fully furnished with much finer things than I've lived with before or since; the general house inventory list provided by the rental agent was over 30 pages long (I still have it somewhere) and included two complete sterling silver tea services, a shop-full of English bone chinaware, antique brass beds and an unmentionable (in terms of investment) amount of quite good original art and sculpture.  And books.  A small library's worth of books, many of which I read in the mornings before walking downtown to open boxes in the back room of a small charity shop.  One in particular (that the owner later told me he considered a "shelf stuffer" - an old economics textbook from his college days) was, to me, especially enjoyable.  "A Maritime History of Australia," by John Bach, "describes the sea-borne trade to and from Australia from around 1788 to 1974, which covers the years of European settlement."  It is the only book I have ever seriously considered stealing and, since it wasn't on the inventory specifically, I could have, since it would not have been missed; I know this since I mentioned my close brush with larceny to the owners after coming back to the States and was told I should have, since they were running out of room for "good" books..  I didn't though and I am only looking through it again this evening since it was delivered to me by the home's owners, when they traveled 12,000 miles to the USA in 2006 and gave it to me during a brief visit with me in Colorado.  It's remains one of my cherished possessions.

Why?

Among other attributes, the book contains a lengthy summary of ships logs from various periods and includes a detailed description of the voyages of a 135 tonne brig registered in Sydney between 1845-46.  During this year, the Emma was commanded by her part-owner, "Captain Fox," and Bach's description of Emma's adventures in the onshore trade between Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, based upon the Captain Fox's logs and diaries provides a detailed, clear and delightful insight into life at sea at the height of the great "tall ship" and dawn-of-steam power era.  It's an era I truly wish I had lived within but, since I was born on the cusp of peak oil production, I missed it and won't live to see it return. It will return sooner than later as the planet returns to a solar powered life.

An excerpt from Bach's work:  "One of the most interesting things to emerge from a study of Fox's dairies is the number of other vessels he passed during his voyages.  In the decade before the goldrush, it is clear, there was very active shipping trade around the southeastern corner of the Australian continent.  For a two-month period in 1846 Fox remained in Sydney to get married, spend his honeymoon at Watson's Bay and to arrange accommodation. For three weeks in April and early May the shorebound mariner sat with his wife on the cliffs above Watson's Bay, in a shelter of rocks near the Inner South Head, and he recorded most if not all of the shipping movements in and out of the harbour. It is a veritable catalogue, enlarged day by day."

"For Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) there sailed the Louisa, the steamer Shamrock, later to be forced back  by a southerly gale, the Calypso, the John, the Waterlily, the Catherine and the William.  In the Port Phillip and Adelaide trade he noted the Dorset, Emma, Mary White, Christina, Palmyra, Vanguard, Martha and Elizabeth, and the Coquette.  Overseas ships included the Saint Vincent from London in 130 days, the brig Giraffe from China and the Governor from Manilla, the British barque Sussex, the Constant for Hong Kong, and the Midlothian and Royal Saxon, as well as to barques taking horses to India.  Several other ships, including whalers, were seen to depart to the south seas."

"Even Fox, experienced mariner though he was, became excited at the sight of so many ships, and on one beautiful day in late April, as he sat with his new wife at South Head, he tried to convey his impression in the following passage:

    'Before us lay the boundless Pacific Ocean now indeed deserving the name, 'deeply, darkly, beautifully blue' from the horizon's clearly defined verge, to the breakers against the perpendicular cliffs immediately beneath our feet.

    Scattered over its slightly rippled surface the meridian sun shining in slendour on their white canvas were seven sail visible of all the various sizes, from the tiny cutter to the 700-tonne ships.

     Three of them (Barques) had left the port this morning, the Constant for Hong Kong, Midlothian for London and Mary for New Zealand.

     It was interesting to see them slowly moving away from the land on their different courses, till they appeared as mere specks on the horizon, and we were led almost involuntarily to exclaim 'how wonderful in its simplicity is that science which guides each of these ships to her far distant haven through such a trackless unmarked space.''"

"How wonderful in its simplicity is that science which guides each of these ships to her far distant haven through such a trackless unmarked space."  Indeed, Captain Fox, indeed.