The Extraordinary Stories Hiding in Ordinary Perth Families

Perth has a particular quality that sets it apart from most cities: it is geographically isolated, and it knows it. The city's history is one of people who came a very long way to be here — from Britain, from Italy, from Greece, from South-East Asia, from the eastern states, from everywhere — and who built something in a place that the rest of the world was barely paying attention to.

That distance from everywhere else had consequences. It forged a particular kind of self-reliance. It created communities that were tight because they had to be. It shaped an identity — wry, independent, occasionally defiant — that you can still hear in the voices of the people who were here for the building of it.

Those people are in their seventies, eighties, and nineties now. And the stories they carry are unlike anything being told anywhere else in the world, because they happened here, and only here.

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The migrant generation

In the decades after the Second World War, Perth received wave after wave of migrants — from Britain under assisted passage schemes, from Italy and Greece and Yugoslavia, from the Netherlands, from Malta. They came to a city that was still very much finding itself, into a culture that was not always welcoming, to build lives from very little in a place that was very far from home.

The Italian families who came to the Swan Valley and the market gardens of the Swan Coastal Plain brought with them centuries of agricultural knowledge, a language their Australian-born grandchildren don't speak, and stories of what they left behind that most of them have never been formally asked to tell. The Fremantle docks received tens of thousands of Europeans arriving by ship — each of them with a story of the crossing, of the first months, of the specific and unrepeatable experience of becoming Australian while remaining something else.

These migration stories are among the most important oral histories that Perth families hold. They are first-person accounts of one of the great demographic transformations in Australian history. And they exist only in the people who lived them.

The families who watched a city grow

Perth in 1960 had fewer than half a million people. By 1990 it had nearly a million and a half. The people who were adults through those decades watched an almost incomprehensible transformation — of landscape, of population, of the character of suburbs that went from paddocks to housing estates within a few years.

Long-term Perth residents carry in their memories a version of this city that no longer exists. The bush that used to be there. The river before it changed. The shops that anchored communities before the shopping centres arrived. The schools and streets and corner stores that their children's children will never see.

This is living history — not in the formal, academic sense, but in the most immediate one. The memory of what Perth was, and how it became what it is, lives in the people who were here for it.

The mining and industry families

Western Australia's economy was built on resources — on iron ore, on gold, on wool, on wheat. The people who worked those industries — the miners, the shearers, the farmhands, the stevedores at Fremantle, the workers at Midland's railway workshops — lived physically demanding lives in often remote conditions, in a culture of mateship and hardship that has almost entirely disappeared.

The Midland workshops employed generations of Perth families. The timber mills of the south-west. The farms that stretched across the wheatbelt and were worked by families who knew what it meant to be genuinely dependent on the land and the weather. The goldfields towns where people made fortunes and lost them and started again.

These are not stories that were written down at the time. They were lived and then, mostly, set aside. The people who carry them now are the only record that exists.

The families who came later

Perth's more recent history — the waves of migration from South-East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, the skilled workers who came from South Africa and Zimbabwe and Britain in the mining boom years, the families who arrived as refugees and rebuilt their lives in this quiet, distant city — carries its own weight of story.

Every family who came to Perth from somewhere else has a version of the same story told differently: the decision to come, the arrival, the gap between what they expected and what they found, the process of putting down roots in unfamiliar soil. Each of those versions is unique. None of them are adequately captured by any official record.

Why this matters now

The generation that built modern Perth is old now. Many are in their eighties and nineties. The window for capturing their accounts — in their own voices, in their own words — is not infinite. The specific, first-person experience of what it was like to be here, then, doing that particular thing, is only available for a little while longer.

Your family's story is part of Perth's story. And Perth's story is only complete when the ordinary people who made it are actually heard.

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The story of how Perth became what it is lives in the people who were here for it. Our team comes to your loved one's home — anywhere in the Perth metro — and records that story while it can still be told.