Alternate Visions

Not all colonists considered Perth’s swamps useless and un-picturesque. A speech given by Marshall Waller Clifton, member of the Western Australian Legislative Council in the 1850s, declares that in Perth:

The natural scenery around is equal to anything I have ever seen elsewhere; and what might it not be made. Its climate, its soil (for it is most unpromising and can be made fertile), its abundant supply of water, its aspect and the swamps which surround, all conspire to render Perth and its environs pre-eminently favourable for every branch of gardening

Clifton 1850

William E Bold was the Town Clerk of Perth from 1900 to 1944, the longest ever serving Town Clerk. Bold was a strong advocate of municipal socialism and developed a 'Greater Perth' concept to embrace satellite garden and seaside suburbs, a redeveloped civic centre like Chicago's, and an overall plan on 'City Beautiful' lines (Stannage 1979).

At the second Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition in 1918, Bold stated that open space was:

as necessary for the maintenance of public health as water supply and drainage systems. Parks and playgrounds are the lungs of a city … the antitoxin of tuberculosis … the provision of parks and playgrounds pays a city – in increase of land values, attraction of population, improvement of the public health, and reduction of delinquency

Bold 1918

In his reminiscences Bold laments the opportunity lost by Perth’s first town planners to retain Perth’s lakes as centre-pieces in an “ideal garden city”:

This leads us to realise the opportunities which presented themselves at that day of laying out an ideal garden city by taking advantage, for ornamental purposes, of the chain of lakes from the eastern end of the city to Monger’s Lake in the north-west. The early settlers, however, were probably influenced more by the possibilities of the site from an agricultural point of view

Bold 1939