Jackson's Ephemera

Each time I return to Perth’s Western Suburbs, I’m saddened to see iconic, older homes replaced with yet more square, glass-fronted mansions that have zero congruence with the natural beauty of the area. Entire streets are steadily being filled with oversized concrete boxes; houses that are at pains to appear striking and ‘contemporary’, but look painfully beige en masse. All driveway, no trees, a garage that’s basically a house unto itself, and scarcely any sign of life visible from the outside either.

This might be just what you’d expect from wealthy suburbs that continue to grow wealthier, but I’ve found that things are different in Sydney. The Eastern Beaches might be home to some of the most expensive property in Australia, but much of it retains its original form, with quaint brick cottages and leafy gardens all over the place. Things just don’t get knocked down half as often.

For this reason, I’m drawn to areas of Perth’s Western Suburbs that have preserved something of their original suburban character. They’re hard to find, but the purest example has to be Seaward Village on Swanbourne’s northern border.

The northern half of Swanbourne is already markedly leafier and sleepier than Cottesloe, but Seaward Village feels like a world of its own. Which it basically is – this is a long-standing military estate attached to Campbell Barracks, and home to a few hundred military officers (including SAS) and their families. It’s also the perfect candidate for No Map Completion because it’s geographically contained and an area of significant aesthetic distinction.

The project

The plan was to enter Seaward Village from the south, coming over the crest of Melon Hill in neighbouring Allen Park and then cutting across into one of the village’s many cul-de-sacs.

From here, there’s not a great deal of road to cover. The village roughly encircles a central park with about six cul-de-sacs extending off the main ring road. It’s also easy to keep to the area, bounded as it is by the off-limits army reserve to the north, Allen Park to the south, Swanbourne Beach to the west, and a singular access road (Seaward Ave) to the east.

Caveats

While Seaward Village is publicly accessible and there’s nothing to stop me from covering every street, it’s naturally sensitive from a security standpoint. So much so that running around taking photos would probably result in military detainment. I took a few photos on the run at the very beginning, but put the phone away before pushing my luck too far.

There’s also a network of roads extending into Campbell Barracks itself that, needless to say, I’d be making no attempt to enter.

First attempt

My first attempt at completing Seaward Village was entirely unplanned. I was halfway through Allen Park when I figured I may as well keep going and see how much of the village I could cover. This was my first visit to the place in about six years, and I hadn’t so much as glanced at a map beforehand, so intuition alone was my guide.

The village is just as I remembered. A quiet hamlet of single-storey, 80s housing stock, detached from time and the outside world. Here is a list of the most indicative textures and features:

• Red brick
• Sand-coloured brick
• Colorbond fencing
• Grass
• Portable basketball hoops
• Ford Rangers
• Asphalt
• Steel shutters (cream-coloured)
• Flywire security doors
• Detached letter boxes with ‘no junk mail’ stickers
• Silence with occasional birdsong

As is always the case with these explorations, what once seemed a small place started to feel much bigger upon immersion. Seaward Village is a classic spaghetti suburb, full of cul-de-sacs and pedestrian thoroughfares to get lost in; council-managed enclaves where illegally parked camper trailers lie harmlessly and the casuarinas close in.

The main circuit of Seaward Ave and Sawyer Street begins to feel just as wandering as the tendrils which snake off it, terminating behind the dunes of North Swanbourne beach. It pains me that I didn’t get a photo of one particular pathway off Seaward Ave which trails off into this mystical dunescape – its sand and shrubbery visible behind a military grade fence and hostile vehicle barriers. The sole hint of the village’s almost absolute-beachfront location in a suburban landscape that otherwise appears transported direct from Thornlie or Canning Vale. From what I can tell, there is no direct beach access anywhere in the Village. no doubt this is for security purposes, but it has the secondary effect of making Seaward Village feel even more hermetic and resolute in its identity; the only bubble of housing in the Western Suburbs that wears its brick proudly, without whitewashed layers of ‘modern’ render. The only streets in this area where you won’t find a single two-storey home.

Eventually I’m all the way around at the entrance off Seaward Ave. I know I’ve missed at least five roads in this first attempt, but going back in would require a heap of switchbacks and grinding it out on roads already covered. And things aren’t flat in a subdivision that’s built on a coastal dune system. The road back to Allen Park is too tempting to resist.

ATTEMPT GRADE: FAILURE.

Second attempt

I tried to be more systematic the second time around, approaching Seaward Village from the main entrance in the east – off Seaward Avenue where i exited last time. immediately I set about hitting each of the cul-de-sacs off Sawyer Street, which all sit on short but sharp hills that get the heart-rate up.

I still don’t want to risk taking any photos, even though it’s just as quiet as last time. only a few council workers doing maintenance of some sort in Harris Park. The Village, I should add, offers two decently-sized but fairly non-descript parks containing a cricket pitch and a playground. There’s also an ADF daycare centre adjoining one of them – the only non-residential premises in the village. It must be a nice place to raise children.

At this point I have to admit that the village doesn’t really reward running. Going back and forth on cul-de-sacs becomes a lot less fun when there’s relatively few pathways and pedestrian connections between them all (there are pathways and such closer to the central parks, but no back ways to link up the cul-de-sacs themselves). It’s a case of constant about turns with minimal improvisation.

It’s also an area with a high field of visibility; the total opposite to a shady and subtly labyrinthine streetscape like that of Daceyville. The houses are low lying, and the trees are either short enough or spaced far enough apart to never impede the view of where you’re headed. The end of each cul-de-sac is always in plain sight, so it feels as if there’s no need to actually grind up a hill in order to see it – which makes the whole endeavour feel even more arbitrary than it already is.

Cul-de-sacs covered, I continue along the lengths of Seaward Avenue and Coast Rise before returning out the same way I came in, totally under the impression that I’ve completed the entire Village. Only now, inspecting the route-map months later, do I notice that Tide Court remains greyed out. An unassuming little no-through road, probably less than 100m metres in length, is the undoing of this particular project. And now that I’m back over east, it will be some time before I can set things right.

ATTEMPT GRADE: FAILURE.

Site specific context

Seaward Village is part of a broader zone which carries significant emotional resonance. It’s flanked by North Swanbourne beach and Allen Park – interpretive places of the highest order – and forms part of a mythic landscape that extends across the great western highway to Bold Park.

When I was younger, this landscape always represented the outer reaches of my small, suburban sphere of experience. A borderland I first sighted from the balcony of the (now demolished) Swanbourne Primary School, which looked out toward the tree-lined hills of Bold Park and Mount Claremont. In those days it did very much appear a “Mount”.

A rough approximation of the view to Mt Claremont/Bold Park from the former site of old Swanbourne Primary School. Despite all the new houses you can still see a line of trees on the horizon.

As such, there’s always been something peripheral about it. It’s a place where houses give way to large parks, bushland reserves, and sprawling dune systems unknown to anyone except army personnel and shadowy men cruising for sex. Home, at various times, to the shattered and graffiti’d shells of long-forgotten Western Suburbs landmarks; the Swanbourne Bowls Club, the old beach kiosk, and even Swanbourne High School. I remember the latter awaiting development on the fringe of the suburb for months – a haunting presence for us kids for whom a living high school was too big a concept to fathom, let alone a dead one sitting there like the carcass of some giant, Krasznohorkai-an whale. The broken glass of its bones reclaimed by ever-shifting dunes.

Clearly there was always going to be something fascinating about the one residential space that existed in this borderland. Especially when it was reserved exclusively for the families of people who shot guns and fought wars, as was my understanding at the time. It felt like a secret space, a no-go zone, which in many respects it is.

And yet how inviting its streetscape was! Coming from a place of straight and busy roads, the winding Courts and Rises of Seaward Village were a revelation. It immediately stood out to me as a place designed for wandering and play as opposed to convenience – one much more closely aligned with the representations of suburbia I’d fetishised in American movies and TV. Tree-lined and rambling, where the most important thoroughfares aren’t roads at all but well-trodden shortcuts through parks and backyards.

Findings

This site specific context indicates two distinct features of seaward village that explain its resonance: (a) peripherality, and (b) wanderability.

In the case of the former, Seaward Village’s peripherality has made it a geographical stand-in for the horizon line of psychological terrain. The border beyond which things become murky and unknown (see The Central Steppe).

Where once this horizon appeared to me as the tree-lined ridge of Bold Park as viewed from Swanbourne Primary School – an unpeopled landscape – Seaward Village has helped me discover an occupied zone in the borderlands of my mind. One that feels uncanny and aesthetically a little off, but still much more familiar than what lies beyond. I can get comfortable here but I will never quite feel at home – never mind the fact that this uncanny frontier is a direct neighbour to some of the most familiar, nostalgically-charged places of my life; areas which have cohered with my own mental landscapes since early childhood. In this sense it is a reminder that unknown psychological territories are closer than we think.

The wanderability of Seaward Village also provided an early roadmap for new ways of thinking that were explorative and tangential; an alternative to the linear and gridded routes inculcated by my childhood suburban experience. Its impact in this respect is not as great as the rambling roads of Rottnest Island, but it still persists in my mind as a landscape that invites free movement and, by extension, thinkning. Here I discovered cul-de-sacs of thought – dead ends that were no less interesting for being dead ends – and isolated spaces that could only be connected to the surrounding landscape by more creative transports than I’d ordinarily use.

For this reason, the village is paradoxical at heart. A closed, heavily-surveilled place that somehow invites free exploration. A defensively detached and isolated enclave that has given rise to ersatz corridors and connections.

A place that feels foreign yet, somehow, a lot like home.