Family-friendly Perth, WA
From my South African perspective, Australia in general – and perhaps Perth WA in particular – is a wonderfully child-friendly country, just the kind of place you’d want your children or grandchildren to grow up in.
Happy Australia Day!
On yet another blue-sky-perfect Western Australia morning, and Australia Day to boot, it would be distinctly non-Aussie to do anything but head for the beach. The long curve of sand – barely a ten-minute drive from where we are in Burns Beach, Iluka – is a firm family favourite.
All Aboard for Mandurah!
Though – or maybe because? – our passport is so dire and our currency so unreliable, one great thing about being South African is that we tend to migrate all over the world. As a result, we sometimes find old friends in unexpected places.
One such Durban school and uni friend of mine, Susan Lazenby (née Hopkins), lives in the beautiful seaside city of Mandurah, an hour south by train from Perth, WA.
Perth Transport‘s Currambine Station is 2.8km from our home in Burns Beach, and the train whisks you south to central Perth in 26 minutes and from there to Mandurah at the far southern end of the line; it’s $12.60 for a Day Rider all-day ticket.
Susan, Russell and family made the move from Joburg to Mandurah 22 years ago. When they arrived, the population was 40,003 strong – “We were the 003,” she says; now it’s closer to 90,000.
Sue taught in Mandurah for 15 years, and now heads up the English department at St George’s Anglican Grammar School in the Perth CBD (www.stgeorges.wa.edu.au/). But it’s school holidays right now, so she was free to meet me at the station and spend all day showing me the place that has become her community.
Teachers tend to know everyone, and everyone knows them. What’s more, Susan is a woman with wide and varied interests and a thirst for knowledge.
That’s how she knows all about this magnificent Morton Bay fig tree on Stingray Point, planted around 1930 on the site of what was to become the hotel Pensinsula, which closed in 2003.
