Perth

The Swan River is Derbarl Yerrigan to the Whadjuk Noongar, and the ground where the city stands, Boorloo, was part of a landscape lived in for tens of thousands of years. Captain James Stirling surveyed the river in 1827, and the Swan River Colony was founded in June 1829 — a free settlement, unlike the convict colonies of the east, and named after Perth in Scotland.

It grew slowly and painfully. Sandy soils, isolation and a shortage of labour almost broke it, and Noongar people were pushed off the river flats, with violence through the 1830s that included the killings at Pinjarra. The colony eventually asked for convicts, who were transported from 1850 to 1868 and built much of what survives from the period, including Fremantle Prison, Government House and the Perth Town Hall.

Gold changed everything. The strikes at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the 1890s multiplied the colony's population within a decade and paid for C. Y. O'Connor's harbour at Fremantle and the pipeline that still carries water inland to the goldfields. Perth became a city of trams, terraces and iron-roofed cottages, and after the Second World War a city of suburbs, filled by British and southern European migrants.

Mining booms in the 1960s and again from about 2004 rebuilt the skyline and made the state rich. In 1962 the city left its lights burning for John Glenn's orbit and was called the City of Light; in 1986 and 1987 it hosted the America's Cup off Fremantle, where the American challenger won the trophy back. Native title across the south-west was settled with the Noongar people in 2021.

Perth's defining fact is distance. It is one of the most isolated large cities on earth, closer to Indonesia than to Sydney, and it keeps its own clock, two hours behind the east coast and without daylight saving. Residents call themselves sandgropers, grumble about the eastern states, and treat the coast as a birthright — the evening swim, the boat, the barbecue and the afternoon sea breeze are the shape of a Perth summer.

Sport is followed intensely. The Australian rules derby between the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers divides families, and cricket, sailing and surfing fill the rest of the year. The arts are stronger than the city's reputation suggests. Perth Festival, first held in 1953, is the country's oldest annual international arts festival, Fringe World takes over the summer, and small bars and live music rooms have spread through the city's laneways. Perth has sent out a long line of bands, among them the Triffids, Eskimo Joe and Tame Impala.

Whadjuk Noongar culture is increasingly present in public life, through dual place names, Welcome to Country ceremonies and the six Noongar seasons, from the hot Birak of December to the cold, wet Makuru of winter, now used in parks and schools. The city also has a strongly British flavour, with the highest proportion of English-born residents of any Australian capital, alongside large Italian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indian and South African communities.

About 2.3 million people live in Greater Perth, the great majority of Western Australia's population. The metropolitan area runs about 125 kilometres along the coastal plain, from Two Rocks in the north to Singleton in the south, with Mandurah joined to it along the coast, and it is low and wide, a place of detached houses with back gardens, pools and a car or two in the driveway.

Mining money runs through everything, although the mines are a thousand kilometres away. Head offices, engineering and services firms and the fly-in fly-out workforce — mine workers who commute by air to the Pilbara or the Goldfields for a week or a fortnight at a time — are all based here, and the wages they bring home lift prices and property values. Health, education, construction and the city's universities, led by the University of Western Australia at Crawley, employ much of the rest.

Water shapes daily life more quietly. Rainfall has fallen sharply since the 1970s, and desalination plants on the coast now supply a large share of the city's drinking water, with sprinkler restrictions part of the routine. Summer brings days above 40°C and smoke from bushfires in the hills.

The current arguments are those of any fast-growing city — housing costs and homelessness, the Metronet rail extensions into the outer suburbs, and the tension between a mining economy and climate commitments.

Perth eats what the Indian Ocean and the south-west provide. Western rock lobster, which locals call crayfish, along with dhufish, snapper and Shark Bay prawns, are the prized catches, and a paper parcel of fish and chips at Fremantle's fishing boat harbour is a ritual even for people who live nowhere near it. Marron, the freshwater crayfish farmed in the south-west, turns up on smarter menus.

Migration built the rest. Italian families who arrived after the war left delicatessens, espresso bars and the pavement cafés of Fremantle's South Terrace, still called the Cappuccino Strip. Vietnamese, Malaysian, Chinese and Singaporean kitchens line William and James streets in Northbridge, where pho, laksa and roast duck are cheap and served late. Albany Highway in Victoria Park is a long strip of Indian, Thai, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern restaurants, while Beaufort Street and Leederville take breakfast as seriously as Melbourne does.

Drinking has its own geography. The Swan Valley, half an hour from the centre, pours verdelho, chenin blanc and fortified wines from cellar doors among citrus orchards, while Margaret River's cabernet and chardonnay dominate the wine lists. Craft brewing took hold when Little Creatures opened in a former crocodile farm shed on the Fremantle waterfront, and the CBD's small bars pour local beer and gin. Red Rooster, the roast chicken chain found across Australia, began in a Perth suburb in 1972.