One of these forces is undoubtedly the natural landscape, characterised by the author as a complex interplay of light and space; of sea and sky, stone and sand, stillness and silence. Reflecting this emphasis, the book’s chapters take their titles from topographical features such as the plain, the limestone coast, and the river; but it is the Swan River which is the source of vision and the central metaphor of the narrative. The river, with its ‘invisible layers’, expresses at once the ‘double effect’ of a ‘legible city’, encamped upon the deeper historical currents swirling beneath the surface.

A sprawling metropolis, stretching from Ellenbrook in the north-east to Rockingham in the south, Perth’s built environment reflects the ambivalent ethos of its surroundings. There is a sense, as the author observes, that its ‘vital aspects are often concealed beneath … a beguiling surface or a layer of unpromising material’. The first ‘planned’ colonial capital, it grew from tents and huts into a gracious Georgian village and, thence, into a small Victorian town, only to be torn down during the mining boom of the 1960s. Although a few period pieces survive, most of the city’s existing structures are less than fifty years old, with the ‘modern geometric frame’ of the CBD standing upon the ghostly remains of its predecessors.

The destruction of both European and Aboriginal cultural spaces, and the emotional landscapes they conceptualise, is a recurrent threnody. Memories, avers the author, are ‘our truest, if most intangible, heritage’. The erasure of Indigenous memories and traditions, of stories and knowledge acquired over millennia, is a particular cause for regret, especially when examined in the context of history. Had the early colonists acknowledged the wisdom and learning of their Whadjuk hosts, argues the author, they would not have struggled to eke out an existence in the first years of settlement.

Whish-Wilson’s attempt to knit together Indigenous and settler stories in a narrative which exalts storytelling as both a theme and a literary device is one response to the lost opportunities of the past. Interestingly, the subjects of many of these tales are renegades and outlaws who speak to the ‘contrarian spirit’ of a people geographically cut off from the rest of the continent. The enduring popularity of marginal figures like Yagan, the Nyungar warrior, and Moondyne Joe self-reflexively celebrates a community for whom ‘difference’ may well be ‘the proudest expression of the city that produced [it]’.

History furnishes many instances of the attitudinal gulf between WA and its more populous sister states. The last colony to become self-governing, it was also the last to federate, and has often bucked the national trend in referenda, voting for conscription in the 1916–17 plebiscites, and against daylight saving at the end of the century. Even the local vernacular is a little out of sync, containing, as the author points out, 750 words adapted from Nyungar dialects.

Whish-Wilson’s chronicle is not, however, a conventional history, but rather an impressionistic, anecdotal, and highly personal account, which, like the city it depicts, strikes a delicate balance between opposing styles. The narrative moves easily from passages of sensuous, almost lyrical prose to a more informal oral storytelling tone.

However, there are odd little disparities, one of them being its overreliance on childhood recollections, cultural allusions, and visual sources rather than the historic record; and while these insights offer a new way of looking at the quotidian, they have also led to some curious omissions. Apart from a passing reference to John Boyle O’Reilly and engineer C.Y. O’Connor, the Irish contribution has been completely overlooked and, unless one counts sport, there is no consideration of religious influences, or, indeed, the sectarian rivalries that informed policy in the first decades of settlement and, occasionally, inflamed public opinion. (There is a spiritual dimension in the ‘almost supernatural clarity’ of the coastal light which the author designates ‘an instrument of grace’.) The most puzzling aspect is the relegation of the state’s significant female figures to the last few pages of the text.

As Whish-Wilson concedes, there are many Perths. The one he finds at the end of his quest is both familiar and strange; an organism which, having absorbed the tensions in its nature, exists ‘in harmony with the stillness and space and silence that is its truest personality’. But perhaps the last word belongs to a Nyungar man who, commenting on the exciting changes happening around him, says simply that the place is at peace with itself because its songs are still being sung.