I arrive

Well here I am in the first corner – Perth. I sat watching the scenery go past in the shuttle bus from the airport in a slightly dazed and sleep-deprived way. Lots of eucalyptus trees, but so far not a single billabong or jolly swagman. The birds all seem to be larger and more brightly coloured than in western Europe – a Willie Wagtail waving its tail vigorously from side to side as it rushed around in bursts, giving the binocular-less impression of a dark coloured squirrel undulating across the lawn; a pair of cockatoos with rather smart but subtle colouration – pale grey above and pink below – that turned out, on consulting the book, to be galahs; a fast flying flock of streaks of red – some kind of parakeet too quick to identify; and a coot – yes? – yes, the same species that we have at home in western Europe.

By a kind of symmetry with the journey to Schiphol, the shuttle bus got stuck in a traffic jam. By the time I got to the hotel it was almost dark, and as I’m off early in the morning on a trip out to an island, and the ferry terminal isn’t too far from the hotel, I thought I’d do a recce and check that I know where to go in the morning. The pier turns out to be just behind the modern bell tower that’s a recent addition to Perth architecture. It’s all lit up at night, so I didn’t come back to the hotel photo-less.

The tower apparently houses a 16-bell peal, plus two extra chromatic notes. Twelve of the bells came from St Martin-in-the-Fields, to mark the 1988 Australian bicentenary, and the other 6 bells were made specially. I'm not sure where the bells go in relation to the lights.