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Welcome to Hesperian Press

 


Hesperian Press has been publishing Real Australian Books since 1969 when its principal, Peter Bridge, first published technical material. The current program commenced in 1979 and Hesperian Press has now published well over 900 titles, with up to 20 works in progress at any time.
 

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PLEASE NOTE: Any book title starting with "The" - the second word of the title is used to list by.

   All prices quoted are in Australian currency and include GST. * Short trade discount.

   If you are unsure of a title use the search facility on the left hand side of this page.


The shop will be closed on Friday June 24 2022. 


We apologise for any inconvenience. 


FREE BOOKS

When you visit the shop you can choose from the 'free book shelf'. Mail order - we will try to add in a free book if it does not increase the postage.

It is important that we get support for our books from our readers. Hesperian does not get taxpayer funding.

Many millions of dollars have been mis-spent on unreadable novels and plainly irrelevant and obnoxious propaganda.

There is no other publisher like us in Australia concentrating on REAL Australian history and people.

Hesperian books will stand the test of time.

But if we do not get buyer support we may not be around too long after our 50 years anniversary.  

The Amphibious Digger, Major George Mitchell.

Anon.

ISBN 978-0-86905-929-9, (1952 R 2022), A4, 15 pages, 80 grams, $22.00*


Biographical interview With Major Mitchell of the Kimberley Guerilla Warfare Group.

Black-Swan-over-javaBlack Swans Over Java
 

by Ian Duggan.
 

ISBN 978-0-85905-898-8, (New, 2021), A4, 139 pages, heavily illustrated, French flaps, 430grams, $40.00*


The story of the Corunna WWII secret air base south of Marble Bar Western Australia, the men that worked there under unbearable conditions to provide fuel, and armaments to American and Australian B.24 Liberator bombers, and the heroic flight crews that flew missions bombing Japanese bases in Java and Bali.

Commandant-of-SolitudeCommandant of Solitude. The Journals of Captain Collet Barker 1828-1831.

Edited by John Mulvaney & Neville Green.

ISBN 978-0-85905-893-3, (1992, R 2021), 240 x 170,   illustrated- colour plates, Section sewn, French flap soft cover, 466 pages, 1.2kg, $80.00*


After seeing service in the Peninsular War, Canada and Ireland, Captain Collet Barker (1784-1831) was posted to New South Wales, but he spent less than a month in the relative comfort of Sydney Town. He was sent to command the isolated settlement at Raffles Bay (near modern Darwin) for just over a year and was then transferred to King George Sound (Albany), both tiny military detachments on the furthest frontiers of empire.

Prehistorian D. J. Mulvaney and historian Dr Neville Green with E.W.F. (Ted) Street laboriously transcribed Barker's journals, revealing the texture of life in the frontier settlements. 

The combined Raffles Bay and King George Sound manuscripts were 586 folio pages of almost indecipherable script. The Raffles Bay folio was deciphered by E.W.F. Street and similarly the 250 King George Sound (Albany) pages by Dr Green that engaged him for 12 years.

Here is Barker's account of his day-to-day problems in the most remote settlements in the continent. He had to deal with difficult officials, unruly soldiers and escaping convicts. He had to try to meet the inflexible demands of the Colonial Office, and at the same time struggle to raise crops and animals in unfamiliar soil and climate. He took an enlightened interest in the Aborigines, who were familiar with European visitors and his journals provide a unique account of the friendly relationships that he achieved with them. 

Barker emerges as an excellent administrator, kind-hearted, zealous and firm. His untimely death is movingly recounted in Chapter 1. As solitary in his death as in his Australian commands, Barker at some time penned a sadly percipient epitaph consisting of the first lines of Alexander Pope's Ode on Solitude. The last stanza of this ode reads:

 

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me dye;

Steal from the world and not a stone

Tell where I lye.

 

On 30th April 1831 Barker was fatally speared in South Australia.

 

This book details the early years of the military settlements at Raffles Bay and Albany. It is essential for the understanding of both colonial outposts. The publishers gt gt g/father, William Thacker, was present at Albany, courtesy of HMG.

dons-adventureDon’s Adventure. Invasion of Balikpapan. ‘F’ Day – Sunday 1 July 1945.

The diaries of Corporal Donald Briggs (WX 16865) of 1 Australian Armoured Regiment, ‘A’ Squadron and Japanese Sailor Katsuichi Kitao. Compiled by Donald (Don) Charles Briggs.

ISBN 978-0-85905-923-7, (New 2022), A4, 56 pages, illustrated, 180 grams, $22.00*


Contains the Japanese diary as well as Briggs’ war diary. 

swedish-scientific-epeditionThe Daybooks and Journals of Eric Mjoberg & Cyrus Viddell

of the Swedish Scientific Expedition to Australia 1910-1911.

Translated & edited by Margarita Luotsinen, Gunnar Syren and Kim Akerman.

ISBN 978-0-85905-905-3, (New, 2022), A4, 290 pages, illustrated, 1.1 kg, $65.00*


This is a companion to our previously published Among Wild Animals and People in Australia by Eric Mjoberg. Hesperian Press, 2012.

An exceptionally informative volume covering aspects of the expedition not mentioned in the 2012 book. Finer details of the personalities, the specimens, and the localities visited as well as an important collection of previously unpublished aboriginal photographs.  A unique record of the Frontier Kimberley through the eyes of non-Anglo European scientists. An important Kimberley reference.

Experiences & adventures in Western Australia. Nathaniel William Cooke. 

Edited by Peter J. Bridge, Annelle Peroexperience_&_adventurestti and Gail Dreezens.

ISBN 978-0-85905-749-3, (2021), A4, French flaps, Illustrated, indexed, 275 pages, **grams, $75.00*


The Reminiscences and Diaries of explorer Nathaniel Cooke (1838 – 1922) with those of his son, Lewin. They cover decades of NW exploration and mining. An important source for early NW history.

Discoverer of Nullagine, Marble Bar, Roy Hill Station, Ethel Creek, and other NW places.

Published under the aegis of the Western Australian Explorers’ Diaries Project as an ancillary volume. 

Fighting the Kimberleys. Errata & Additions.

Peter J. Bridge.

ISBN 978-0-85905-932-9, (New 2022), A4, 15 pages, 80 grams $22.00*


Printed for permanent record. Free pdf on website. 

the-great-nor-westThe Great Nor’ West and its Resources.

L. van Praagh & Reginald Lloyd.

ISBN 978-0-85905-912-1, (1904, R, 2022), A3, 116 pp, heavily illustrated, indexed, 1kg, $70.00*


A magnificent reprint of the very rare 1904 book. This A3 book of 116 pages (=232pp A4) has hundreds of photos of the NW before 1904 together with good descriptive text. Period adverts also abound for the enterprises that helped develop the country. Mining, pastoral, agricultural, shipping, transport, pearling, aborigines are well covered.

This is a companion volume to our earlier publications, Nor’ West of West (1908), History of the North West (1915), Nor’ Westers of the Pilbara Breed (1981), Due North (2020), Experiences and Adventures of NW Cooke (2021), and many smaller books.

These are fundamental sources of information on the people and businesses that have developed the North West into the powerhouse of the national economy. They are the foundation for future projects such as our Biographical Dictionary of the North West 1860-1960.

The unusual size of this book creates problems for mailing. Resolution at reasonable costs is being examined.

Map and Gazetteer of Western Australia.

Prepared by Celene Bridge.

ISBN 978-0-85905-555-0, (2013, R), A3, 17 pages colour map, 33 pages text. grams $50.00*


The 1969 1:2,250,000 map modified with 1:250,000 sheets marked and the gazetteer included.

Some 7000 localities marked. This is the best map available of WA. An essential research tool.

marrinup-a-cage-in-the-bushMarrinup: A cage in the bush. No. 16 POW Camp. Kaefig im wald. Una gabbia nella boscaglia.

By Ernie Polis.

ISBN 978-0-85905-926-8, (New, 2020), A4, 252 pages, heavily illustrated, indexed, French flap soft cover,  1.1kg $60.00* [Postage for a single book will be $12.75. Express $16.25. Multiple or bulk orders will be quoted for before payment.]


The detailed story of the No 16 POW Camp at Marrinup, near Dwellingup, which held thousands of Italian and German POW during WWII. The full history of the camp from 1943 to 1946 together with much personal detail on both the prisoners and the guards with statistics and anecdotes.

A book such as this is to be welcomed as the camp has remained little known to the wider public. The Harvey civilian internment camp being relatively well known.

One of the many highlights are the photos taken by a German POW on his secret Leica camera. The book is the result of some decades of dedicated work by Ernie Polis, an officer in the Australian Army Reserve and in civilian life a cartographer and ranger. Ernie’s parents were Latvian displaced persons after WWII, his background creating a great interest in military history. He is now retired and is president of the Historic and Antique Firearm Research Association.

On-the-SwanOn the Swan.

A History of the Swan District, Western Australia

by Michael J. Bourke.

ISBN 978-0-85905-893-3. (1987,R, 2021), 180 x 245, French flaps, Section sewn, heavily illustrated B&W & colour, 385 pages,  1.2kg, $75.00*


One of the best local histories published in WA and a beautiful book. A new edition with some upgrading. Essential reading.

potjostlerPotjostler.

The life of William Carr Boyd. Explorer, Prospector, and Raconteur.

By Peter J Bridge, Ian Elliot, Ian Murray, and Gail Dreezens.

ISBN 978-0-85905-854-4, (2021), A4, french flaps, illustrated, 453 pages, 1.3kg, $80.00*


A documentary biography and history of one of Australia’s most interesting and amusing explorers and bushmen (1852-1925).

Published jointly with the Laverton Shire and under the aegis of the Western Australian Explorers’ Diaries Project as an ancillary volume. Laverton Great Beyond shop. HP for mail order.

Ramillies.ramilies

Tales of Western Australia's Convicts. Volume 1. The story of 277 convicts who arrived at the Swan Colony in 1854.

Researched and compiled by Glennis Sewell.

ISBN 978-0-86905-914-5, (New, 2021), A4, 228 pages, 650 grams, $50.00*


Since giving a talk to the Convict Group of the WA Genealogical Society in October, 2017 I had been expecting a collection of scattered convict biographies to publish in a proposed book. Irma Walter had produced her Stout Hearted but there was little indication that the good intentions of members were going to result in anything solid. 

However when Glennis Sewell’s manuscript arrived in October 2021 I was both very surprised and greatly impressed.

So opening Glennis’ magnificent contribution was a hearkening back to Rica Erickson and the early days of the great projects that resulted in the Dictionary of West Australians.

Now Glennis, working alone, and far from Perth, has produced this great offering of ancestor worship.

Such dedication and competence is now rarely seen, and certainly not from our degraded academic institutions or from those leech swamps involuntarily funded by the taxpayers.

This shows what can be done with dedication and a belief in ones capabilities when distractions and negativity are cast aside.

The 10,000 plus convicts who were sent to Western Australia included my great grandfather on the Corona, and his father in law who had arrived on the Amity in 1826.   William Thacker was the only person on that little ship who stayed on, and so becomes the first British settler of Western Australia.  

It amuses me that there are so many descendants of the 10,000. Many seem to have had some success in marrying female migrants and free settlers. This says something about many of the latter males.

I see that England had two classes: Those that had been caught, and those that had not. Any examination of society will show that among the latter were many of the greatest criminals of their time, who occupied positions of great power. Similarly today, some of the wealthiest and politically powerful deserve swift application of the hemp rope.

The law goes hard on man or woman, Who steals the goose from off the common. But lets the greater sinner loose, Who steals the common from the goose.

While we are now inundated with stories of the hard lives of aboriginal citizens, little consideration has been given to the lives of the convicts, dragooned from a thriving European society, and left in a strange land without the support of family or society. 

Barrington’s refrain, ‘True patriots they, let it be understood. They left their country for their countries good’ may have been said ruefully, but seeing how these true born Englishmen prospered it can be truthfully said that they were England’s loss.

Descendants of the convicts, who are proud to claim their ancestry, have risen to the highest honours, and of wealth and political power.

 

they_racing_at_landorThey're Racing at Landor

by P.R. Heydon

ISBN 0 85905 169 2, (1992 new), Soft Cover, 272pp, illustrated, 350grams

$30.00 + POST


The history of the people, horses and place of the fabled Landor bush races of the North West of Western Australia.  A racing classic.

 

Now available again.

Last year our stock got buried in the warehouse. Just found.

Those customer’s whose orders we could not fill can now re-order.
 

THE AUTHOR

Phil Heydon commenced his working life in the Post Office at Cue, in 1935, as a Telegraph Messenger. He worked in most Murchison goldfield towns, returning to Big Bell as Postmaster in 1947 and retired as Postmaster at the General Post Office, Perth. He was awarded the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977, and the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1979.

westward

Westward, the Course of Empire. Western Australia.

by Gilbert Parker.

ISBN 978-0-85905-921-3, [1890 R 2022], A4, 44 pages, 150 grams, $22.00*


A sometimes scathing but honest overview of the West before its fortunes changed with the discovery of gold. How we were in our bucolic isolation. A century later we are the economic powerhouse of the nation.

what-the-hellWhat the hell was that? A conservation biologist’s journey in Australia & Asia.

Darrell Kitchener.

ISBN 978-0-85905-899-5, (2021), A4, French flaps, illustrated, 205 pages, 600 grams, $55.00*


Raised in a wild Tasmanian timber town, this book traces the authors experiences as a biologist in Tasmania, Western Australia, and Asia. It provides examples of the constant wrestle between conservationists and resource developers in these regions. He spent his last 30 years working on a variety of projects, including conservation of Sumatran Orangutan, Javanese Rhinoceros, national parks, forests and watersheds in a many Indonesian landscapes. He built a heritage hotel beneath a smoking volcano in Java and published on Javanese painters and ancient trade ceramics found beneath the Musi River in Sumatra.

 The first part, highlights stories of modern exploration on those islands visited by Alfred Wallace in southern Indonesia at the interface of the Australian and Indomalayan Biogeographic realms, and in the Western Australian Wheatbelt and Kimberley Regions. The second part provides readers insights on the effectiveness of work done by international NGOs in Indonesia and the nature of the enabling environment for expatriate conservationists. 

All Hesperian Press books are prepared, printed and published in Perth. 

We do not subscribe to printing overseas. Localisation, not globalisation.

We believe that one must support the nation that breeds you and feeds you, both physically and spiritually.

Exporting our jobs is like exporting our raw minerals, it only benefits parasites.

If the book is on this list it is in print and in stock.

Geological and mining library for sale.


My library of some 60 years of collecting must be disseminated to the wider world.

I can categorically state that this is the best privately held library in Australia of this material.

Such items will never come on the market again.

It covers many countries from America, north and south, Africa, Europe, Asia, and especially Australia. Much Australian material goes back to the 1850s, while the world wide items go back to the 1890s. Covers all aspects of geology and mineralogy. Much is general. Much is collectable.

With lighting installed in my new shed and raring to go, I am at present unpacking the mountain of cartons which have been stored for several decades.

The extent is too large to list. Perhaps if anyone has a specific interest in a country or subject they can query me. Offers accepted for the bulk collection.

Peter J. Bridge, mineralogist.



Editorial and Proofreading Services for Real Australian Writers of Non-Fiction

 


Assistance with preparing your writing for publication. Services include editing, indexing and proofreading. No job too modest or too academic.
 

The Australian Government Publishing Service standard used for normal editing work.
 

Qualifications and experience: PhD, BA Hons (Geography). Over 16 years as a proof reader and editor with the Western Australian Explorers' Diaries Project.
 

Marion Hercock

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

0404 036 109


 

WAM BAM.
April 2022
 

Visiting the new WA Museum in October last, I was surprised by the flurry of flunkys cockroaching around.

The building is of that brutalist design which is the mark of many recent vomitous buildings in Western Australia and bears the same relationship to spiritually uplifting architecture as does sodomite fancy to heterosexual love.

The exhibits, without rational planning, are higgledy piggledy, or more precisely like a pig sty of dead cultural leftovers without any connectivity for anyone whose interest rises above the evanescent pages of twatter and faecesbook.

Since a fleeting visit some months ago the minerals exhibit has had a partial relabelling, so someone must have finally realised that 'pickabox' is not very educational and utterly irrational. There is an immense distance to go from the current choose a colour/shape and find out what it is, to a display that is both mentally stimulating and aesthetically attractive. Just like in the gallery of irrelevancies juxtaposed in an insoluble snakes and ladders puzzle the part time conceptualists and full time sodomites have no idea who or what is on the other side of the glory hole.

One notes that, appropriately, the Hoax of the Twentieth Century gets several windows of its own among the all-pervading stench of local tribalism. The glorification of 50,000 years of devolution to give social misfits and ring-ins an antipodean sense of 'we wuz kangs' has little attraction for the rest of us.

We had all hoped that the new WAM might be a priceless ornament to both our history and culture. Few realised that underneath the government hype the core was as rotten as it could ever be.

Just as the destructive rampage of the 'Dr' D&C through the National Museum and other once high cultural centres ended in tears, of rage, this abomination will go the same way. In the meantime the potential intellectual growth and enjoyment of thousands of children will be thwarted. Hopefully some of those will wake from the wokes imposed upon them and take a sword and noose to the fleeing destructionists.

The Museum had/has immense collections of interest which have been secreted away. Or have they been destroyed as politically unsuitable, like the hundreds of thousands of rare books that once adorned the State Library? The mineral displays are ridiculous for a state which owes its wealth to its mineral resources. Those displays of ~70 years ago educated and lifted me to greater things. What has happened to the world class antique arms collections? What a drawcard they would be. I covered some of these problems in The Ontology of Book Burning.

We need answers to these questions. We need a stocktake to discover where the collections have gone and a public enquiry into the burying and stealing of our patrimony. Could the WAM survive a stocktake by independent auditors? In preparation they have been rewriting the catalogues via digitisation so that all will look clean.

Life is not long enough to waste more than a quick spin to receive an unwanted visual emetic that is the WAM displays. This is cultural pornography and as it targets children, it is actually culturally paedophilic to its core. I give the internal 'structure' about 12 months before its collapse, as citizens awake to the waste of hard earned dollars and the poison that it unleashes on the defenceless schoolchildren that are herded through this Molochian horror, on the way to the immolation of their capacity to think and derive knowledge useful to their future.

The current government of culturally ignorant parvenus will bitterly regret allowing the pretentious scum of the new weaponised pseudo-social 'sciences' to control the agenda and waste near billions of the citizen's assets in their sick abusive propaganda exercise. Generosity (with the taxpayers $) towards those southland gypsies, who like their relations, have no interest in principles, only the principal; and it never stops.

I delayed publishing this critique while I corresponded with the Museum Director, or more correctly, the CEO. Responsible Directors with appropriate training in science and administration have not been seen in the WAM for many years.

Many of our readers have queried as to why our books are not on sale in the WAM toyshop as they were in the earlier State Library Bookshop. Possibly under the rubric of saving the shekels for the building programme, all our books were removed from all WA Museum outlets in WA. That in Kalgoorlie had once flourished. A long and somewhat acrimonious tit for tat led nowhere. The intensity of pissy fits in the WAM indicate that there is more than mere economics to our boycott and that a psychosexual imbalance corrodes their world view. It appears that somewhere in that cannibal food chain is a cabal of creatures whose company I would like to both avoid, but see, at a distance, impaled on a stake. That would satisfy forever their anal instincts.

Recently we published a book by an ex WAM staff member. He was told that if the book had been published by anyone other than Hesperian they would have stocked it. When the CEO was informed of this he 'lost his cool.' He objects to my use of the term 'boycott', but he just smells it differently. Attempts to get to the real reasons behind the boycott have not succeeded. Perhaps my earlier writings have impacted on the sorry set of vicious and vocal degenerates that seem to emerge everywhere lately. Suffice to say, again, that something is very rotten in the WA Museum and its parent body, the Arts Department.

The government agenda is that of a flowering of the 'long march through the institutions' and placing the wokes and wackos into positions of power which cannot be removed except by extensive cauterisation. This sickness of Mc$hit has corrupted the entire Western world and the smell of burning flesh in the chastisements to come will be all pervading.

The following essay, creative writing, but not fantasy, reveals the sickness and suggests a cause. Germs rarely affect a healthy organism. With un-healthy there is only death, and that is incurable.




A Dead Man's Land on the Highway of Death.


By Peter the Painter.


September 2021.


The cultural and architectural chimera that is the new WA Museum – Boola Bardip – Place of Lies – is a place cursed for both whites and blacks.

Built on a hill overshadowing the city, on top of the old Perth Gaol and its gallows where dozens of men, and women, were executed between 1851 and 1887, it is also where some of the aboriginal dead were dumped instead of being carted to the East Perth Cemetery.

Cursed now for the white man as it is a direct cultural attack on those who built the nation.

Cursed twice as it is the place of death and non-sacralised burial of ancient bulya men.

Thrice cursed as a haunting place for the teratophiliac degenerates who planned, designed and built such an 'abomination of desolation.'

I forecast, or is it a prediction, that it will be devoid of patrons by the end of the year, 2022. Once the Old Museum invigorated by multiple visits. Now one visit is enough the last a lifetime, of regret, at having wasted a precious hour.

Our dictatorial governments of ignorant upstarts think that $ and diktats alone can run a nation.

But they have destroyed the cohesiveness of our culture, throwing us all to the dingos on the death path.

When bones were found during the excavations for the foundations they were quickly and quietly spirited away, never to be seen or discussed again.

When, in 2021, answers were demanded from both the state pathologist and the coroner, the researcher was told that it was none of his business.

This, protecting an institution which has secreted the skull of Pigeon, a vicious cannibal killer who was bulleted in 1897. A cult heroicising this foul creature has infested the lower levels of the anthropology and land rights bowel movements. It is identical to that of Yagan, another killer & cannibal who met his bullet long ago.

The cover up is on – the bones were human and aboriginal.

The Museum, despite all the crowing and promotions, is built on the Bones of Dead Men.

My ancestors, both white and black, would look with distaste upon the thrice cursed hill of death, our colonial Golgotha.

My white convict ancestors would have known some of those whites hung to death there.

My black ancestress was related by blood to natives hung on the bloody gallows.

The gallows on the hill overlooked the city centre, where is the omphalos of our city, directly down to the river, along a highway of death, our own El Camino de la Muerte (Don Quixote).

All traditional cultures have a knowledge of spirituality, of spirits good and bad, and despite the trappings of modernity they are still there, rumbling away beneath the surface like the fires of dormant volcanoes.

We can only measure the baleful aspects of these influences as a whole, individually they can be dismissed, but the effects of accumulation, never.

The Chinese call their understanding of this, feng shui. Paradoxically we are more familiar with this concept than we are of the almost lost divinatory arts of our own Celtic ancestors and that of the little studied aboriginal boolya and kaidatcha men.

These emanations curse the activities and well-being of all who venture to live or work where they are in force.

The death spirits flow directly downhill along Beaufort and Barrack Streets where they are bottled up in that canyon of death and ricochet among the buildings down to Barrack Square on the river.

They also flow westwards along James and Francis Street to encompass the double-hexagoned Art Gallery of poisonous 'degenerate art' and the State Library, which specialises in burning books, and then to the coven of brothels, opium dens, gambling and clip joints that made up Northbridge. Now a scene of tribal feuding and maiming. Yagan Square, another nomenclatural fetish, has collapsed as a harbinger of all associated with the imposition of cannibal culture. Right among this was the shop of the Chinese merchant whose daughter was horribly murdered in 1926 and dumped in the river. Northbridge has always been a hell-hole of vice and death. Nothing really changes, just that we do not see the hidden history or sense the planned puerility of a sick society.

Directly opposite the Old Gaol/Museum is a 'glory hole' of the denizens of Sodom and all that entails. Several years ago the Museum accepted, with some alacrity, as a 'valuable cultural object', an old filth stained toilet door. It had a hole at a 'convenient height' through which deviants could entertain each other anonymously. When the Museum opened they positioned an isolated solitary door, with a large hole in the middle, in the centre of the 5 metre wide Beaufort Street entrance, conveniently located directly opposite the glory hole, as a hidden sign of community between the two cesspools. The connection of degeneracy and the Museum is marked. Just a few years ago the pink and green neon signs on the Beaufort street wall openly promoted such. Given the intense direct relationship of faggotism with paedophilia it would be most unwise for parents to let their children freely wander around the Museum buildings and grounds.

Next there was the Canterbury Court carpark, an architectural eyesore of rotting concrete, now demolished and replaced with the equally financially disastrous Northbridge Centre collapsed into another car park. These are opposite the old Police Courts and cells where generations of unfortunates were initiated into the realities of the system before final incarceration at Fremantle Gaol or Rottnest.

Over the rail bridge on the east is the proto-'Godzilla' of Western Power. In Barrack Street, near the corner, is the hotel destroyed by the local mafia, now with a rebuilt facade disguising that cultural crime.

Next the site on the SW corner of Murray street of the old State Taxation bank that was robbed of £11,000 in about 1962, by a rising star of political and underworld crime, Ray O'Connor, best friend of 'Daphne' Court, gunman and military intelligence operator of the nearby Beehive Tearooms, and later brothel operator, disgraced former Premier of WA, and a suspect in the murder of fellow whoremongerer Shirley Finn.

All along here seedy untenanted shops exist in an economic shadow with little of the wealth of the lateral byways sticking to them. Such places, abandoned by the locals, become the habitat of dozens of culturally alien eating places, existing only by selling to each other.

On the next corner is the convict built Town Hall, now merely a remnant figurehead of our cohesiveness, almost abandoned. No life exists there. Opposite, the underground Alhambra Bar, remembered only for the unfortunate death on the stairs of one of our foremost song men, the poet 'Crosscut' Wilson.

Next the site of the old R & I bank, creator of the closest got by this state to economic sovereignty, killed off by a creature of Canberra operating for alien financial interests.

Outside this a bronze plaque marks the spot where the city was proclaimed by the ritual execution of a gum tree, the harbinger of the destruction to follow.

Then the old Treasury, now whored out at high prices to international interests. On this corner is the hidden & unrecognized omphalous of the City.

Directly over the Terrace stands a bronze statue of Alexander Forrest, a smart financial operator, and if one carefully examines the gun over his shoulder the metaphysical notches indicate the number of natives shot on his expeditions.

The highway then encompasses the Perth City Council offices, headquarters of our own home grown mafia and destroyers of life in the city. Also once, and possibly now, the Pentagon of the South, operating the North West Cape electronic antennas controlling the nuclear submarines patrolling the oceans with atomic death. Hidden in the nearby jungle is the Supreme Court where for many life was destroyed by costumed cabalists. Opposite, the great greenness has been replaced by the sterile establishment of the black castles of Elizabeth Quay, where few dare to traverse their courts.

The Bell Tower, a southern neo-Gothic edifice, with reflections of Gaudi, whose great bells are silenced by the overwhelming encroachment, now appears as a sad and lonely monument, like a long meaningless menhir of old Europe.

The end of the Canyon is the development of Barrack Square, fingering into the river, where life is one disaster after another for the hoodwinked tenants.

Here the spirits are finally thwarted from their attempts to escape down river to fly to their final resting place of Kurannup, and so echo back, shattering any possible peace and stability on the Highway of Death.

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