User talk:Gregoriusgreg

Please stop. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, you will be blocked from editing. (Note - this same edit was made by an anonymous IP twice earlier in the week.) 04:11, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

You have been blocked from editing Wikipedia  as a result of your . You are free to make constructive edits after the block has expired, but please note that vandalism (including page blanking or addition of random text), spam, deliberate misinformation, privacy violations, personal attacks; and repeated, blatant violations of our polices concerning neutral point of view and biographies of living persons will not be tolerated. The next one will be a permablock. &mdash;Moondyne 06:03, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

???
Your edit to Western Australia is vandalism.

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism and immediately reverted. If you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the work of others. SatuSuro 04:31, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Please stop
You have been temporarily blocked from editing in accordance with Wikipedia's blocking policy for abuse of editing privileges. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make constructive contributions. If you believe this block is unjustified, you may contest the block by adding the text below. &mdash;Moondyne 04:51, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

unblock. can I not at least have this linked to the perth page just as way of telling a different side to perth ??

"PERTH AND THE BIG SLEEP" the definitive version

"PERTH AND THE BIG SLEEP" the definitive version

A city in isolation and the culture of complacency that can be sown from.

I rarely read the 'West Australian', unless for reasons unconnected to journalism. It has always been largely supported by a readership more inclined to peruse it for its fairly extensive classifieds section than its account of the daily news or world current affairs. The newspapers editor who's inexperience and editorial irresponsibility/ineptitude make a mockery of politically independent & unbiased reportage, and who has a distempered somewhat circumspect disparagement of any who may not appeal to the narrow even small-minded anglo-centric fixation he himself is given towards promoting at the expense of all else.

Though he is not on his own all the journalists that work in the main areas of Perth's media in general have an affinity for self-protection, challenge one you pretty much challenge them all. Perth's isolation can make it very prone to excessive scrutiny of any whom do not follow the jolly little white script.

It was however with despair that I observed an article written in the Saturday morning edition of this particular newspaper, where the writer seemed to be promoting the potential of the opposition leader, to serve our state in a leadership capacity.

There is in this thought the potential for concern. As for all the self-serving, self-righteous, moralising, preaching, hypocrisy of the Labor government, I worry of the alternative even more in some ways. The opposition leader it seems is an ordinary enough bloke someone you would be quite happy to have as a member of the community or even as a decent co-member of any particular sort of recreational group etc., or even someone to just meet and greet in the street.

However for a potential 'Premier' he is absolutely lacking in charisma, broadmindedness, and imagination and unfortunately this type of personality when placed into positions of power act exactly as ordinary normal god-fearing people would, these take their lack of imagination, their ultra-conservative values, along with their reverence for the establishment right to the top of the pole with them in their assumed roles as leaders and statesmen.

And as we have seen so many times in the past with right wing individuals as our leaders the people in the end pay hell for, [ not denying all their concern for family values, why is it that whenever a potential incumbent rants on about family values when these eventually do take office they invariably are prone to creating wars, from Hitler to Mussolini, Genghis Khan and back, history is littered with self-serving demagogues that got there using the platform of family values and by kissing babies ].

Indeed it would not be wrong to suggest that this could also be said of the extremist version from the opposing political spectrum 'the Left' also.

It is hard not to think of the opposition leader as being in ways a deeply conservative individual, part of the 'old guard', thanks to whom have held back Perth for so long with an ultra-orthodox Christian type mentality, which has all but ensured that Perth stays at least 20 years behind the rest of the world for most of last century, all for the misguided view that being a backwater is going to keep us all safe and out of mischief.

All this has done is that the establishment cronies have remained utterly entrenched, and that any idea of Perth being in the advanced guard as opposed to the same old rear-guard mentality is to be less an alternative than it ever was. Somehow the idea that isolation has to mean hostility to new ideas, and an overriding almost obsessive/compulsive concern for family values, as well an oppressive need for constancy, just does not sit well for many.

At times it can be difficult not to feel as though Perth is not that dissimilar to the famous David lynch television series of the late eighties 'twin peaks'. It seems to be taking on a similarly 'darkly pretty' sort of vernacular i.e., slightly too normal not to be a little deranged, where everyone is smiley & nice and yet underneath quietly desperate, while tendering pleasant gardens under the midday sun, at the same time completely oblivious to the fact their lovely city is becoming increasingly prone to lurking violence. Nobody would doubt that Perth is not for wanting when it comes to suburban beautification. This it has in droves. But great cities have more than genteel suburbs at the heart of their makeup.

Serial killers and common street stabbings now are as ubiquitous to Perth's cultural makeup as its famous golden and wide beach's. An ocean front now well and truly in the dominion of a certain set or social order of folk, far and way above the average persons wage capacity.

The dividedness based on class that this city has evolved into over recent decades is truly worrying. You have the eastern industrialised suburbs and the well off affluent western suburbs, and the twain rarely meet with repercussions that will become ever increasingly prone to disruptiveness in the future if there is not a philosophical change. A convergence of the two worlds, all types of class more closely interrelated for a more dynamic city overall.

There should be no real reason why Western Australia cannot become a modern day 21st century version California style of state, whereby all this backward shitty self-serving cronyist orthodoxy could not be done away with, and where instead of always being last on the ladder, Perth for all its isolation cannot become finally the place where things happen first and reverberate elsewhere, like the epi-center of a shockwave. And when referring to a California style of state I do not mean 'CALIFORNICATION' here but more a style of culture that yes respects innovation and liberal progression without going loco about it, whilst at the same time not allowing its pragmatism to become so set and imbedded we reduce ourselves into re-action and backwardness that any creativity is abandoned and made virtually impossible.

Looking at the state of perths urban district you see skyscrapers that revell in their outmoded and unoriginality of design. Box like structures that any modern metropolis elsewhere has long since evolved away from.

Why is there nothing outstanding architecturally in the city of Perth? Is it because even our local govt.authorities and beaurocracies are really of the view that perth and 'Western' australia in general are nothing more than a 'quarry state' for big mining companies with which to occupy and denude for its mineral resources ? ie., Cheap and utilitarian. Thats aspirational enough. Very little value adding and very little in the way of philanthropic contributions back into the culture of the place. Being viewed as little more than a giant quarry in the outback.

The only really interesting architectural statement made in the overall metropolitan area in the last 50-70 years would be the new Fremantle Maritime Museum. Really a beautiful building. And undoubtedly a great entrance point into the port city of Fremantle.

But why not outsource some of the architectural work to people like the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, or even the american Frank.O.Geri. Or even Sir Norman Foster.

Perth really needs some amazing public and even private buildings with which to uplift the structural flatness of the place [witness the affect that the Sydney Opera house has had on Sydney].

A magnificant overturned pyrimidal type of design standing several hundred metres into the air, whereby the higher it ascends the more width it would possess. Its structural integrity owing to massive inner supports. Somewhere down by the river perhaps ?

Calatrava for one would be perfect to have design a major bridge spanning across the Swan river from the risely st., area of applecross through & into the crawley region where it would branch off towards crawleys- riverside drive as well further northwards linking with other major northern arteries. Finally unifying the Northern and Southern precincts of the metropolitan area.

A grandly surreal and beautiful suspension bridge spanning the vast basin of the Swan river eliminating the chasm that up til now cannot be accessed unless by ocean going vessel or ferry or unless one is a fish or a bird! Pure. White. Practical and preferably something architecturally challenging.

An example might be of a curved taut bridge not needing to be higher above the river than any of the other existing Perth bridges, only this bridge will rely on suspension bulwark that connect and relay over each other resembling a lattice effect not unlike other major suspension bridges throughout the world but more cross woven [ the way some cathedrals have suspended roofs]. Each cable lattice work descending from vast stuctural edifaces not straight upwards but diagonally leveraged outward from each other. 3 of these would more than suffice.

Shanghai and Beijing are two cities now undertaking dramatic improvements of their cityscape that Perth administration could well take heed of. Esp., when it comes to skyscrapers and stadiums designed as dramatic and highly creative statements that reconfigure and renew their inhabitants ideas as to themselves and their sense of place and value.

In fact taking Perths riverfront as an example of irrelevant old style thinking, it is a riverfront that should be at the very center of action and for all Perth citizens, yet it seems to remain the domain of the rich and almost a closely guarded secret. Any really intelligent community would surely utilise the astonishingly beautiful Swan River as the cities main meeting place and hub, which was in fact the case in the early part of the 20th century.

Instead the Great Swan river has become a fairly isolated attraction dominated by the homes of the rich and a place that one would go to infrequently, and then usually for special occassions only, or unless one had the use of a boat, canoe, yacht or was associated with some other water sport. It has by ways always been promoted purely to be looked at from the windows of ones car while one would drive to and from the workplace, or maybe as a great source of touristic photos. It has not been seen as a place to live necessarily unless one had won at the lottery.

Environmental overstress is a more telling example of the blinkered reactionary mentality that fails to initiate action before it is too late, because even now when it is common knowledge that our lowered rainfall is a consequence of deforestation our government and regulatory bodies still allow suburban developers carte blanche the go-ahead to build suburb after suburb almost to the very horizon. All to satisfy the kind of redneck attitude that needs a big empty front lawn to park their 4-wheel drives upon. Many of which are mild mannered middleclass semi-professional women between the ages of 25-40. More recently our government also opened up mineral sands mining in one of our last remaining reserves of Tuart trees. Giants as fragile as they are monolithic. Mineral sands that once are removed were most likely the very reason such imposing sentinels grew there in the first place. This from a government claiming to care for the environment!

There well maybe a lot of baulderdash in all this fashionable concern over environmental degradation and carbon pollution one hears of today, but the plain fact of the matter is that having protected and abundant forests and a closer inter-relation between human population and wildlife and the benefits this accrues is in so many major ways of its own, is enough to demand better of politicians and town planners. It is common knowledge and not in any way at all new evidence to suggest a closer relationship with the natural world is to the benefit and general well being of all.

Sadly it is hard not to feel that our new potential incumbent would be any more willing to deliver a better outcome for those concerned by environmental degradation or even bring about the type of change that might extend beyond the self-same old style doctrinaire this city has always been known for -'Over-regulated into the oblivion and undeniably beautiful to look at but decidedly dull.'

written 20/12/04 by greg hoey

n.b- perth has its positives and these are its beaches probably the weather [temperate- average winters, stinking hot even humid summers] the city is undeniably pretty and in recent years its even tried to pick up the pace and catch up to the rest of the world. lots a building and development going on I use the east perth redevelopment, the subi redevelopment as examples good things happening.

But many would say its about time too. Perth has seen its isolation as reason to be insular, dull and very closed off unless you happen to be one of the insiders. The media this way can be very very very stupid and nasty and DO NOT like their little patch in the least bit criticised [ esp the ones mentioned like 96fm ,94 fm ,6pr, 6ix, [720 abc- boughousie jingoism]. these are jingoistic mainstream stations that play ugly commercial crap and even our real alternative radio rtr has its jingoistic streak actually but can play some cool music]. And this has also encouraged or helped create as said before 'a very insulated closed OFF culture'. The folks that work in them nearly always closely connected to eachother [nepotism].

As to perth's isolation. This could be used in a positive light and activate a kind of spark of well were at the end of the world so lets at least not let this make us complacent and as uninteresting as we can be but let our isolation make us be the most stunning iconic unique most isolated city on the planet. Its too much as j506hn above stated quite correctly perth is all about footy and not much else. And it does seem to attract a lot of these kind of personalities that left other places maybe because they hate interacting with others and dont much like intelligence that is not only sporting beach-side culture. Like the poms mostly, but they hate australia esp when they may be loseing their grip on it and this is one of the main reasons why perth has in the past been very semi-conscious. And why the republican issue is not what it should be here in perth.

I like the beachside culture also but there's got to be more than this. gotta say allannah mctiernan and labor do seem intent on at least trying to knock out this emphasise on smug cultural values and parochial small-mindedness. Nevertheless she and Labor are still part of the heirarchical-value system tainted by this slack over-regulation / selfdefensiveness/ 'nanny state' mentality to a certain extent. Perth needs serious visionary work to it [kennet like]. So much you could do to make perth eclipse sydney melbourne or wherever if they only had the guts to demand more and break with tradition and complacency. -GH