Perth, the capital of Western Australia sites as the most geographically isolated capital city on earth, and sits on the time zone of two thirds of the worlds population. It one of the largest and least dense metropolises. Its bigger and smaller than it seems. Emma Jackson, our guest today is an architect and now tapestry designer. We studies together in Western Australia, and she has been our colleague at RMIT, where she carried out a series of projects under the title of the Strange- exploring the world of Western Australia’s mining town urbanism and vast landscapes. Her fascination with geology has brought her to design tapestries and textiles drawn from geological formation. As a once local and partial outside to Perth, there perhaps a particular view Emma takes to this city, through these lenses. We could talk about Perth’s relation to NASA, and the often heard claim that Perth was the first city to be seen from space. In Charles Waldheims intro to Richard Weller’s 2009 book Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City, he says: Perth first registered in international media in 1962 by turning on its lights to illuminate the south western coast of Australia for astronaut John Glen orbiting the earth in Friendship 7… Perth’s singularity and remoteness make it an unlikely indicator of tendencies and trends evident elsewhere. Perth is closer to the urban populations of Indonesia and Malayasia than to the Eastern Australian metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. Even the city’s website describes Perth, with no small pride, as the most remote urban centre in the world. Perth named itself the City of Light after it turned it on for John Glen in 1962, and the connection to NASA continued when in 1979 the space station Skylab crash landed in western Australia east of Perth. It was a relief to NASA and many others that it ended its orbit in some of the least populated land on earth. There’s a similar narrative of isolation in Christos Tsolkios’ story titled Civil War from the 2014 collection Merciless Gods. In its opening the narrator says: Perth, all bland office buildings and vast suburban stretches, is a modern city at the edge of the world. It is an automated, clean city. The railway stations don't have toilets in them, as though it wasn't a city for human use… for the daily animal cycle of eating, drinking, shitting, pissing and sleeping. People there are proud of their trains. …the landscape makes a mockery of their attempts to control and master the environment. Even in the middle of the business district, in the dead centre of the city's heart, the ancient sand seeps through every crack. With every strong gust of wind the sand rises and swirls and dusts the concrete and plastic with a faint orange tinge. The sand is not the only ancient element which taunts and threatens the city…this white city lives in fear of the shadows cast by its black inhabitants. It was a thin young man with beautiful dark eyes who taught me that the sand is one of the weapons the landscape uses to fight back against the arrogance of the city. The unfathomable sky is another. Dwarfed by the sky and breathing in sand, Perth feels like a make-believe city. I kept meeting people who told me how in a few years it would be one of Australia's great cities. A few even suggested that one day it might be one of the world's great cities. But when I got to Perth I had no time for claims of a grand future. I was not impressed by the swiftness of the electric trains and the efficiency of the state-of-the-art communications systems. Instead I loved hearing him talk about the soil eating away at this baby metropolis. By the time I'd arrived in Perth I had stopped believing in cities.

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