꧁•⊹٭𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛, 𝚖𝚢 𝚍𝚎𝚊𝚛٭⊹•꧂

𝐵𝑒𝒸𝓀𝓎'𝓈 𝓉𝓇𝓊𝑒 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓈

Five years ago when I was last visiting Perth, I spent a morning with my mother in the state’s official art gallery, imaginatively named The Art Gallery of Western Australia. It lies in what North Americans would call “Downtown” but what we call “the City”. Entry to the gallery’s large home collection is free, the atmosphere is very pleasing - refreshing and humming with quieted voices like a church - and the building is situated directly above the sunken train station hub, making it a little popular with locals, for an art gallery.

I’m no gallery hound, far from it, but every now and then I like to drop in to visit my favorite paintings from my childhood, very, very occasionally I’ll attend a special exhibition with an entrance fee, and I’m ready at any moment to stop for a drink at the café onsite. “The City” and this section of it in particular is dear to my heart. The state museum is right next door and, because my paternal grandmother was the museum’s most valued volunteer, I spent every school holiday break of my childhood running loose through the museum’s secretive rooms, extremely closed to the public. The state’s enormous central library is in the same square, prompting some horrible piece of shit in local government, or perhaps a contracted marketing firm, to revoltingly dub the square The Cultural Centre.

Perth Roofs 1939 Harald Vike

Very Big Water Dreaming 1972 Ronnie Tjampitjinpa

As my mother and I left the gallery that midday, I was instantly annoyed by how hot the day had become, and how large and cumbersome the sunhats I have to wear are, as I’m prone to burn very badly and get headaches if overexposed to the full sun. As much as I loathe wearing hats and sunglasses and carrying water everywhere, there’s no escape from them for me in the West Australian climate. My annoyance increased when two very chic, bareheaded and unencumbered women goggled at my oversized hat in scornful amusement. I’m perfectly aware of how provincial I look in hats, as if I think that strolling around the city is a day at the races. At this moment, while I was perfectly primed to take notice of anything which might annoy me further, I witnessed a real life pantomime of “The lady doth protest too much”, or in this case, the man doth.

The gallery is on a rise, and as my mother and I made our way down to street level, we were passed by a class of private school girls on an excursion to the gallery, with several large, male teachers as wranglers/protectors. All schools in Australia, private and state, require that the pupils wear a uniform. It’s very easy to distinguish the private school uniforms by their thick tartan skirts and long jackets, and the strictness with which the uniforms are worn - all perfect and neat with socks pulled up. State school uniforms are lighter, looser and suitable to the climate. I wasn’t the only person in the old and very narrow street to take notice of the girls.

The students were 12-13 years old and trooping along tidily towards the gallery with four tall, sharp-eyed teachers. When my eye caught an extremely unsavory-looking man eyeing them intently, I used the cover which my sunglasses and hat gave me to eye him. I felt perfectly safe staring at him. His focus on the children made it clear that a large adult woman like me could never hold his attention. He was stopped dead in the street and was all but drooling as he openly ogled the schoolgirls. I know my hometown fairly well, so I could tell by his clothing, his proximity to the central train station and his obvious meth use that he’d come into the city off the Armadale Line. I rode it often enough myself in the early 2000s, when many of my friends were Armadale Line addicts.

The sun was scorching in the merciless, shade-less street, so my mum and I didn’t linger. The girls and the ogler were on the other side of the road but it’s very narrow and twisty, and we were very close. The tallest of the teachers noticed the ogler and began staring very hard at him. When the teacher took a couple of steps toward him, this shook the ogler out of his reverie, the subject of which I won’t contemplate. The ogler suddenly became conscious of his conspicuousness. He whipped his head around and finally took in not just myself observing him closely, but several others too. I waved a little sign at him, just to let him know that I knew exactly what he looked like.

Loudly then, addressing the street in general the ogler said, while pointing weakly at the teacher who’d detected him and all but straightening a non existent tie, “That guy looks like a pedophile! I wouldn’t let him near my daughter!”