Call It ‘California Down Under’ : West Australia: Equal Parts Sun, Fun and Nouveau Riche

A perfect day. Leave the office behind, strap your boards atop the Toyota and hit the road for the Window, the Windmills or the Gallows--wherever the surf is up.

With a bit more time, you could make a run to the wine country, through the tall trees or out to the gold fields.

This is the state of Western Australia, California Down Under.

Most Western Australians are so laid back, says Tom Stannage, a social historian, that they have developed a strain of anti-Americanism based on their aversion to the Yankee work ethic.

According to Stannage, there is a deep-seated belief in this land of relative plenty that in times of trouble, something will come along. Something always has: gold in the depression days of the 1890s, iron and nickel in the postwar years--something underground to supplement the wheat, wool and timber industries on the surface.

“She’ll be good enough, mate,” they say out west, heading for the beaches.

Stannage, a professor at the University of Western Australia here, admits that he is still puzzled by the contradictions of the Western Australian--conservative, brash, hedonistic--all held in balance by an abiding faith in the place.

The state covers a third of Australia--deserts, forests, coastal areas--but has only 10% of the population.

The political power of Australia lies in the southeast, in the old states of New South Wales and Victoria. There is no love lost here for the Eastern Establishment. Its symbols--the Geelong Grammar prep school, horse racing’s Melbourne Cup and other institutions representing old money--bring a snort from the Westerner.

In 1933, an unsuccessful secessionist movement in the west was pressed all the way to Parliament in London. Lang Hancock, a prototypical self-made millionaire of the west who pioneered the iron industry, still has secessionist thoughts.

The west is a place where a person can put together a fortune at an early age. Alan Bond, whose boat won the America’s Cup yacht races in 1983, made his in baby-boom real estate. Robert Holmes a Court, a powerful financier on the American scene, got his start here.

Western Australia’s Socialist Premier Brian Burke recently assayed the power structure of his state and decided that the old money was wary of the new men like Bond, “the four-on-the-floor, profit-motivated group of new-rich entrepreneurs who were very threatening, coming over the parapets into the Peppermint Grove-Dalkeith (old money) domain, buying properties and building mansions.”

He might have been describing the Los Angeles-San Francisco rivalry of a few years back.

Comparisons with California come easily to a visitor here.

The coast is like California’s turned on its head. The north is Anza-Borrego and Mojave country, spectacular desert scenery like the Bungle Bungle Range. The south is Humboldt land, timber country, pastures and the bleak port of Albany on the chill and foggy Southern Ocean. Art Linkletter and other Californians invested in this region in the 1960s.

In between, the skyscrapers of Perth, a metropolis with more than 75% of the state’s 1.3 million people, rise above a scrub landscape, reminiscent of Southern California. And farther south (north, in the California sense), in rolling pastures of knee-high clover, sheep and cattle pass their days.

Inland lies Kalgoorlie, site of the 1890s gold rush that boosted the state’s population tenfold in less than two decades. In those days, a young Herbert Hoover managed a Kalgoorlie mine, and gold is still coming out of the shafts.

In every region, the hills and roadsides are shaded by varieties of eucalyptus, a family of trees introduced to California about the same time that Californians headed here in the Gold Rush.

Other similarities between the two western states abound:

--The Mediterranean climate of the Western Australian midlands encourages outdoor living, and the citizens are sports-mad. While Californians might opt for softball, a very proper and popular sport here is lawn bowling, played by men and women dressed entirely in white.

--American easterners might recoil at a California invitation to a dish of Hangtown Fry, but probably no more so than an Adelaide matron offered a serving of a Western Australian favorite, Morton Bay bug (a crayfish).

--Californians on the road keep a lookout for RV parks; hereabouts, they are called caravan bays. And here you stop for take-away food.

--Both states were magnets for immigrants. “Australians in general,” said Stannage, the historian, “believed they were sort of a super race, that they were going to throw off the ills of the old world. This was called a working man’s paradise.”

For all the visual and historical similarities, however, differences are also obvious, mainly in the population. Perth has been called the most isolated city in the world. Sydney and the other big cities of the east, or Jakarta, Indonesia, the nearest foreign metropolis, are more than 1,000 miles distant.

Although no one has made the connection with empty space, Western Australia has the country’s highest suicide rate.

Perth is an outwardly prosperous city and the home of several influential national politicians. But it is not a trend-setter. The entertainment and fashion centers are in the east. So are the social and political causes.

“Western Australians,” Stannage noted, leaning back in his book-lined office, “sometimes worry that they don’t have the ills of the rest of the world. They go looking for them.”

This place is known, he said, as a “coming state,” one with a future in national leadership. But nobody here seems to be pushing the clock ahead.