I've met three people but I don't think they like me and we all talk about the state of the weather.

[reddragdiva]

Perth is so amazingly tedious it goes out the other side of "dull" and through to some sort of Nirvana-like state of introspection, only with Nutrasweet, yellow swimsuits, five months of thirty to forty degrees, undrinkable piss lager and hideous complacency. Also if you don't have a car you're utterly, utterly fucked. It's a damn good place to go when you have to get the fuck away from it all for six months or a year. Clean, cheap, fatally pleasant, lots of nice people. So quiet and clean, it's like the Martians left several hundred years ago and left all their buildings behind. It is Vermilion Sands. But, you know, I did so much getting away from it all growing up there that I think I'll be spending the rest of my life trying to get to it all. It's somewhere to come from or go back to. I've done one and don't plan to do the other. The young people either move to Melbourne before thirty or they curdle and become lifers.

No-one ever leaves ... Perth. It's on the other side of the event horizon. You don't get out of Perth except by going "fuck it" and leaving with a ticket and a single suitcase — the traveller's equivalent of quantum tunnelling. You forget your name when you come to ... Perth. You go to Perth, you better buy your ticket out before you go, 'cos you'll wake up one day and it'll be three years later and you'll have Perth friends and a Perth girlfriend/boyfriend and wonder what happened.