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The book 'Take me to the River' was really created in relation to a challenge that
was, there had been so many different ideas for Perth Foreshore and Perth water over 200 years
of European settlement. The challenge was there had never really been documented for the
historical record and the effect of that is because there were so many different
ideas proposed over so many different years you would tend to circle, it would circle around and
old ideas would reappear and not be recognised as old ideas and they would be sold
as new ideas and would go around in this endless cycle of remembering and
forgetting and proposing and forgetting and remembering, which is not necessarily
a problem other than it's very inefficient and you don't know where
you've come from so you don't know where you're going to. So this book essentially
was about documenting the story of the foreshore and all these hundreds of
proposals for it, which had never been built for the historical record, kind of exhuming
these old schemes, understanding them as schemes but also understanding them as
changing ideas of what Perth is, was and indeed could have been.
Cos I'm an architect, by training we actually render what all these old schemes would have looked like
today if they'd been built. While the book is ostensibly historical document
it also deals with the challenge of population growth and sea-level rise and
agitates for the need for revision. Now Elizabeth Quay is a wonderful moment to
celebrate but we have to remember that it's only 300 metres of the shorelines of
the eight kilometre shorelines of Perth water, let alone the hundreds of kilometres
of the Swan River, but it's not the end of the story.