As Western Australia approaches the 200th anniversary of its founding as a colony, staff at the State Records Office (SRO) are looking back at how previous celebrations have been marked, and how we now look at our history.
"We're getting closer to 2029 and our office has been thinking about what we need to do in preparation for that," senior archivist Damien Hassan said.
"We're looking at getting major historical, archival sets of information available online — the building blocks of history — to support research of any level really, but to also help people get a better understanding of WA history.
"In thinking about 2029, it's had us reflect back on 1979 and 1929."
A proudly British settlement
In 1929, 100 years after the founding of the Swan River Colony, WA's population was 420,000 and was largely a proudly British society, with little acknowledgement of the Indigenous population.
Preparation for the 1929 celebrations began years in advance, with the creation of a State Centenary Committee to plan events with military precision.
"There was a book that was commissioned for the centenary called A story of 100 years, and it's the last chapter of the book that really stood out for me," Mr Hassan told Dustin Skipworth on ABC Radio Perth.
"This chapter talks about 2029 and states: 'WA is occupied exclusively by a homogenous people of the one colour, speaking the one tongue and animated by like ideals'.
"It's the preservation of this, these ideals, that may well be the prime consideration in all planning for enlargement of the state.
"As a result, what was planned for the centenary events in 1929 was very much from this Anglo-Saxon perspective, and it really became a celebration of colonisation without this deeper reflection on what that actually means."
A year-long party
What followed, the records show, was a year-long party, that came to a screeching halt with the Wall Street crash and the economic depression that followed.
"There were lots of pageants, lots of sports carnivals, there were things happening almost every day," Mr Hassan said.
"There was the Centenary Air Race from Sydney to Perth that finished at Maylands aerodrome.
"There were two special public holidays added to the year.
"There was a civic lunch at the Perth Town Hall with a menu that included things like chicken patties, sirloin of beef and the most popular vegetable of the time — asparagus.
"There's a lot of documentation, you get a sense of how big these events were just from the amount of files that we hold about them."
Mr Hassan said a stage play, based on the fictional scene depicted in George Pitt Morison's painting, The Foundation of Perth, was also performed at the town hall.
"We've actually got a script of that play in one of the state archive files and some of it's a bit bizarre."
'Hooligans' overrun fireworks
Two of the large-scale public events went seriously awry, including a massive fireworks display planned for the Swan River foreshore.
"They had six barges setting off fireworks from the river, and they had what were called set pieces," Mr Hassan said.
"These are something we don't really see in firework shows these days, because they're just too dangerous.
"They are built structures, which you attach fireworks and crackers to and they are animated.
"One of the files says that one depicted an elephant engaged at his morning toilet, and Mundaring Weir overflowing."
The whole affair was so big and expensive that organisers decided they would have to fence off the foreshore and charge people who came along, expecting a crowd of 20,000.
On the night, 80,000 people showed up.
"Because of the sheer numbers, they couldn't control them and there was a huge surge forward, people stormed through the fence, they didn't pay," Mr Hassan said.
"The reports the next day in the newspapers say that hooligans overran the event and let off the fireworks themselves."
Legal advice on bad poetry
The second debacle was a public competition to compose an ode in honour of the centenary, with a £50 prize – equivalent to about $4,000 today.
They were overwhelmed by entries, receiving 279 to be judged by Walter Murdoch, then a professor of English at the University of Western Australia.
The state records hold the typed report Sir Walter wrote after reading through the entries:
"The quality of the whole collection was disappointing. A number of the poems are plainly written by schoolboys or schoolgirls, and a number carried the marks of senile decay; two classes well represented in every competition of this kind.
"But even when these were set aside, what remained was, in the whole, startlingly bad, not more than a dozen rose above mediocrity."
Eventually, two poems were chosen as joint winners but when they were submitted to the State Centenary Committee there was consternation.
"[The committee] couldn't believe that they were going to award prizes to these poems so they started to get legal advice on whether they had to award the prize," Mr Hassan said.
"They got a legal opinion that they must award the prizes, then that's done.
"By that stage, once they announced the winners, I think Walter Murdoch and the whole committee just really wanted the whole matter to go away."
While planning for the 2029 has barely begun, Mr Hassan said we had "an expectation that what happens in 2029 is going to be a little bit different to 1929".
