Perth

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia (WA).

Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia (WA). It is Australia's fourth-most populous city, with a population of 2.1 million living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is part of the South West Land Division of Western Australia, with most of the metropolitan area on the Swan Coastal Plain between the Indian Ocean and the Darling Scarp. The city has expanded outward from the original British settlements on the Swan River, upon which the city's central business district and port of Fremantle are situated. Perth city is located on land on which the Whadjuk Noongar, an Aboriginal people of the south west of Western Australia, have lived for what is considered "a relatively conservative estimate of around 50,000 years".

The Noongar people now refer to Perth as Boorloo.

Captain James Stirling founded Perth in 1829 as the administrative centre of the Swan River Colony. It was named after the town of Perth in Scotland, due to the influence of Stirling's patron Sir George Murray, who had connections with the area. It gained city status in 1856, although the Perth City Council currently governs only a small area around the central business district. The city's population increased substantially as a result of the Western Australian gold rushes in the late 19th century. It has grown steadily since World War II due to a high net migration rate. Post-war immigrants were predominantly from Britain and Southern Europe, while more recent arrivals have led to a large population of Asian descent. Several mining booms in other parts of Western Australia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw Perth become the regional headquarters for large mining operations.

Perth contains a number of important public buildings as well as various historic sites. Notable government buildings include Parliament House, Government House, the Supreme Court Buildings and the Perth Mint. The city is served by Fremantle Harbour and Perth Airport. It was a naval base for the Allies during World War II and the Royal Australian Navy's Fleet Base West is located on Garden Island. All five of Western Australia's universities are based in Perth. The city has been ranked among the world's most livable cities and was classified by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network in 2020 as a Beta global city.As of 2021, Perth is divided into 30 local government areas and consists of more than 350 suburbs. The metropolitan boundaries stretch 123 kilometres (76 mi) from Two Rocks in the north to Singleton in the south, and 62 kilometres (39 mi) east inland to The Lakes. Being 22 kilometres (14 mi) shorter than Sochi and with development continuing, "Perth may soon eclipse Sochi in Russia", making it the second-longest city in the world.Outside of the central business district, important urban centres within the metropolitan area include Armadale, Fremantle, Joondalup, Midland, Rockingham, and Thornlie. Most of those were originally established as separate settlements and retained a distinct identity after being subsumed into the wider metropolitan area. Mandurah, Western Australia's second-largest city, forms a conurbation with Perth along the coast, though for most purposes it is still considered a separate city.

Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the Perth area for at least 38,000 years, as evidenced by archaeological remains at Upper Swan. The Noongar people occupied the southwest corner of Western Australia and lived as hunter-gatherers. The wetlands on the Swan Coastal Plain were particularly important to them, both spiritually (featuring in local mythology) and as a source of food.The Noongar people now refer to Perth as Boorloo. Originally this term (also spelled Boorlo or Burrell) applied to Point Fraser in East Perth, and according to Robert Menli Lyon meant "big swamp". The present-day CBD (central business district) formed part of the territory of the Mooro, a Noongar clan, who at the time of British settlement had Yellagonga as their leader. The Mooro was one of several Noongar clans based around the Swan River, known collectively as the Whadjuk. The Whadjuk themselves were one of a larger group of fourteen tribes that formed the south-west socio-linguistic block known as the Noongar (meaning "the people" in their language), also sometimes called the Bibbulmun. On 19 September 2006, the Federal Court of Australia brought down a judgment determining that another judge should make the opinion deciding Noongar native title over the Perth metropolitan area in the case of Bennell v State of Western Australia [2006] FCA 1243. The judgment denied the claim because that application was premised on the existence of a single community throughout the whole claim area.

The Dutch Captain Willem de Vlamingh and his crew made the first documented sighting of the present-day Perth region by Europeans on 10 January 1697. Other Europeans made subsequent sightings between this date and 1829, but as in the case of the sighting and observations made by Vlamingh, they adjudged the area inhospitable and unsuitable for the agriculture that would be needed to sustain a European-style settlement.

Although the Colony of New South Wales had established a convict-supported settlement at King George's Sound (later Albany) on the south coast of Western Australia in 1826 in response to rumours that the area would be annexed by France, Perth was the first full-scale settlement by Europeans in the western third of the continent. The British colony would be officially designated Western Australia in 1832 but was known informally for many years as the Swan River Colony after the area's major watercourse.On 4 June 1829, newly arriving British colonists had their first view of the mainland, and Western Australia's founding has since been recognised by a public holiday on the first Monday in June each year. Captain James Stirling, aboard Parmelia, said that Perth was "as beautiful as anything of this kind I had ever witnessed". On 12 August that year, Helen Dance, wife of the captain of the second ship, Sulphur, cut down a tree to mark the founding of the town.

It is clear that Stirling had already selected the name Perth for the capital well before the town was proclaimed, as his proclamation of the colony, read in Fremantle on 18 June 1829, ended "given under my hand and Seal at Perth this 18th Day of June 1829. James Stirling Lieutenant Governor". The only contemporary information on the source of the name comes from Fremantle's diary entry for 12 August, which records that they "named the town Perth according to the wishes of Sir George Murray". Murray was born in Perth, Scotland, and was in 1829 Secretary of State for the Colonies and Member for Perthshire in the British House of Commons. The town was named after the Scottish Perth, in Murray's honour. Beginning in 1831, hostile encounters between the British settlers and the Noongar people – both large-scale land users, with conflicting land value systems – increased considerably as the colony grew. The hostile encounters between the two groups of people resulted in multiple events, including the execution of the Whadjuk elder Midgegooroo, the death of his son Yagan in 1833, and the Pinjarra massacre in 1834.

The relations between the Noongar people and the Europeans were strained due to these events. Because of the large number of buildings in and around Boorloo, the local Whadjuk Noongar people were slowly dispossessed of their country. They were forced to camp around prescribed areas, including the swamps and lakes north of the settlement area including Third Swamp, known to them as Boodjamooling. Boodjamooling continued to be a main campsite for the remaining Noongar people in the Perth region and was also used by travellers, itinerants, and homeless people. By the gold-rush days of the 1890s, they were joined by miners who were en route to the goldfields.

In 1850, at a time when penal transportation to Australia's eastern colonies had ceased, Western Australia was opened to convicts at the request of farming and business people due to a shortage of labour. Over the next eighteen years, 9,721 convicts arrived in Western Australia aboard 43 ships.

Queen Victoria announced the city status of Perth in 1856. Despite this proclamation, Perth was still a quiet town, described in 1870 by a Melbourne journalist as:"...a quiet little town of some 3000 inhabitants spread out in straggling allotments down to the water's edge, intermingled with gardens and shrubberies and half rural in its aspect ... The main streets are macadamised, but the outlying ones and most of the footpaths retain their native state from the loose sand — the all pervading element of Western Australia — productive of intense glare or much dust in the summer and dissolving into slush during the rainy season."

With the discovery of gold at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in the late 19th century, Western Australia experienced a mining boom, and Perth's population grew from approximately 8,500 in 1881 to 61,000 in 1901.

After a referendum in 1900, Western Australia joined the Federation of Australia in 1901. It was the last of the Australian colonies to agree to join the Federation, and it did so only after the other colonies had offered several concessions, including the construction of a transcontinental railway line from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie to link Perth with the eastern states.In 1927, Indigenous people were prohibited from entering large swathes of Perth under penalty of imprisonment, a ban that lasted until 1954.In 1933, two thirds of Western Australians voted in a referendum to secede from the Australian Federation. However, the state general election held at the same time as the referendum had voted out the incumbent "pro-independence" government, replacing it with a government that did not support the independence movement. Respecting the result of the referendum, the new government nonetheless petitioned the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. The House of Commons established a select committee to consider the issue but, after 18 months of negotiations and lobbying, finally refused to consider the matter, declaring that it could not legally grant secession.Perth entered the post-war period with a population of approximately 280,000 and an economy that had not experienced sustained growth since the 1920s. Successive state governments, beginning with the Willcock Labor Government (1936-1945), determined to change this. Planning for post-war economic development was initially driven by Russell Dumas, who as Director of Public Works (1941-1953) drew up plans for Western Australia's major post-war public-works projects, including the raising of the Mundaring and Wellington Dams, the development of the new Perth Airport, and the development of a new industrial zone centred on Kwinana. The advent of the McLarty Liberal Government (1947-1953) saw the emergence of something of a consensus on the need for continuing economic development. Economic growth was fuelled by large-scale public works, the post-war immigration program, and the success that various state governments had in attracting substantial foreign investment into the state, beginning with the construction of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Refinery at Kwinana in 1951–52.

The result of this economic activity was the rapid growth of the population of Perth and a marked change in its urban design. During the 1950s, Perth actively began to develop along the lines dictated by the rise of the automobile and the suburban sprawl, a development acknowledged by in the Hepburn Report (1957), which noted that Perth was beginning to resemble a pattern of development less in line with the British experience and more in line with North America. This was encouraged by the opening of the Narrows Bridge and the gradual closure of the Perth-Fremantle Tramways. The mining-pastoral boom of the 1960s only accelerated the pace of urban growth in Perth. By 1975 the population of Perth has risen to 825,000.

In 1962, Perth received global media attention when city residents lit their house lights and streetlights as American astronaut John Glenn passed overhead while orbiting the earth on Friendship 7. This led to its being nicknamed the "City of Light". The city repeated the act as Glenn passed overhead on the Space Shuttle in 1998.Perth's development and relative prosperity, especially since the mid-1960s, has resulted from its role as the main service centre for the state's resource industries, which extract gold, iron ore, nickel, alumina, diamonds, mineral sands, coal, oil, and natural gas. Whilst most mineral and petroleum production takes place elsewhere in the state, the non-base services provide most of the employment and income to the people of Perth.