rediscovered the ‘culture shock’. You see, Michael learns
from his travels; studies, explores, absorbs. He quickly
learnt that Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, is
almost as large as the state it serves. The state is larger
than most of the world’s countries, the sheer scale can’t
be ignored. He laughed when recounting that he’d read
that the father of communism, Karl Marx, described
Perth in his 1867 text, Das Kapital, as “an object lesson in
how not to establish an overseas settlement”.
One of Australia’s first ‘free’ settlements, Perth soon
held out a hand for help when just a decade after establishment
the colonists realised, they were in trouble and a
penal colony was the ‘only answer’. In fact, Perth was the
last Australian settlement to cease as a place of punishment
for the British ‘unwanted’.
Political historian to geographical explorer, Michael
soon discovered that Australia has many requirements
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