Know Thy Neighbour Residency: Blue Joy Theatre Company with City of Belmont #1

Jun 24

Blue Joy Theatre Company's Mohammed 'Ayo Busari', Shelby McKenzie and Ken Meyer reflect on their first experiences as resident Know Thy Neighbour #4 artists with City of Belmont.

There's always a moment of uncertainty when beginning something new. It sits with you at first as a rumbling discomfort, but once you settle into it, it starts to shift into a blooming curiosity. That's where we began.

Our first gathering as a team took place at Centenary Park Community Centre: talking through what Echoes in the Pavement is reaching toward, how we might approach it, and where to start. We had organised some community engagement early on as a way to hit the ground running. But as that failed to produce interest, we decided to move through Belmont and begin somewhere familiar. Shelby headed to the library to print flyers for our upcoming community conversations. Ayo and I made our way to Bilya Kard Boodja Lookout, adjacent to one of WA's major road arteries — Great Eastern Highway, which runs through Belmont alongside the Derbal Yerrigan.

I remember traversing this road a lot growing up, as our family drove to the airport to visit relatives in either Germany or Japan. But later on in life, when that traffic was routed elsewhere, my reason to move through this place was lost. Coming back now I felt a tinge of nostalgia and reconnection to my younger self.

A Garden Between Two Cities

Shortly before our visit, I'd learned about Adachi Park, a small garden built in 2004 to honour Belmont's sister city, Adachi in Tokyo. Naturally, I was drawn to it.

Moving north-east from Bilya Kard Boodja Lookout with the bilya on my left, I arrived at what felt like a careful civic gesture. A modest, well-tended, and quaint garden featuring a tin-roof shrine that managed to feel perfectly Australian and Japanese. Inside, a small display told the story of the exchange program between the two cities and the histories that brought this place into being.

The park was established in 2004. The statistics inside prompted me to look up the current equivalents:

Two cities, each growing quietly in parallel. The scale of one dwarfs the other, but the gesture of connection and the sharing of culture, had significant weight to it.

Further explorations through the park lead me to find two haiku’s:

Spring Peace…
last year which tree root
was my pillow

A young priest
teaches a child the stars
Heaven’s River.

Moving through, arriving, returning

During our short visit, I couldn’t help but notice the planes overhead. They came one after another, descending into Perth along the same corridor, over and over again.

I've since looked up what flew overhead that morning:

Qantas QF763 Melbourne → Perth T3 - spotted 9 May 11:21:46AM
Boeing 737-800 (174 seats)

Qantas QF10 London Heathrow → Perth T3 - spotted 9 May 11:59:18AM
Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner (236 seats)

Qatar Airways QR900 Doha → Perth T1 - spotted 9 May 12:03:48PM
Airbus A350-900 (283 seats)

Singapore Airlines SQ213 Singapore → Perth T1 - spotted 9 May 12:14:59PM
Airbus A350-900MH (303 seats)

Those are only the ones I captured. Flight data shows four more aircraft passed overhead during the same window. Eight planes in roughly 70 minutes. Each one full of people moving through, arriving, returning, beginning something…

Standing beneath that flight path, next to a Japanese garden in the middle of a Perth suburb, I felt the particular kind of layering this project is starting to uncover.

Clay into bricks and beyond

On 13 May, we attended a talk at the Ruth Faulkner Library, hosted by curator Blythe Digweed-Downey, about the history of clay and brick-making in Belmont.

The early brick industry, we learned, was foundational to Perth. Clay pressed here became the water and sewerage pipelines, the residential homes, the civic infrastructure of a growing Perth. The Ascot Kilns are the most well-known remnants, recently restored and protected. But another site caught our attention as access was publicly available: Garvey Park, where Marr's Brickworks and Millard's Brickworks once operated.

We ventured out there.

What we found was extraordinary. A now wonderful open space, home to a cafe and kayak club, full of established gums and lush grass sitting along the Derbal Yerrigan. We explored further and found ourselves amongst a fascinating landscape. We noticed along the eastern section of the riverbank lay hundreds of bricks. Tree roots had grown over and into them, folding the bricks into the landscape as nature began to reclaim them. The whole ground we walked on was built of buried bricks. One we found was stamped: J.Millard. We walked upon a forgotten history, buried by sand and time.

As we write this blog we have just received notice that Blythe and her colleagues have completed our research request with the Belmont Museum. They graciously spent a lot of their time on this request and compiled an incredibly detailed and generous document that we look forward to sinking our teeth into shortly.

Everyday Places - A Belmont Community Workshop

Our first community engaged workshop occurred on May the 23, and while the group was small we were so excited to continue the conversation with the residents that did attend.

This workshop was designed to lead the community through written reflection on their city, how they interact with the people, places and objects and how these moments can become habitual and therefore overlooked.

Short prompts like “What places do you move through each day” and “What small actions or encounters shape your sense of connection or disconnection to a place?” led into a stream of consciousness writing, which then developed into incredibly detailed conversations about their home. We were so grateful to the community members who did attend and were able to give a small look into their lives as Belmont residents, their opinions, thoughts and ideas were backed by genuine care for the city and its people and this was clear throughout the workshop.

We intend to continue these workshops in our second month of the residency and will extend our relationships with the attendees of our first workshop by conducting one on one interviews with them.

Where Next

We are excited to begin our one on one interviews with the residents we have met within our first residency month, as well as residence we had connections to previously.

A question we're left with is: where in Perth are these bricks today? And could this help us connect more deeply to the land we share? There is a deep memory of land in the walls around us. Through collaboration with the City of Belmont, we've begun to trace the journey:

WA Government House: The Lodge

Perth Sewerage Scheme

Hill 60

All Saints Church

St Anne’s Church

Brick homes in Ascot

Roof tiles

Irrigation pipes for agriculture

We've also connected with the Belmont Potters Group and look forward to speaking with members about the history of clay and brick in the area. We also hope to arrange a site visit to the Ascot Brick Works.

First Nations consultation is also underway. Through these conversations, we hope to reframe the sites of brickworks and clay mining as places of gratitude to Country.

Images courtesy of Ken Meyer

More about the Know Thy Neighbour #4: Gestures project.

More about the arts in City of Belmont.

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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.