Perth, Western Australia: Gosnells Parks and Railway Markets

Perth, Western Australia: Gosnells Parks and Railway Markets - Day 11

Fish Mural Art along the front of a garden box near the Agonis Centre Entrance

Gosnells City Council has always been supportive of the arts to the point where
you can see many examples of public art throughout the town centre.

Gosnells the suburb, or even the City of Gosnells, isn't really a destination at the forefront of anyone's mind when visiting Perth. Even now, after so much money has been spent on making pleasing community spaces and facilities, in the 24 years since I moved back to South Australia.

It's certainly a much more pleasant looking place to live now than it was during the years I grew up there, from the age of eight. My family moved there from South Australia (after a brief eight month stay in Kelmscott while we waited for our house in Gosnells to be built) at the beginning of 1978.

Today's plans were for my mum and I to catch up for lunch and do a bit of a walk around Gosnells - where she still lives - though not in the original house we had built, which was sold years ago.

Usually it's a chance for me to see what's changed since the last time I was there, but since it wasn't that long ago, relatively speaking, other than a new community park space, near the railway station, it looked mostly the same.

Dome Cafe

Mum and I walked to the Gosnells Dome Cafe, which is really quite nice inside, with full leather style armchair seats at some tables as well as proper booth seats and couches.

Mum shouted me lunch. We both had ham and cheese toasties with potato chips and tomato salsa dip, along with a cup of tea. I'd definitely recommend it. The food was nice and the dining area makes the whole experience feel more up market than the prices suggest.

The Agonis Centre
Clock Tower.

Agonis Centre

We then walked down to the Agonis centre, which is a bit of a landmark with its fairly modern looking clock tower. Inside, just in front of where the library - sorry, the Knowledge Centre - is, there is a permanent display giving a history of the area.

Then, out the back of the centre we made our way around, what is a kind of tree top walk, down to the playground, community stage/amphitheatre, and river board walk that is very nice for some light exercise or if you're into nature photography.

Tree top walk way that leads down to the playground behind the Agonis Centre.

Treetop walkway (along the back) that leads down to the playground and
parkland behind the Agonis Centre.

The Gosnells Railway Markets

From there Mum and I made our way back to the Gosnells Railway Market, passing through the new open space park, that wasn't there before, just in front of the railway station.

The Market seemed very empty for a Friday afternoon. Many shops inside were closed and there didn't seem to be much going on in the food hall. Unless the weekends are better I suspect the markets won't be open too many more years (or maybe it will?).

These Markets were actually opened a few years before I left Perth. Not sure of the exact year (1991 I think since that's when the train (image below) was placed inside)? The market did start off strong, with a busy food hall, fruit and veg market, and a good selection of variety stalls selling typical market type items, books, clothing, bric-a-brac etc.

Dd 596 Steam Locomotive inside the Gosnells Railway Market.

This Dd 596 Steam Locomotive sits between the food court and the main market area. It's
representative of the trains that used to travel the line through Gosnells up until 1968.

I think the hope was that they would help make Gosnells a weekend destination (since they are only open Thursday through Sunday). Unfortunately they never really attracted much more than the local market. I think they were hoping for something like The Fremantle Market, which I have never known not to be packed, and challenging just to walk around for the sheer number of shoppers.

As I said, Gosnells is not really a destination anyone thinks of when visiting Perth. Even people who live in the surrounding suburbs, I suspect, rarely ever make Gosnells a destination for a day out.

---o ---o--- o---

Anyway, that was day 11 of my trip to Perth. Mum and I went back to her place to relax with a cup of tea, before I headed off to visit my brother, who lives a suburb over in Maddington, for a couple of hours.

My partner, Enigma, spent the day with my Dad's partner, taking a trip out to Hillary's Boat Harbour, where there is a similar, but more successful market out on the jetty.

Comments

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements

TET heelflip - looking better but still not a land. A s of writing this I've stuck to my plan of filming myself skate every second Sunday. By the time this post goes up I will have three episodes done. As part of that goal I am also skating more between episodes, about every second to third day for an hour, practicing Braille's Skateboarding Made Simple, Volume 1. That said, I'm not posting these videos here immediately after they're posted to my @TETLife YouTube Channel because I only post an article once a week, and that would make every second article a Sunday Session post. These posts are really so I can add some additional thoughts after the fact, and, of course, because this blog is about all things that interest me, of which skateboarding is one of them. In episode two I had intended to speak to camera more than I do but my driveway is right next door to my neighbor's shed/workshop, and I get a little self-conscious if I'm not too sure whether he's th...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...

The Australian Federal Election 2025 Could Be a Win For Independents

Australian Democrats founder, Senator Don Chipp, embodied the role of minor parties holding the balance of power with his quote of "keep the bastards honest." Photo Manipulated Caricature by TET. A s of writing this, the actual Australian Federal Election date has yet to be announced, as our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, attempts to keep the focus on the fallout of severe weather events in Queensland, however it's looking likely that some time in May is the safest bet. Despite this, all parties have been hard at campaigning, with smaller parties, and in particular, conservative independent candidates, seemingly rallying together to make sure people know how much influence they can have just by preventing the two major parties (Labor and the Liberal/National coalition) from having a majority in either (or both) houses of parliament. They're also doing their part to make sure voters finally understand that preferential voting works in everybody's favor over one ...

The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Image to Video Generator to Animate Art That Started as a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article, The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) No Spoilers

T his is another film that I would have liked to have seen in a theatre but, for whatever reason, didn't get to. Having now seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) almost a year later I'm glad I didn't. Which is not to say it's bad. Like its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which I enjoyed in a cinema immensely, this film would definitely benefit from being on a big screen for the spectacle and epic visuals of it all. However unlike its predecessor there is so much going on, with back and forth between the waring parties, and Furiosa's story as well, you can't just sit back and kind of enjoy the ride. It's like writer/director, George Miller, wanted to cram in as many of his ideas as possible for the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max, because it's not likely he'll make another one, but whoever does, has a rich, detailed world of on screen source material to draw upon. The story begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) and her journey from the ...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog