6. Subiaco - sub lacum or sub standard?

By all accounts, residential Subiaco began as a mistake.

My source is former Australian swing bowler Terry Alderman*, born and bred in Subiaco and our waiter at the Sicilian. He’s answering questions in-between serving tables and has recommended us the Big Subi Breakfast: eggs Benedict, New Norcia bread and a decaffeinated soy milk cappuccino.

* One must ask whether all arenas in this state are merely gladiator coliseums. The Australian penchant for sport is well known, but here they seem to take it to another level. We have already discussed the Cauldron of Fear, but Terry Alderman was once attacked by a member of the crowd at the Western Australian Cricket Association (WACA) ground in an Ashes test in 82-83.













“The first house in these parts was down the road a little, but its gone now. Built in 1886, but demolished years ago. I think it’s a car park or a video store now. It used to be called Jone’s Folly because it was so far away from Perth and everyone thought it was a grave mistake to build here. Apparently it was a real bugger transporting the bricks and timber to build the place. It was the only house in Subi for 8 years. Can you imagine? Not the most auspicious beginning, especially since the monks had abandoned the place by that stage already. Can’t have been too exciting back then. They were lucky the train line came this way pretty early.”

“Why did the monks leave Terry?”

“Not sure. Apparently there was more happening out in the bush, out in New Norcia where they had another monastery and they all took off there. One of them stayed behind, but they never really got going again. Most of them left about 20 years before Jone’s built his place. These monks were from around your neck of the woods, weren’t they Johno?”

“It was my ancestors who came here, you are right. But I feel no trace of them left. It is hard for me to imagine how new everything is here. My home dates back to Nero’s time. He built a gravity dam there, one of the first and the only Roman one in Italy. The name Subiaco means this, sub lacum, or below the lake. The monks destroyed it 1300 years later trying to water their fields. It is a shame. But in the hills around my home are the monasteries of St. Benedict of which we are very proud. He was a great man and we have his image in many houses. The monasteries were very progressive for their time and we welcomed the Germans there in the 15th Century when others turned them away as heretics. They established one of the worlds first printing presses there with the help of the Germans. For this, we are very proud. So you can say, that from my home comes both the book and the founders of your home New Subiaco.”

















“Yeah, it’s a shame your relatives couldn’t stick around. Things are a bit trendy around here now, but they’re alright. I’m sure you’ll find something exciting. But look fellas, would be nice to shoot the breeze all day, but we have an office party booked in at twelve.”

John and I Thanked Terry Alderman and stepped outside the Sicilian. John rated the eggs moderate on the Roma-Arkansas scale and the soy milk coffee far inferior to his beloved espresso.

We thought we’d spend the afternoon looking at the architecture and exploring the role of books on Subiaco culture as a way of making a comparison with John’s home.
We walked the suburbs for several hours. We saw few people and few old buildings. It seemed that many of the original buildings had been demolished to make way for new housing. So much of what we saw was only a few years old at most, much of it originating in the 21st Century.

“How old is old John?”

“For me, anything in the 19th century or later is new, but here?”

“For me it is the same. Toledo is so rich. You can feel the weight and responsibility of history on the streets, in the dust even. We are poor and our golden age was in the past and sometimes we hunger for the new and for a chance to escape the responsibility. But here I am not sure. I find it very frictionless to walk here, like it is untouched or that it is shapeless. I am unused to this feeling.”

“The old seems older than it is when it is side by side the new.”

“Some of the new buildings are beautiful, but seem silent. They haven’t learned to speak.”

“It looks like Legoland in places. Ramon, I am not sure what to think. The feeling of being in a new place here makes me tingle, but I am not engorged by it.”

“Excited?”

“Excited? I mean engorged. I mean ready with flesh in front of me. I feel like I would be waiting too long here. The old is not old enough and the new is never new for long. The sense of place I need has not happened yet. You can’t synthesise time Ramon, but it is hard to judge a place by the absence of this. Without the sense of history around me, I feel abandoned. I could not be excited, but I do not know what it is like to be born with no history. My cousin, she was born again, but…”

“But which is more exciting Giovanni, newness or history?”

“History inspires and it reaches out to the new. I will not try to answer for others if they are happy.”



Our first attempts at finding a literary heritage were met with alarm: we passed a rubbish skip laden with old books and found the most popular store was a dedicated romance book dealer. However, it wasn’t long before we found a public library, which seemed a little quiet to us, and a few small retailers on the high street. Inside one I began to browse. There was not another person in the store. The P.A. broadcast a soundtrack of Muzak. I headed straight for the Australiana section to look for Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet, set in neighbouring suburbs. A young male employee walked past to begin stacking one of the shelves. He seemed dazed or a little slow. He was humming the Muzak as he worked. It was Celine Dion’s love theme from Titanic. There was nobody in the store to see me run back onto the high street in search of a pub.