And then there is the part of Perth's fortune that no other city I read makes quite so literal. In most places, when we say the mountain is the source of wealth, we mean it as an image. In Perth you can mean it plainly. This city's prosperity has come, again and again, straight up out of the earth. First the gold of the goldfields inland, then in our own time the iron and the great mining booms that turned a remote outpost into one of the wealthiest cities in the country. The land behind Perth has literally handed up its riches. The mountain as the giver of wealth is not a metaphor here. It is the city's whole history.
WHAT THE STUDENT COULD NOT SEE
I had all of this in front of me when I was twenty something years old, sitting in those coffee shops with my books. The river that rested. The hill at the back. The wealth waiting in the ground. And I could not read a word of it.
That is the honest lesson Perth gave me, and it is the one I am most grateful for. Feng Shui is not a set of formulas you memorise and then apply like a stamp. The formulas are only the alphabet. Learning to actually read a landscape, to stand on a riverbank and feel why a city grew where it grew, took me years and many more cities than this one. Perth is where I was handed the alphabet. It took the rest of my life so far to learn to read the sentences.
So when I picture Perth now, I do not picture a place I have outgrown. I picture the patient city that let me begin, badly, before I knew anything, and waited for me to come back one day with eyes that could finally see it. A great deal has changed in me since that one dollar consultation. The river has not changed at all. It is still resting there in front of the city, holding its fortune the way it always has, exactly as it did on the mornings I walked past it and understood nothing.
Some debts you can only repay by going back.
JY
P.S. A small group of old friends, former students and early clients, perhaps fifty or so, have stayed in touch with me across all these years, and they have been asking me to come back to Perth for a coffee talk. Between us, I would much rather make it a wine talk, and I have a feeling that is the way it will go. The one thing still missing is a venue. If you are in Perth and you have a space, or you are someone who could bring something to the table for an evening like this, leave me a note in the comments. It would mean a great deal to gather again in the city where all of this started.