Perth’s ‘rancid’ Yagan Square is a monolith to the mining booms’ missed opportunities

It’s a typical summer night in Perth, and I’m standing at the top of the stairs overlooking the train station to Yagan Square, watching four tween-teens huff nangs on a rickety picnic table. I’m overcome by a wave of nostalgia — homesickness, even — for scenes, places and picnic tables I didn’t think existed anymore. But here they are, like it’s 2003. 

The mining boom changed Perth, a lot. The money came thick and fast and the tsunami of wealth that came with it remoulded the city, in shape and spirit. Words like “redevelopment”, “rejuvenation” and “reimagination” were bandied about like passcodes for a mythic speakeasy: whisper them at the right doorway and a Valhalla of urban renewal will be revealed. 

It didn’t pan out like that, of course — not exactly. Certain unprintable words come to mind when I think of the Barnett government’s many backhanded, wheeler-dealer boondoggles it pulled off for this city, and this state, with its seemingly bottomless bounty. 

Yagan Square, more than the infamously lame Elizabeth Quay or the criminally miscalculated Fiona Stanley Hospital, became the most bitter of these many disappointments. Named for Yagan, the Indigenous Noongar warrior who was betrayed, murdered and beheaded by settlers in 1833, Yagan Square began construction in February 2016 and “opened” in March 2018 under the reign of then premier Mark McGowan. 

Connecting Perth’s CBD to Northbridge, Yagan Square was a much-needed, I-can’t-believe-it-took-them-this-long piece of urban rejiggering, designed to correct the disconnection between the city’s two major (see: only) hubs. The $73.5 million project was a collaboration between architects, the government and the Noongar community.

Writing in Architecture Australia in 2019, Emma Williamson, a co-founder of the Fulcrum Agency, wrote that “Yagan Square’s intrigue lies in its engagement with the site’s future and its past”. She continues:

Yagan square has not been designed as a single, totalising gesture. Rather it invites curiosity and exploration, revealing stories over time … rather than creating an iconic singular object, the project team has developed a space of deep and layered memory, with each element having symbolic significance in the narrative. It is a place that can be returned to, time and time again.

Aboriginal Elder and Noongar man Richard Walley liaised between the Noongar Whadjuk working group and the design team. The digital tower at the entrance to the square (which now plays ads for everything from reality TV to mobile gambling apps) included 14 “reeds”, intended to represent the site’s original wetlands and the 14 language groups of the Noongar nation. 

At the heart of the Square is the Market Hall, originally a hub of cafes, bars and restaurants — safe investments for anyone wanting to take advantage of all the foot traffic. The building looks a bit like a structure Darth Vader would build for his accountant to work in, and its complete and utter failure was the first sign that Yagan Square’s promise of community and renewal had faltered. 

McGowan’s border closure did no favours to the Market Hall’s eateries, but the demise of the lunch-and-dinner hub as a concept is likely more closely linked to ill-considered design and mismanagement. It was a matter of stairs: travellers enter and exit via them in similar train station food courts; here, the stairs went around the side.

Rents were also high, business was all but non-existent, and the square soon became a hotbed of drunken violence and destitution, solidifying into what one friend who cleaned the public toilets nearby described as a “rancid vibe”. 

In an irony so lazily inevitable it borders on cynically unbelievable, Yagan Square quickly became the centre of Perth’s homeless crisis. A spate of deaths (namely overdoses), assaults, robberies and “riots” joined any headline to do with the square, and the anecdotal evidence gave a queasy hop-skip shuffle to the gait of those passing through, be it for work or a night out. 

There was a shrug of acceptance, in a sense. By the time Yagan Square had arrived and collapsed, the city and state witnessed the false promises of the mining boom, and the Otomo-esque urban malaise and dislocated chaos it built into Perth. The Hay and Murray Street malls have the air of a post-apocalypse dystopia, and Carillon City — once the city’s pulsing retail hub — has been so empty for the past three years that a wetland has been installed in its former food court as an art installation. 

Yagan Square has continued to operate as a sort of ironwork Picture of Dorian Gray, embodying WA’s moral decay while the coffers of the rich and powerful continue to bloat. When the pop-up cop shop opened in the square in 2021, it was like an unpoppable boil erupting from the city’s worn and cratered face. Who needs to support something when it’s cheaper to police it?

But this is all due to turn around, or so the same pundits who heralded the square’s opening say. Eleven new storefronts are set to open in the abandoned Market Hall over the next month, and 250 staff are to get it going. Edith Cowan University’s new campus is almost finished being built on the square’s west side, and it seems inevitable that the thousands of students it will bring to the area will buy their lunch in whatever burger joints and noodle houses open up. 

Still, it is hard not to see Yagan’s Square as another monolith of successive governments’ failures to cash in on the windfall that was/is the mining boom. Architecture is not infrastructure, and craft beers are not culture: what the square needed to thrive was already lost in the shuffle of untold billions — a sense of soul and self that the city auctioned off to BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside and the rest somewhere at the turn of the century.

No matter what the future holds, the intervening years have existed in the neverscape between profit, promise and loss, so to huff a nang on a picnic table on a hot day is, in many ways, only natural.