This is the Cenotaph of the State War Memorial.  [There is an 18 metre granite obelisk commemorates all Western Australians who gave their lives in the service of their country] - from bgpa.

[At dawn on April 25 each year, Kings Park is more than a bushland reserve, The cenotaph at its heart becomes the focus for the annual Anzac Day dawn Service. Thousands of Western Australians gather to pay their respects to The men and women who died in their country’s service. The cenotaph was unveiled in 1929 and the centenary of the founding of the colony was Celebrated by planting an avenue of red-flowering gums along Fraser Avenue.] - from wa.gov.au.

The Cenotaph in the night.

The internal walls of the undercroft list the names of more than 7000 members of the services killed in action or who died of wounds or illness in WWI.

There is an area next to the Cenotaph that allow visitors to view the city of Perth and Perth Water.

This is called “Court of Contemplation” at State War Memorial precinct with the words written - “Let silent contemplation be your offering“.

Then we reached a curved wall with country names written on it.  One of the names stated is Borneo! :)  And SiewPeng’s sister told us another specialty of this curved wall.  If one sits at one end and leans against the wall to say something (with normal speaking volume), the person sitting at the other end of the curved wall can hear every single word clearly as if they are talking to each other face to face.

SiewPeng doubted her sister’s words because one would sure look insane if he or she sits at one corner and talking to a wall all by herself or himself.  However, she finally decided to give it a try.  The picture above shows SiewPeng delivering her words to her sister through the wall who was sitting at the other end of the curved wall.  And it really worked!

This is where the other end of the curved wall is.  It’s quite a long distance from the spot where the arrow is pointing in the picture above.  And that was where SiewPeng sat just now.

Here is another picture to show that the distance between the two spots is really far!  Look how tiny SiewPeng is at the beginning of the curved wall!  But it is true that the person sitting at this end where the arrow is pointing at, can hear every single word crystal clear as if they were sitting next to each other and talking!  Amazing!

We will remember them - the Australian army.

Light yellow flowers as the offering.

There is a flame - “Flame of Remembrance” in the middle of a pool - the “Pool of Reflection“.

2/16th Battalion Memorial - honours the men of this battalion who fought in Syria, New Guinea and Borneo in WWII.

There are other memorials, statues and structures in the park which I did not take the photos for each of them.  They are the statue of John Forrest, ANZAC Bluff Commemorative Plaque, 10th Light Horse Memorial, South African War Memorial, Queen Victoria Statue, Floral Clock, HMS Queen Elizabeth Shells, Leake Memorial Fountain, Kokoda Memorial Plaque, Jewish War Memorial and Dr Arnold Cook Memorial.

And I believe the most recent memorial would be the Bali Memorial that commemorates the loss and suffering of the Bali tragedy which occurred on 12 October 2002.

This is the last post about Kings Park. As usual, let me summarize the posts about Kings Park as follow:-

1. Visited Kings Park, Western Australia
2. Kings Park - Part 2 - the Nature
3. Kings Park - Part 3 - Perth City
4. Kings Park - Part 4 - Sunset
5. Kings Park - Part 5 - Night Scene
6. Kings Park - Part 6 - Gija Jumulu at Botanic Garden
7. Kings Park - Part 7 - State War Memorial (This post)

Hope you have enjoyed them.

This is famous the Boab Tree / Adansonia gregorii (Gija Jumulu) located at one of the car parks near the Botanic Garden in Kings Park.  It has been moved 3200km away from Warmun in WA’s Kimberley region to here. - Amazing!!!

The Gija Jumulu, SiewPeng and Colin.

This tree was estimated 750 years old, 36 tonnes weight, with 2.5 meters diameter trunk, and relocated due to works on the Great Northern Highway.  It took days (14 July 2008 to 19 July 2008) on its journey to arrive at Kings Park.

25 metre truck trailer and two traffic lanes were required to transport this giant boab tree with police escorts. :O

[Boabs are deciduous trees that are highly valued by Indigenous people for their edible fruits, medicinal uses and water-holding properties. …

…Now known as ‘Gija Jumulu’, the tree is a special gift to all Western Australians from the local Indigenous people, the Gija, who are the traditional land owners. They performed a farewell ceremony to the Jumulu (boab in Gija language) on Monday, 14 July 2008. …

…Along the way, almost entire towns came out to see Gija Julumu and people honked horns and waved the whole way down. The boab arrived at its new home in the heart of Kings Park on Saturday, 19 July. ] - from Botanic Garden and Parks Authority Website.

This is the signboard telling the story of Kings Park.  Kings Park was officially opened on 10 August 1895 whereas Botanic Garden was opened on 1965.

First I was confused about “Kings Park” and “Botanic Garden“.  How are they related?  And where are their boundaries?  From Wikipedia - “The botanic garden is an 18 hectare site within the park“.  It answers my question.

It is now known as Western Australian Botanic Garden and has a collection of 2000 species of Western Australian flora.

We haven’t finished exploring the entire botanic garden, because we wanted to look for the sunset.

Are these flowers Banksia?  They are in red and light orange.

We heard about this Boab tree before we came here, and we were not sure where it is in the huge Kings Park.  We explored and we found it.

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Last night, I had a chat with my brother, he told me about his experience with the tour guide when he visited China.  I told him that I like to travel without tour guide because I like to explore places myself.

Most of the time, after I have visited a place I will do some research on Google or Wikipedia, then I might try to find it on Google map to have an idea about its shape and topology.  If I visit that place again in the future, I would be able to explore it better.

Sometimes, the things that were discovered, are not on the web but will be stored in our memory and accumulated as experiences.

This is the night view of Perth City from Kings Park.  Does it look like the picture in a postcard?  I hope I can improve the quality of my photo and create my own DIY postcard.

I bought some postcards at a post office in Como at 60 cents (small), 80 cents (medium) and $1 (large) for my own collection and as souvenirs.  Later I found the small postcards sold at the city for 35 cents per piece only.  Maybe the qualities are different.

It was getting cooler after the sun had set.  It is not too cold and we enjoyed the temperature.

It is still summer at Perth now.  From this web page, today (25 Feb) the maximum temperature has reached 41 degree Celsius. Wow… it’s hot.

Can you find the green / yellow colour Swan Bell Tower?  It changes its colour from green to purple, blue and yellow every some interval of time.

It was about 8 pm in the evening.  We were not the only couple at Kings Park.  We saw a few people with camera and tripod taking photos at the lookout point too.  Some people were still sitting on the grass.

This is the Narrows Bridge on Kwinana Highway.

Zoom to the max, and cropped a bit, I can see the green road sign clearly.

On google map, I can see everything and know the direction well.  But when I was driving, I could get lost easily when I saw one of these exit signs.  Sometimes it was not easy to make a decision which exit to take within a limited time, when I saw it for the first time (especially the car behind chasing at a very close distance).  I hope I can get a GPS loaded with Perth map.

The road directory provided by the car rental company is useful, but I have to read it properly before starting the journey.  Sometimes, when the surroundings are different from what I expected, I need to stop and look at the map (But stopping on any freeway is not allowed).  But most of the time, SiewPeng’s sister was reading the map and was a good manual GPS.

These are the trees at Kings Park at night.  Finally we walked back to our car.  I saw many cars parked along the road on the slope.  I have come across a sign, something like this - it is against the law if the person in-charge of a vehicle is not at the park.  Hope I can find out more information about it.  Tell me if you know about it.

We went to Kings Park again on 15 February (Monday) evening at about 6:30 pm to watch the sunset.  We did not see the sunset process because the sky was cloudy.  We also did not figure out where is the best location to watch the sunset.

However, I have taken photos of the sky in warm colour slowly turned into darkness at dusk.  Parts of the sky was in purple, light red, yellow and orange.

Slowly, lights from buildings, roads, freeways and vehicles were switched on.

If I am not mistaken, this is a building at Mounts Bay Road.

The Wheel of Perth was also had its light switched on.

This is the Kwinana Freeway.  The lights of cars became the light trails in my photo.  1 second of shutter speed was used, hand held and still clear.  :)

Trees and orange-coloured sky.

On that evening, actually we reached the Botanic Garden first, we parked our car not far from the Gija Jumulu Tree.

Later, we found that the sunset was not visible there, we quickly went back into our car and parked somewhere nearer to the Aboriginal Art Gallery and State War Memorial, but the sunset was also not visible there.  We just saw the orange sky, and we continued moved ourselves following the direction of the sunset.

We had entered an area with woods were surrounding us, and had taken these series of photos (trees with orange-coloured sky).  It was getting darker and darker, but we went into the park deeper and deeper.  We still saw some people jogging facing us, so I was not worried and kept on searching the sun following the orange-coloured sky, and I hoped that I could reach a place high enough to see the sunset.  I remember SiewPeng and I had climbed up a little hill in the wood or the bushland.  Suddenly, we found ourselves had reached the Botanic Garden again because we were not far from the Gija Jumulu Tree.

The sky turned dark completely, and we walked towards the direction of our car.

We spent another 45 minutes taking the night scene of Perth City at our favourite lookout point (above the Aboriginal Art Gallery). Coming up next post, Kings Park - Part 5, I will show you the night scene of Perth City.

This picture was taken when we parked our car at one of the parking areas. Checking on my compass, I found that this is the direction where the sunset happened. But I am not sure if it is accessible beyond these trees.  And we had went to other directions to search for the sunset, but did not really find it.

Later, I checked the map of King Parks by Google map, and found that the park is facing South East.  It must be good for sunrise instead.  We did not go for it, because the sunrise was too early in the summer - about 5:30 am.  Yes, next time, we will come here - Kings Park again to watch the sunrise.  :P

Does it look like a typical or a unique city view?  You tell me.

While it is typical, let me make it unique.

While it is unique, let me turn it into a typical city view.

Far away, We can see the Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell Tower.  We have been there by walking along Barrack Street to the jetty on our trip to Perth last April, but we did not pay for the ticket and try both of these tourist attractions.

This time, when I have a chat with our friend Alan, he said that he and his family has never tried the wheel of Perth too although they are living in Perth.  He said that Kings Park is higher and can see the whole city.  Therefore, this trip to Perth, SiewPeng and I spent our time on Kings Park and visited 2 times on the 1st and 2nd day of Chinese New Year, instead of going up to the “wheel“.

For the Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell Tower, again…  we told ourselves for the second time … “Next Time“.

Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell tower look small in this photo compared to the building around it.  I doubt that what I can see if I were sitting on the wheel.  :P If the wheel was build on Kings Park, sure the visitors can see more things.

I like to study about the highway on the map and compare with the actual highway.

Some are called freeways actually.  The speed limit on freeways can be up to 100 km/h.  As you can see on the photo below, the railway for train is on the middle land of the freeway separating the traffic heading North and South.

In Perth, the highway seems like a normal road (60 or 70 km/h), but it can be very long (hundreds of kilometer).  I am familiar with Canning Highway (because we stayed at Como), Albany Highway (we went to Carousel Shopping Center), Leech Highway, Great Eastern Highway etc.

It takes 409 km from Perth to Albany using Albany Highway.  We didn’t tried that.  As an example, if you take a wrong turn South instead of North of Albany Highway, you will reach Albany if you keep going for 409 km.  Many time, it is confused whether a left of right turn should be taken because both side have the same street name.

There are several exits after the Kwinana Freeway to the city.  Since this was the first time I drive in Perth, I had made some mistakes by taking the wrong exits, because our destination has different names with the name of the exits.  Many times, we had reached Powis St exit and we know that we have missed the earlier exit and needed to turned back.  There was even a time, when we wanted to head south to Como, but we entered to the North freeway instead.

However, I learned from each mistake with the spending of extra petrol.

One of the Jetties.

Look at the blue ferry, its shape is a cube.

Boat.

Train on freeway competing with cars.  Do you think which one is faster?

There was one day, we decided to take a train to the City from Como.  When we arrived at the train station at the junction of Canning Highway and Manning Road, we could not find the parking for our car.  If we parked somewhere near the petrol station, we were also not sure how to get to the train station.  We didn’t want to walk on the freeway with cars beside us driving with at least 100 km/h.   Therefore we gave up the idea and drove to the City.  It was not easy to find a parking space, and I parked the car in a multi-layer carpark which called His Majesty’s Car Park cost us AUD$4.20 for an hour and ten minutes.

This is the place where I took most of the photos of Perth City from Kings Park.

The lower ground of this look out point is the Aboriginal Art Gallery.

Let me zoom in from the picture above.

There is a small jetty, and footpath along the coast.

Can you see the dotted line on the picture above?  From Kings park, it looks small.  If I am not mistaken, it is the very long jetty at Como beach.  We have been there twice, because we can watch sunset there and it is less than 5 minutes from where we were staying.  I will show you the sunset pictures and jelly fish at como beach in the coming posts.

You can notice that most of the photos above include the river.  It is called Swan River.

We found the emblem / logo for the Perth City and we understand that why it is called Swan River.  There must be many black swans near the river.  As we know water always attracts birds.

(taken from http://www.perth.wa.gov.au/)

As usual I have taken many photos when I visit a place, and the posts coming up will still be on the topic of Kings Park.  Stay tuned!