The Aborigines had been living in Western Australia for more than 40,000 years before it was sighted by the first Europeans, almost certainly Portuguese, some time during the late 16thC.

In a gesture of supreme hubris, the Dutch navigator Dirk Hartog landed on the coast in 1616 and claimed the whole place as Dutch, calling it New Holland. He even left behind a pewter plate nailed to a post recording this fact. This pewter plate duly remained in place on what is now called Dirk Hartog Island, one of the more remote stretches of the 5,000-km-long Western Australian coastline. For some reason, ensuing explorers seem to have missed this notice. Or perhaps they perversely ignored it.

Either way, no one was really interested in this barren lump of land stuck at the end of the Indian Ocean. The Dutch took to using it as a navigational aid. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, they would make use of the prevailing Westerlies to cross the southern Indian Ocean. When they reached Western Australia, they would turn north along the coast for Batavia (Java). Despite Australia being the largest navigational aid in the world, ‘navigators’ were soon making a regular habit of sailing slap into it. As a result, most of the early European settlers of Western Australia looked like Robinson Crusoe. Unfortunately, their views on Australia have not come down to us, and can only be imagined.

By the 19thC, the British had begun importing more characters looking like Robinson Crusoe into colonies on the east coast of Australia. These were the first convicts. (And we don’t have to imagine what they thought of

Australia, because some of them went to immense trouble to record their views on this matter.) The British didn’t mind filling up their empire with desperate convicts writing rude tracts about their new home, but when they heard the French wanted to get in, they decided this was going too far. Rumours spread that the French were planning to take over Western Australia, so the British established a colony at Albany in 1826. Three years later Lieutenant-Governor Stirling founded the Swan River Colony in the region of modern Perth. No French turned up, but neither did any further colonists. So the British began shipping in more Robinson Crusoes, in large numbers. But for these convicts, the colony would probably have died.

Then, in the 1890s, gold was discovered in the Western Australian hinterland, and more than 100,000 Robinson Crusoes from all over the world descended on Western Australia in one of the biggest gold rushes the world has ever seen. As a result of this increase in population, Western Australia graduated from colony to autonomous state.

Western Australia joined the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, but this was not a universally popular move. In a referendum held in 1933, almost 70 per cent voted in favour of seceding from the federation. Such feelings were only mollified with the building of the Trans Australian Railway, which gave Western Australia its first tangible link with the rest of the country.

The next big increase in Western Australia’s population came as a result of post-war immigration. A large number of these immigrants were Poms, but for the first time in the state’s history its new wave of immigrants didn’t look like Robinson Crusoe.

In 1935, the celebrated Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova visited Perth. She stayed at the Esplanade Hotel (since demolished). For the dinner given after her performance, the hotel’s chef, Bert Sachse, created a new dish in her honour. This was a dessert made from whipped egg white, cream, sugar and a variety of fresh fruit, and was named Pavlova in her honour. Pavlova is now served throughout the world wherever anyone has a sickly sweet tooth. Everyone knows who it’s named after, but in a recent cookery book I read they claimed that it was invented in Perth, Scotland.

In 1962, US astronaut John Glenn first orbited the earth, he noticed a single bright light beaming up out of the total darkness of the Western Australian land mass. The citizens of Perth knew they inhabited the loneliest city on earth, and they reckoned that John Glenn might find himself even lonelier out there in orbit. So they decided to turn on every light in the city, just to keep him company. John Glenn was so touched that he christened Perth the ‘City of Lights’.