Perth, imagined
For West Australians aged 60 or older, it's pure nostalgia, evoking 1940s - 60s Perth and its easygoing lifestyle — the trams and trolley buses, the rickety old trains, the friendly corner stores, Guy Fawkes nights, and summers spent swimming at Crawley Baths during the day and prawning in the Swan River shallows at night.
While the author never names the suburb of his fictional old house at Number One Cloud Street, it's clearly West Leederville. He describes the route to it from the city and names West Leederville station. It was "the wrong side of the tracks" in the mid-20th century; these days, it's much sought after — close to the city, Swan River, the University of WA, Subiaco Oval and the cafe strips of Subiaco, and to the east, Leederville.
West Leederville became a suburb separate from Leederville when in 1966 the two were dissected by the Mitchell Freeway, which connects the city to the northern suburbs. The freeway transformed Perth, but Cloudstreet still resonates in its streets.
In November 2007, West Leederville gained its first big grocery retailer. Before, its residents had to travel to Leederville or beyond for the big weekly shop. In the novel, Lester Lamb suggests opening a store in the Lamb's half of Number One Cloud Street. "I've cottoned on to some-thin," he tells his wife Oriel. "There's no corner shop this side of the railway line." Oriel replies: "I know, I've carried the groceries back from Subi."
West Leederville's new supermarket is on busy Cambridge Street, which heads west from the city, and which in the Cloud-street era hummed to the sound of trolley buses. When they first ran, in 1933, the service from the city to West Leederville station (then called Leederville) was the first permanent trolley-bus route in Australia, and it was also the nation's last: it shut down in August 1969.
"West Leederville used to be a dump — quite literally a dump!" says local (Town of Cambridge) councillor David Berry. "Lake Monger, where Lester Lamb's escapee grocer's carthorse is found grazing, was the rubbish dump for the Perth City Council. Now, Lake Monger is a beautiful recreational area and the second-largest tourist attraction in Perth after Kings Park."
Subiaco Oval, "the football ground" in Cloudstreet, also had a less-than-salubrious start in life. The Perth icon was built on a part of sandy, weedy Mueller Park and opened in 1896 for the Subiaco Football Club. It's now a floodlit modern stadium with a total capacity of 43,500, leased and operated by the West Australian Football Commission.
Cloud Street never really existed, but it could have been one of any number of West Leederville streets — Tate, St Leonards, Northwood, Kimberley — that lead to Railway Parade and the railway line.
Blackburn, E. (2009). Perth, imagined. Australian Geographic, (95), 46.