The western frontier

Australia's Wild West is in the midst of its gold rush, with mining incomes soaring at a rate to match the skyscrapers of Perth's shiny new CBD. But if new money is supplanting Western Australia's old pioneer spirit, then at least the state's venerable cricket ground has its eyes focused firmly on the past rather than the future.

There are few grounds in the world more evocative than the WACA and none in Australia in quite such a terminal state of disrepair. However, that is not to say it is a bad place to watch a cricket match. Quite the contrary. The ground, by Australian standards, is small and intimate (although in WACA-speak intimate might as well be shorthand for intimidatory). The stands are hotch-potch carbuncles, stacked rather than built, while the grass banks on both sides of the wicket exist as testimony to the ground's lack of pulling power rather than any deference to aesthetics.

But the name itself - "The Whacker" - is reason enough to make the pilgrimage and immerse yourself in the legend of a ground that retains its aura in spite of the speed with which the world around it is being transformed. Take its five sublimely brutalist floodlight towers, each cast from concrete as thick as the walls of a fallout shelter. It is these, rather than the tired old pitch, which has lost much of the pelota ball-bounce of its heyday, that stand as the true totems of the WACA's past glories.

The ground was dredged from a swamp - part of which has formed, since 1929, the neighbourhood's other major sports venue, Gloucester Park, aka "The Trots" - and it may soon be subsumed by the boom going on around it. But it is, nonetheless, magnificent in its fading might, as splintered and storied as Turner's Fighting Temeraire, and as relatively short-lived in its pomp too.

Prior to the advent of air travel, Perth was off limits as a viable touring destination, too remote even for the rest of Australia to embrace as its own, and the WACA had to wait until 1970-71 to host its first Test. Now it exists more as an artefact than a viable venue. The decaying Lillee-Marsh stand, dominated by a vast, dank bar, where a Long Room might take precedence elsewhere, epitomises the working-class values on which Australia the nation was founded.

But Perth is changing fast, as is Western Australia as a whole, and the reasons to visit extend far beyond the fascination of the WACA's crumbly history. There's the weather for starters. None of Australia's Test-hosting venues can guarantee more hours of sunshine than Perth, and the knock-on effects can be experienced throughout the region, from the city's 19 beaches to the boutique wineries whose reputations have burgeoned in the past few decades, particularly around the Margaret River, a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the south.

My personal experiences of Perth have centred, out of necessity, in the city's twilight zone - the thin strip of hotels and bars running west to east along the parallel thoroughfares of Hay Street and St George's Terrace. This is a rat run that takes you from the city centre to the WACA's media entrance, via countless briefings in the Hyatt Regency, England's regular team hotel, and past the lugubrious duck pond in Queens Gardens. Eventually, depending on deadlines and peer enthusiasm, that same direction of travel can take you all the way across the causeway to the shiny glass pyramid of the Bursewood Casino.

But it's not all two-way traffic. Perth is an increasingly sprawling conurbation but it remains a small enough place for cricket and cricketers to take centre stage whenever a big match is in town. This was proven to me on each of my two Ashes visits when, in the aftermath of Australia's customary WACA victories, I encountered two key protagonists in improbable circumstances.

The first meeting came in December 2006, on the very night that Australia regained the Ashes en route to their 5-0 whitewash. Quite how Brett Lee had escaped the dressing-room celebrations to make it to a lowly backpackers' dive on Aberdeen Street is anyone's guess. But there he was, in his cups, guesting on the house band's bass guitar during a rendition of "Brown-Eyed Girl", his blurry vision focused as intently as possible on the neck of his instrument as he strummed away with determined rhythm.

Four years later, almost to the day, another gig - albeit on a somewhat grander scale - provided the after-party as Australia hauled themselves level in the 2010-11 series. The venue this time was the Subiaco Oval, Perth's most cavernous stadium, and the band in question was none other than U2, still a few years shy of becoming corporate viral sell-outs. They had breezed into town for their 360 tour, and who should I encounter in the ticket queue but Michael Hussey, fresh from the century that had just drawn Australia level in the 2010-11 Ashes, and visibly bewildered to have earned his team a fighting chance in the series.

It's possible, having put down roots for a week to ten days at a time, to forget that Perth is the most dislocated city on the planet, such is the buzz of industry and income that keeps its wheels grinding. But even once you've sampled the delights of the craft breweries in nearby Fremantle or poked your nose into the mysteries of the Pinnacles Desert or Rottnest Island, nothing underlines its splendid isolation quite like the journey eastwards into the Australian interior. The scorched, pockmarked void of the Nullarbor Plain, that vast expanse of wasteland that keeps Western and South Australia as removed from one another as North and South Korea, is an awe-inspiring reminder of Perth's pinprick status. Whether viewed from an aircraft window or on the ground by train or car, it puts the city's very existence into stark perspective. No wonder it's a venue where touring teams have feared to tread.