One favourite entertainment was the establishment of ‘White City’ at the foot of William Street, a kind of down-at-heel Luna Park run by the Ugly Men’s Association, whose profits went to Trades Hall. By day White City was a fairground with all of the regular sideshow rides and treats for children, including a giant slide, while by night the precinct became home to the ‘adult’ entertainments of boxing, games of chance and a dancefloor where the young might fraternise. This was the period of the notorious ‘pass laws’ requirement for indigenous people, following the 1905 Act and the official government policy of assimilation of the indigenous population, as administered by A.O. Neville. White City, as described by Miriwoong man Stephen Kinnane in his book Shadow Lines, was one of the few places where white and black might escape the surveillance of the authorities and mingle. Meanwhile, with the establishment and continued growth and influence of the Women’s Service Guild and the Western Australian National Council of Women, under the guidance of two remarkable women; Australia’s first female member of parliament, Edith Cowan, and first wave feminist Bessie Rischbieth, major achievements such as the employment of women police and justices of peace, the setting up of free kindergartens and teacher training, the improvement of girl’s educational opportunities and the  establishment of a government maternity hospital were achieved. Such was the effectiveness and reputation of the two local organisations that according to writer Dianne Davidson, ‘In 1928 a visiting Victorian feminist hailed tiny, isolated Perth as “the Mecca of the Women’s Movement in Australia” and the source of “streams of inspiration and knowledge to the rest of the continent.”’

War broke out in Western Europe and due to the high rates of enlistment in Western Australia its effects were deeply felt in Perth. The statistics alone are telling, where Western Australia voted for conscription and filled its expected quota of volunteers three times over. As a result, fully one quarter of the troops at Gallipoli were Western Australian, and the tragic consequence of this was that of the 30,000 volunteers some 53.7% of these men became casualties of war, which was nearly half of the eligible male population of the state. The memorialising landscape of Kings Park reflects some of this tragedy, in particular the Avenues of Honour that follow the kilometres of roads throughout the park where plaques naming the dead soldiers are placed at the base of trees planted, many in unison in 1919 at the anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

More generally, both because of, and in spite of the terrible damage done in the war, the government mantra of populate of perish resulted in enticements for Britons to emigrate, in particular to the wheat-belt where modern farming techniques and the application of rock phosphate fertiliser meant that marginal soils were now considered productive. The city continued to grow, and with the coming of the motorcar a novel method was employed to enable transport within the city. ‘Jarrah plank roads’, modelled on train tracks and largely built by public subscription and made from trees felled and milled by locals, spread across the city and made road transport possible in Perth’s sandy soils. New suburbs such as Osborne Park were established, in what was formerly a dairy farm area, as well as new subdivisions nearer the coast in North Beach and Scarborough. The town planning of the period reflected a preference for the ‘garden city’ model, at a time when Perth still maintained a large population of workers who lived in the inner city.