12:30AM on a stormy Wednesday night. About the right time to be getting home from the Scotto, or sleeping; Readying for that early Thursday uni tute, or shift at the pet food factory. But the Urban Explorer puts all of these to the back of their mind. The mind is everywhere but the books.

After venturing about various North Perth haunts, and a railway museum (it was a busy night, interrupted only by ABC’s The Elegant Gentlemens’s Guide To Knife Fighting), we phoned a friend looking for something more. We’d heard from several people about this amazing place in Perth’s north-eastern suburbs, an abandoned mansion on acreage with a huge shed and empty concrete pool. It is known to be a great place for some photography and, not unlike goldminers heading into the desert, we were pretty excited to try and find this figurative golden nugget in the outskirts of town.

So, yes, 12:30AM.

We drove down a dirt track and found our mark; A large dilapidated brick shed, but then it started bucketing down. We sat in the car, dreaming up ridiculous scenarios, mostly involving our untimely deaths at the hands of whatever creatures lurk these parts. This was only made weirder when the sound of a cat purring emanated from the glove box in front of me. The rain stopped and we walked across a small sandy paddock to the large shed. It’s not a good idea to head here at night, for the first time at least.

As we shone our torches around a hole where a large door must have been our light caught ‘the eyes’. Every person we have spoken to about this place since has remembered three distinct things. These piercing terrifying eyes are one of them. We checked the perimeter (remember, we had just told each other how we were going to die here) and then ventured about. A burnt-out car sat in a corner, which looked like something off a punk album cover, all graffiti-d up and looking dangerous.

At this point I’ll add that basically every square inch of every paintable thing is COVERED in graffiti; ranging from tags through to amazing art pieces. We explored the shed area, took some snaps and then ventured out to find this mansion.

We had no idea where to look and decided walking back to the main(ish) road would be the best way to find it, and sure enough about 25m from the shed we shone our torch through the trees and could make out a white structure. ‘This is it’ we though, as we walked semi-terrified all excited towards the destination. As soon as we could see the building proper, our visions of crack heads and the like grew ten-fold. It wasn’t hard to imagine seeing some pretty fucked up people here, hopefully it was empty.

As we walked up, we ventured left to an elevated ‘grassy (bushy)-knoll’ from which a view of the empty concrete pool and surrounds was possible. This view really wet the appetite thinking about what else could be inside. So much is going on. Crack portraits to the right, destroyed 2nd floor in front of us, and about 2 feet of murky black water in the pool to the left. Let’s not go swimming tonight, boys.

“Nuff ‘a that, lets go inside!” – you, the reader. To that I say please stick around for that instalment, there’s just too many good photos of the place for one post. And for HD photos, the upload time would be infuriating to say the least!

-An Ominous