The evening service

THIS "cathedral of trees" is a magnet for film buffs.

Heart of the Nation

IT'S a balmy summer evening in Perth, and a thousand people are sitting among the grand Norfolk Pines of the Somerville Auditorium, watching a story unfold on the big screen before them.

The last breaths of the Fremantle Doctor waft through the trees, carrying their perfume into the night. A canopy of stars lies overhead. Could there be any more magical place to see a film than this?

The venue was the brainchild of William Somerville, who 84 years ago set about creating an open-air auditorium resembling a “cathedral of trees” on the University of Western Australia’s main campus. The trees were planted as saplings, tracing the nave-and-transept footprint of a classic European cathedral. Ramrod-straight Norfolk Pines were chosen to represent the pillars of the nave. It’s a “romantic and reverent” space, says Madeline Bates, program manager for the series of fi lms screened there as part of the Perth International Arts Festival.

Many of the films are foreign or arty – tonight’s fare is a subtitled French biopic of the writer Françoise Sagan – and people generally whet their appetite for the experience (or steel themselves, perhaps) by arriving an hour or two early with a bottle of wine and a picnic, and soaking up the ambience.

Quite what Somerville – a key figure in the local labour movement, and a foundation member of the university’s senate – would have made of such pleasures is anyone’s guess. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, this “pipe-smoking, free-thinking teetotaller” rather disapproved of fun – indeed, of leisure in general.

“He disliked idleness or frivolity,” the entry reads. “His daughter was once instructed to ‘Stop that knitting and read something’.”