Why it looks like this

Perth was founded in 1829 as the Swan River Colony, a small grid between Mount Eliza and a wide, lake-like bend of the river. For its first century it stayed remote and modest; gold rushes and then iron-ore wealth built the towers that now overlook the same waterfront.

Isolation shaped everything: Adelaide, the nearest large city, is about 2,100 kilometres away across desert. With flat sandy coastal plain on all sides, the metropolis stretched astonishingly — a ribbon of suburbs more than 100 km long down the Indian Ocean coast, tied together by freeways and the river.