It cost more than ninety million dollars to build.
Does that make it Australia’s most expensive pedestrian bridge?
It may or may not be our longest suspension bridge that carries no cars; certainly, it is more than twice as long as one eastern Australian pretender to the “longest pedestrian bridge” crown.
(I have long since ceased to be surprised that “perhaps we should check to see what has been built or achieved in places west of the Great Dividing Range” is a notion that never occurs to far too many Australians who live east of “The Divide”)
Statistics aside, Perth’s Matagarup Bridge is a singular structure; imagine a pair of swans, in flight…
The Matagarup Bridge enables one to walk over the Swan River, from East Perth to the Burswood Peninsula; most people who do so are sports-lovers, en route to/from Perth Stadium.
It is a bridge of remarkably various appearance, depending on one’s vantage point, the time and type of day or night, and whatever kind of natural or artificial light shines upon it.
Click here for image gallery.
Click this for statistics, construction history and explanation of the name.
My photo looks up to the tops of the bridge’s main arches; a good distance below them are the deck and the river – both tree-screened, from my vantage point.
I took it at 3.51 pm on 02 July 2022, from the East Perth foreshore – an easy twenty minute walk from Perth’s GPO.
A further, equally easy, more scenic, twenty minute walk could have taken me over the bridge, then through parkland, to Perth Stadium.
The glorious day was not atypical; a “normal” Perth winter is much wetter than a “normal” Melbourne one, but Perth’s winters are much sunnier and warmer than Melbourne’s.