Lost
Summer

Mark Reid has been dropped off at the edge of Perth by his parents so he can hitchhike north and get a job on a crayfish boat. “He looked like some bloody bushman,” recalls his mother Jackie Reid, now a regal 85-year-old full of salty good humour.

“The next time I saw him he was wearing beautiful cream-coloured silk trousers with Italian leather shoes, a tailor-cut buttoned shirt and a navy blue blazer. He was immaculate head to toe.”

The sleek, sophisticated change that came over Mark was the same kind of change that would make over Perth in 1987.

Mark had fallen in with the America’s Cup crowd.

“Alan Bond gave him a job driving one of the tender boats,” says Jackie. “They all got that kind of clothing. It changed his life. He left the crayfishing behind and became a yachtsman.”

In 1983, the 12-metre racing yacht Australia II crossed the finish line off Newport, Rhode Island ahead of US contender Liberty. For the first time, Australia had won the America’s Cup.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s quip that “any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum” summed up the drink-sodden joy of the moment as the nation toasted the victory of West Australian business tycoon Alan Bond, the crew led by skipper John Bertrand – and that top-secret winged keel.

Then, when the hangovers subsided, a sobering realisation crept in.

Australia was to defend the Cup in 1987. This meant hosting the internationally renowned sporting event in Perth and Fremantle – a stubby provincial city and a shabby port far from the glamour of Sydney or the culture of Melbourne.

Thirty years later, at her flat in a leafy suburb of Perth, Jackie Reid opens a photo album of the 1987 races gifted to her late husband Stan, a high-profile doctor who was also the commodore of the Royal Perth Yacht Club that summer.

She laughs as she thumbs through memories frozen in tableaus of white-hot WA sunlight and cruel slabs of Indian Ocean water. “All of a sudden our pissant little yacht club and our pissant little town had to put on this great big race with all the world watching. It was a hell of a time!”

For 132 years, the New York Yacht Club had held the America’s Cup in Newport, Rhode Island where America’s super-wealthy built palatial mansions in Great Gatsby style.

Perth’s biggest claim to fame was that it had turned on its lights for the astronaut John Glenn as he orbited Earth in 1962, allowing him to see a single bright spot in a sea of darkness.

“There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time to lose,” says Graham Edwards, a member of WA’s Burke Labor government before and during the America’s Cup defence. “There were only four years between challenges and there was an immense amount of work to do.

“There was a feeling that this was an opportunity for Perth to grasp the future – to reshape Perth as a city of excitement and a city of the future, and a hospitality and tourist hub.

Over four turbocharged years, the government set about transforming the centres of Perth and Fremantle, pushing through major construction projects in a bid to modernise the state and attract the international jet set. Skyscrapers shot up in the CBD, the luxury hotel Observation City was plonked on Scarborough’s beachfront, concrete light towers went up at the WACA and a modern sports arena, the Superdrome, was constructed.

John Longley was a sail grinder on Australia II in 1983 and became a key figure in Alan Bond’s bid to win the right to defend the Cup in his home port of Fremantle – ground zero for big spending.

“We were putting on a show so we spent a huge amount of money creating facilities for all these other boats coming from the international scene. In Newport they did nothing for us whereas here we built all of this!”

Sitting in the sun at the specially built Royal Perth Yacht Club annex, Longley, now a business consultant and sailing administrator, gazes at the harbour and city, still proud of the times he helped shape.

“There was a battle for Fremantle that raged through the ’70s and by ’83 was largely won, and people said, ‘OK, we won’t knock them down (heritage buildings) but what are you going to do with them?’

“What the America’s Cup did was give a raison d’être to those buildings and so suddenly you had $450 million of private and public money spent on this little town. Fremantle was given, over two to three years, this boost that would normally take 30 or 40 years to get.”

The port’s historic waterfront and west end was revitalised and a dedicated marine complex was tailor-made for the event. On the northern beaches, a boat harbour got the green light at Hillarys.

By 1987, Perth and Fremantle were as ready as they could be.

American satirist P.J O’Rourke, who flew to Australia for the Cup, was not impressed by the scene out west: “In Western Australia they don’t even know how to make that vital piece of sailing-boat equipment, the gin and tonic.”

While Perth is rife with upmarket cocktail bars and top-shelf haute cuisine restaurants, in 1987 it was more of a beer and counter meal kind of place.

“We had all of these millionaires and billionaires and celebrities coming in from all over,” Jackie Reid laughs. “They all came in with their own bottoms too – power yachts they got sailed in with some poor bloke behind the wheel while they jet in and get to take it out.”

The biggest boat on the water was Kalamoun, owned by the Aga Khan, a Persian royal with a billion-dollar fortune and a stake in the Italian 12-metre Azzura competing in the Louis Vuitton Cup – a series of races held off Fremantle to determine which international boat would challenge Australia for the America’s Cup.

One racing day, the Aga Khan invited Jackie and Stan Reid for a jaunt on the seas.

“He was nothing like what I expected, so friendly and funny and he even served all the food and drinks himself. He didn’t even wear shoes!”

Jackie remembers that WA’s rough charm eventually rubbed off on everyone.

“The America’s Cup Ball was held at the old wool sheds in Fremantle and I had nothing to wear. All these film stars and politicians and millionaires and there I was, handbag of the commodore, nothing but rags to choose from!”

On the night, Jackie waltzed in looking a million dollars in a brilliant white gown with silver sequins, rubbing shoulders with guests such as Prince Albert of Monaco and pop star Jimmy Buffett.

“Then, to my horror, we were all waiting for the Governor to arrive and as he came down the steps with his wife I saw she was wearing the same thing. It was absolute torture.

“We were the last couples to be seated – and had a laugh. She asked me where I got it and I told her my daughter sewed it. She said I could have saved her a bit of money!”

In a room decorated in “candlelit bushland fantasy” theme with a fake gum-tree forest and waterfalls scented with eucalyptus, guests dined on buffet dishes straight out of a Country Women’s Association cookbook: roast fillet of beef with avocado and peaches, choko and capsicum salad, saddle of venison with chicken mousse and meringue swans with strawberries and cream.

“Protocol is that the top table eats first but Stan whispers to me, ‘You can’t expect the Governor to take a plate up to the buffet!’ So I said, ‘Sod that, that’s what we were expected to do.’”

With music from Glenn Shorrock and the Eddys shaking the dancefloor, and Moet, Margaret River wines and Swan Export beer flowing, the ball was a huge success, says Reid.

During yachtsman John Longley’s quest to win the Cup over in the United States, he compares the discipline and extreme focus to going to war. At home in Fremantle, he could finally let his hair down.

“It’s 30 years ago – God, it seems like yesterday,” he says. “What’s amazing is that people who were here, they still say, ‘Boy, oh boy, Fremantle, that was it, that was the greatest yachting regatta ever.

“It was a very intense time,” Jackie recalls. “There were perks, though. Holden gave us a sponsor’s car with air-conditioning – such a luxury! And we had to drive to and fro organising everything. Stan was always in meetings and running about.”

Having won the Cup, Bond’s team should have been the natural choice to defend it, yet Longley says they insisted on opening up the Cup defence to rival Australian syndicates, confident that they could beat anyone.

Four Australian syndicates competed to become the Cup’s defender. In a stunning upset, the Taskforce ’87 Syndicate, led by Perth department store mogul Kevin Parry, emerged victorious with its Kookaburra series of yachts. Alan Bond was out, for the first time in 13 years, and so was Longley.

“I think of that time with great regret, says Longley. “I think we were arrogant.

“We’d been to Newport since 1974, ’77, ’80 and ’83, we’d raced against lots of international boats and we’d always won. Could we beat an Australian boat? Of course we could. If we’d been smarter we could have certainly defended it.”

If the results of the competition to select the defender were surprising, the winner of the international trials to select the challenger was a bit more expected.

Two-time Cup winner Dennis Conner – the man Australia II bested at Newport – lived up to his sobriquet Mr America’s Cup to beat all comers in his powerful 12-metre Stars and Stripes.

Conner didn’t just want to win the Cup back – he wanted revenge.

Conner was presented with the silverware at the Royal Perth Yacht Club, and jetted it straight back home to a ticker tape parade through New York City organised by Donald Trump, who even deigned to write the foreword to the champion sailor’s book The Art of Winning.

But for the Australians, the party was over.

Graham Edwards’ face twists into two emotions when he recalls the aftermath – pride at what was achieved and sadness at what could have been. “It was a great time. Big crowds, incredible enthusiasm.

The high water mark of the America’s Cup defence remains all around Perth from the glass spikes of skyscrapers such as 108 St Georges Terrace to number plates that still read WA: Home of the America’s Cup.

The Observation City hotel has changed hands a few times, and is now known as the Rendezvous, still the only true high-rise tower on WA’s coast.

But the tide has rolled back, and rolled back hard for many of 1987’s big players.

That year’s Black Monday stockmarket crash dashed many of the ambitions the Cup ignited. Brian Burke resigned as WA’s premier in 1988 beset by corporate scandals that led to his jailing for two years.

Kevin Parry lost the Cup and lost control of his own company. And, by 1991, Alan Bond’s business empire had collapsed, taking with it personal debts of nearly $2 billion as Australia entered “the recession we had to have”.

John Longley throws his hands in the air at the thought of what could have happened if he’d gotten the chance to defend the Cup.

“We would have then defended it a couple of times because we would have made all the mistakes and we’d have fallen over the line and gone, ‘Whoops! We’re not doing that anymore’.”

For years WA was haunted by the dreams of riches and the spotlight of the America’s Cup. It wasn’t until 2009 that good times started rolling west again – this time spurred by a mining boom that flooded the state with money, investment and ambition. It was as if the spirit of that lost summer of 1987 had rolled back in, too, only with bigger waves that would also, inevitably, break.

Jackie Reid shuts her photo album and laughs about the amazing events she had an insider’s view of as the commodore’s “handbag” 30 years ago.

“From the moment it was won in ’83, it was an exciting time. The hype just built and built and we all got swept up. Shame we lost, but that’s life. Mark (her son) went on in yachting for many years after that. He ended up working for America’s Cup challenges overseas. It was the making of him. So it can’t be all that bad.”