IT’S A DRIZZLY WEDNESDAY NIGHT and the dining room of Emily Taylor is packed to the rafters with patrons chatting and laughing and dipping into share plates of super-spicy dumplings and massaman curry of beef and twice-cooked sticky pork. The hotspot Fremantle diner is tucked behind the equally cool Warders Hotel, which has revitalised a row of historic limestone cottages built in 1851 to house the warders of the nearby convict-built UNESCO World Heritage-listed Fremantle Prison.
Both the restaurant and the hotel opened in late 2020, in the midst of the first year of the pandemic and seven months after Western Australia closed itself off from the outside world. “We’ll be turning Western Australia into an island within an island – our own country,” Premier Mark McGowan said at the time. It would be 697 days until it would open back up and rejoin the rest of the country.
But the women sitting next to me at dinner catching up on their week and the family a few tables away celebrating a birthday don’t look fatigued by the prolonged isolation. They look happy about snagging an in-demand
