Today Mandurah will celebrate Heritage Day.
Community groups and museum staff and volunteers will put the rich history of the Peel region on show and people will come to wander around the Old Bridge precinct to soak in our roots; to look back on Mandurah how it used to be.
Just a couple of kilometres away, police will continue their investigations into our latest horror; a murder on Day Road.
How did it come to this?
Long gone is the sleepy little fishing village in which many of us grew up.
Even longer gone are the wetlands and camping grounds used by the country’s first people.
And while it’s perfectly normal to yearn for the ‘old days’ and to long for simpler times, facts are facts; Mandurah is not what it used to be.
With alarming crime rates and high unemployment, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater since the property boom brought million-dollar waterfront mansions to our doorstep and major commercial investment to our shores.
Success and popularity are not bad things.
Progress is good.
But is our massive growth over the past couple of decades in some way responsible for the problems we are seeing now?
Mandurah is becoming notorious for its crime.
Is that the price we pay for success?
For while those with the cash and Council approval set about building their empires along our waterways, there were many left behind in the boom.
Now we appear to have a whole generation of disenfranchised residents who, for one reason or another, missed the memo about moving up in the world and bagging that 1000sqm block by the ocean while the time is right.
The truth is, Mandurah is more than frolicking dolphins on the estuary as much as it is more than meth-addled crooks breaking into houses.
It is almost the ultimate dichotomy; the rich are very rich, and the poor are scrambling for benefits to keep their kids fed.
Add drugs and alcohol to the mix and what brews is a perfect storm of disharmony and resentment in a community once known as tight-knit and supportive.
But here we are.
And we all have to get along.
If Heritage Day can teach us anything, it’s that the best communities grow in a spirit of cooperation and inclusion.
Without that we really do end up with a tale of two cities.
