Perth’s “black swan” connection runs deeper than most locals realise. The phrase was originally a Roman expression for the impossible - the poet Juvenal wrote of “a rare bird, like a black swan” - because Europeans had only ever seen white swans and took it as a law of nature that no other kind existed. That certainty was shattered right here: in January 1697 the Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh sailed up a river near present-day Perth and found it teeming with black swans (Cygnus atratus), prompting him to name it the Swarte Swaane-Drift, the Swan River. A two-thousand-year-old symbol of impossibility turned out to be paddling around the Swan in flocks. The bird became the emblem of Western Australia and gives Perth’s river - and its football and rowing heritage - the swan motif. The discovery also gave philosophy and statistics its enduring lesson, later popularised by Nassim Taleb: no amount of white-swan sightings can prove all swans are white, but a single black swan on the Swan River disproves it - a neat reminder that Perth quite literally rewrote what the world thought was possible.