On a cold and grey winter morning in 2014, I sat in front of a video camera in an office in England being interviewed for the role of Perth festival artistic director. They asked me why I was interested in moving from London to work in the world’s most remote capital city.

I was attracted to the possibility of being under a vast blue sky, to the light, the landscape, the idea of living on the western edge of our continent, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, connecting with Indigenous culture. Australian storytelling has been dominated by our relationship to the landscape and the natural world. Growing up in Sydney, place names like Broome, Kalgoorlie and Ningaloo loomed large in my imagination; the writing of Tim Winton, the Triffids’ anthem Wide Open Road, Jimmy Chi’s Bran Nue Dae all deeply evoke Western Australia.

Perth is ‘unencumbered by the frictions and factions’ of other big cities, says Wendy Martin. Photograph: Toni Wilkinson

My first meeting in Perth was with Noongar elder, artist and educator Richard Walley. Together with Ernie Dingo, a star of Bran Nue Dae, Richard began the modern-day Welcome to Country ceremony in 1976 that is now a feature of public events across Australia.

Richard and I met in Kings Park, one of the world’s most beautiful inner city parks, rich in Aboriginal history and native biodiversity. Richard sang me into country. He told me stories of the Waugal, the rainbow serpent responsible for the creation of the Swan and Canning rivers. He talked about the Noongar six seasons that better reflects seasonal changes here than the dates on the imported western calendar. He crushed the slender leaves of a Swan River Peppermint tree, known as Wonnil to the Noongar people, releasing the unmistakable scent of the south-west.

My series of festivals began with the 2016 epic Home, where Richard led a cast that included 300 Noongar people and many dozens of Western Australia’s most imaginative artists, musicians and writers. John Butler, Tim Minchin, Shaun Tan and Kim Scott spoke and sang of the light, the bush, the ocean and the suburbs that sprawl across the Swan coastal plain.

Many Perth artists attest to the creative freedom offered by a city unencumbered by the frictions, factions and orthodoxies laid down in the citadels of culture; a city on the “periphery”, with an outward focus. For them, distance breeds adventurous curiosity.

New ideas are supported before being proven like nowhere else ... artists mingle and mix and support each other. Cat Hope, composer

Perth artists have a can-do approach to collaboration and experimentation expressed through the likes of SymbioticA: the world-leading biological arts centre inside the School of Anatomy at the University of WA; and the Blue Room, the independent theatre incubator that has hatched and honed brilliant artists such as Minchin, Matthew Lutton, Eamon Flack and Kate Mulvany.

Then there is Tura New Music, a hotbed for experimental music and sound art whose exponents include acclaimed composer Cat Hope. Cat’s wordless opera Speechless premieres in the 2019 festival. She says Perth gives artists “the opportunity to make your own path, not the expected path made by the generations of artists before you. New ideas are supported before being proven in a way like nowhere else. It’s a city where artists mingle and mix and support each other.”

That same spirit runs through Boorna Waanginy: The Trees Speak, the 2017 festival opening with Kings Park as its canvas. Back this year, this epic show of light, sound and projection led us through the six seasons, Noongar creation stories and a conversation between Indigenous knowledge and western science, ending with a reminder of the fragile beauty of the environment we share. Artists, Noongar storytellers, scientists and thousands of school children worked together to offer audiences ways of dreaming a better future.

This kind of deep collaboration is possible in a city as contained and set apart as Perth and highlights the role that artists can play in interpreting and focusing our attention on the urgent issues we all face.

Closer to the rest of the world’s population than cities in the east, Perth also calls to creative spirits from afar. Iranian-born vocalist Tara Tiba’s liberated voice rang out across the city in 2018 in the outdoor sound art installation Siren Song, and Isha Sharvani, the dancer and daughter of Indian chorographer Daksha Sheth, collaborated with Perth’s Ochre indigenous dance company on the new work Kwongkan (“sand” in Noongar).

Perth is a unique incubator for new and original ideas – and, after four years, it has fed me beyond anything I could have imagined.

• Perth festival 2019 runs from 8 February to 3 March.

• Wendy Martin is the outgoing artistic director of Perth festival