Loving Place Fremantle is a curious arts project that takes on the community challenge of knowing and sharing Walyalup-Fremantle as a loving place. A special place that for many is now at the cross roads of uncertainty and despair as it chooses to expand and develop its waterfronts and surrounding landscapes.
Welcome back to Walyalup-Freo, Josée. Nice to come home to close friends after travelling the world, hey?! Where special places, and clear waters, become timely moments in an itinerary of life revisited. Writ large & loving for you.
Grant Revell, 2024
The inner harbour at The Port is a bit like a theatre’s stage with different actors coming and going, in and out of the spotlight. Dolphins, dinghies, container ships - and sometimes enormous cruise liners full of excited passengers en route to their next seaside destination.
I like to wander through the Port to watch the unscripted performances unfold.
This is a tale of the 1960s when as a keen but naive 19-year-old reporter I rented a cottage behind the butcher’s shop in North Street, Swanbourne. The cottage smelled of lamb fat and was known to my hilarious friends as The House of Meat.
Each day I’d walk from the House of Meat to the Grant Street station and catch the train to Fremantle. Then I would stroll through the town, my eyes peeled for crime, vice and newsworthy tragic accidents, which I urgently wanted to occur while my notebook and I were in the vicinity.
Every Wednesday morning I’d call in at Somes’ newsagency in High Street to buy Time magazine, the journalists’ Bible back then. I felt serious and important buying Time and keeping up with international news events. And from the vantage point of Fremantle, Western Australia, there seemed to be a fair bit happening. JFK had a lot on his plate, what with Krushchev and Cuba.
That done, I’d head for the West Australian’s branch office on the corner of Adelaide and Queen streets where I worked as a cadet reporter.
The reporting staff of two senior and two junior reporters worked in the back room behind the classified advertisements’ counter and the ad salesman’s and typists’ tea room, and facing the afternoon sun.
The chief reporter was Don Scott, his deputy was Tim Knowles, and two cadet reporters alternated on day and night shifts. The Daily News also had a journalist there, the Fremantle city councillor, Bruce Lee, not to be confused with the Asian movie star.
On day shift, my first job was to cut out that morning’s Fremantle stories from the paper, and glue them into a scrapbook as evidence of our valued work the previous day.
Then to the first assignment: covering the Fremantle Police Court, where the wrongdoings on offer ranged over the widest possible list of human offences — from wilful murder to the wilful possession of undersized crayfish.
If the seriousness of a charge was to be judged by the time it took for evidence to be presented — often three or four hours — and which involved complicated gauges and legal arguments over crustacean carapaces, it was clear that the State’s legal system judged the most heinous crime to be the possession of smallish crayfish.
Inevitably, the morning’s other charges included the appearance of bruised and hung-over seamen, in court to answer for the previous night’s assaults with fists, glasses or marlin-spikes, on each other or the prostitutes in the Cleopatra Hotel.
Interestingly, legal firms often used the Fremantle Police Court as a training ground for their shyest young solicitors before they were launched into the tougher court milieu of Perth.
There was one young lawyer whose stutter, blushes and self-conscious ineptitude finally tried the patience of Magistrate A. G. Smith, whose patience had been tested enough already by having to fill in for a magisterial absence on the Fremantle bench.
“Get a move on, please,” the magistrate sighed, rolling his eyes. “We haven’t got all day.”
To which the solicitor’s client, charged with attempted murder for trying to garrotte his wife with a fishing line of 80-pound breaking-strain, interrupted proceedings with a shout.
In heavily accented English, he yelled, “The boy is doing his best. He’s a good boy. He’s saying good things about me that didn’t even happen. Go easy on him, Your Majesty.”
For lunch in the Fremantle office I’d buy chips from Cicerello’s and eat them on the harbour sea-wall, or a pie and vanilla slice from Culleys’ Tearooms. Then at 3pm every afternoon I would gather, decipher and retype the daily shipping list of all arrivals and departures from the port.
This meant prising the original list from the reluctant sausage fingers of the Fremantle harbourmaster, whose phobia – the waterfront equivalent of worrying whether he’d left the gas on – was checking and rechecking the sailing times in case 400 passengers missed the Fairstar to England.
According to newspaper mythology, this mishap had actually occurred, after an earlier, hapless Fremantle cadet, whom we’ll call Ron Blunder, retyped the shipping list with a PM instead of an AM time for the departure of the Fairstar.
Incidentally, Ron would enter local journalistic mythology a second time for wrongly killing off someone involved in an accident in High Street between a semi-trailer and a motor scooter.
Ron asked Fremantle traffic police about the participants’ injuries. Sergeant Dave Frame, a man of dry humour, told him, “Yeah, the motor cyclist was lucky: only slight abrasions. Pity about the truck driver though.”
“What happened to the truck driver?” asked diligent Ron.
“In an accident between a semi and a Lambretta? said the sarcastic sergeant. “The truck driver died, of course,”
Without checking, Ron wrote the story. Next morning the truck driver was amazed to read about his improbable death on page one. So was his old mother, who suffered a heart attack. Immediately afterwards, Ron
Blunder left newspapers for public relations.
On slow summer afternoons in the Fremantle office, in the two hours when our shifts crossed and the low western sun made our shared desk uninhabitable, we cadets played office cricket with a ruler for a bat and a ball made of Scotch tape and copy paper.
But it wasn’t all shipping lists and office cricket in this roughhouse town, especially during night shift. A young reporter on the police, ambulance and fire-brigade round walked the windy night-time streets and wharves with caution.
If I was on night shift I would’ve spent the morning in the surf at Cottesloe, intermittently gazing out to sea and hoping that a crayboat was sinking or, better still, an ocean liner, or that someone was being taken by a shark, and (what luck!) I was on the spot to get the scoop.
At night in Fremantle, my notebook and I were alert as always for crime, vice and newsworthy tragic accidents. But all I usually saw were the rowdy offspring of Italian and Greek fishermen, Croatian vegetable growers and Irish-Australian wharfies circling the port in their V8s looking for action.
Sometimes on quiet nights I rode around in the front of the St John’s ambulance with the paramedic Brian Williams, the thinnest man I’d ever known. The route was always the same, via the pubs, and the last stop was the Railway Hotel in North Fremantle.
The Railway Hotel deserved a heritage listing for being the only pub to offer drinkers a bargain deal: a haircut, a bet on the races, a meat pie, and a beer served by a barmaid in underwear, all for 5.
On night shift, I ate in a café run by the Pittorino fishing family near the office. The son of the family skippered a crayboat and his wife ran the café. She was a beautiful red-headed woman, whose hospitality and appearance I shyly admired and thought about as I returned by the midnight train to the House of Meat.
By day, Fremantle’s maritime aspect and leached limestone buildings gave the town a serene and historic character: a cohesive, independent, strangely old-fashioned place, with power divided between the watersiders and the city councillors, between labour and capital, between Catholics and Masons.
And, importantly, between the South Fremantle and East Fremantle football clubs. And when the Bulldogs played Old Easts it was a genuine boots-and-all derby.
The names John Todd and John Gerovich on one side, Ray Sorell and the two Johnsons, Bob and Percy, on the other, were etched on my brain. But none more so than the name Wilson Onions. As a small boy I’d even barracked for East Fremantle because of his curious name. When it cropped up in the paper, always for the wrong reasons, it was like the name of a comic-strip character, both tough and funny. And matched by his relentlessly tough and comic deeds on the football field.
Apart from his name, what endeared Wilson Onions to me was his comically wayward reputation. He wasn’t particularly big, about 12 stone, and five foot ten, but not many games went by when he didn’t flatten at least one player and face the tribunal.
What made Wilson Onions so engaging was that he was always sincerely unaware of having done anything wrong. Once, charged with knocking over his own brother, he answered, “Well, he didn’t have on an East Fremantle jumper, did he?”
There was no sly, behind-the-play sniping from Wilson. It was just that he couldn’t help hitting the opposition.
In the club history, Old Easts 1948–1975, the opening photo is of Wilson Onions glaring at the camera. The caption, headed BAD BOY, mimics a radio broadcast of the time: “East Fremantle has just had to call on 19th man Wilson Onions, and he’ll take over on the wing on the far side of the ground...Hello! He’s knocked down three West Perth players on his way across!”
I came to regard Fremantle as the de facto capital of Western Australia. Amid its many controversies it clung by its fingernails to historic architecture, a mix of cultures, and a raffish history, which progress and redevelopment hadn’t succeeded in snuffing out.
Despite gentrification, the shrinking of its pubs and clubs, and the bleak daytime desert of some of its streets, it still retained much of its original hard-to-define quality. It was easy to understand why so many musicians and artists had been inspired by its sandy charm and salty shabbiness.
Fremantle was one of two places in the State (Rottnest being the other), which seemed to arouse especially strong feelings. Scorned by certain Western suburbanites for whom crossing the Fremantle bridge was to plunge into a den of iniquity, I quickly saw that it was treasured with a fierce affection by its devotees.
As a young reporter I soon learned that the port appreciated a juicy controversy. At any given time a political, environmental, business, legal, union or maritime dispute seemed to be raging.
The most internationally famous event had been the rescue, on Easter Monday, 1876, of six Irish political prisoners, Fenians, from “the living tomb” of Fremantle gaol. The rescuer was one Captain Anthony, the Quaker sea captain of the Catalpa, who had no connection with the Irish cause. He put his crew, his family, his financiers and his own life in danger to sail from New Bedford in America to Fremantle in Western Australia on a trip disguised as a whale hunt.
Why? Because, as he said, “It was the right thing to do.”
On the given day, the six escapees broke away from their work gangs, met up with a trap and horses and were taken to Rockingham beach, where they were rowed out to the Catalpa, waiting in international waters.
It was a race for survival as the police and the steamship Georgette gave chase. To make matters worse a storm blew up and it took twenty-eight hours for the prisoners, the rowers and Captain Anthony to make it safely to the Catalpa and hoist the American flag. They gambled that if the boat was in international waters, the British could not fire on her. A cannon attack would be a declaration of war.
The Catalpa crew didn’t know if this strategy would work. It did. The British held fire, but the Catalpa only just escaped. A sudden lack of wind was causing the ship to drift back into Australian waters. After years of organisation, and many lives on the line, the success of this escape effort all came down to a puff of wind.
Some of the most notable Fremantle crimes and scandals were recorded in the Mirror, the outrageous Perth weekly of the 1920s to 1950s. Ron Davidson wrote of them in his book on the bawdy Mirror days, High Jinks at the Hot Pool (Fremantle Press, 1994).
Often featured was a Fremantle identity named Ernest “Shiner” Ryan, alias Paddy Morgan, Henry Jeffrey, Alex Clemov and Harry Dale. Shiner, no stranger to Long Bay, Parramatta and Adelaide gaols as well as Fremantle Prison, was a locksmith so gifted he could pick any lock with his hands behind his back.
As an Adelaide prisoner, Shiner once crafted a set of keys, and walked out of gaol. While a Fremantle prisoner he produced excellent counterfeit two-shilling coins which were distributed around Fremantle’s pubs by a warder accomplice. Shiner was also the only person who could make the prison’s clock keep time.
During his occasional stints of freedom he was a well-liked Fremantle fellow, his lock-picking talents called on by residents who’d accidentally locked themselves out. He would also take poor children for rides on the old thoroughbreds in South Fremantle’s racing stables, his interest in racehorses extending to his providing Perth horse trainers with jiggers: battery-loaded whips that he made in a Fremantle radio repair shop.
Aged 64, in an act of considerable courage, Shiner married the major Sydney crime figure Kate Leigh, whose sly-grog joints, brothels and cocaine distribution had earned her the titles Queen of Surry Hills and the Snow Queen.
The wedding service, conducted by Canon Edward Collick, the Fremantle Prison chaplain, was celebrated at St John’s, to ringing cheers from the crowd gathered outside the church.
Sadly, like many celebrity marriages, theirs was of short duration — though shorter than most. After the wedding the couple headed off to their Sydney honeymoon – by taxi. Shiner stayed married for only four hours and 280 kilometres. At Merredin he did a runner, escaped through a public toilet window, stole a car and returned to Fremantle.
When he died, aged 71, in 1957, the Mayor of Fremantle, Sir Frederick Samson, was a pallbearer at his funeral. Kate Leigh provided Shiner’s epitaph: “His brain was in his fingertips.”
Another Fremantle “scandal” aroused local indignation during the days of encouraging British immigration. The Mirror was against the idea of “Ten Pound Poms”. The paper’s best British migrant horror story suggested that Fremantle was getting less than the prime specimens of migrants.
When a man with an artificial leg was spotted hobbling down a gangplank in Fremantle. The Mirror headlined POMMIES LANDING WITH WOODEN LEGS AND OTHER DISABLEMENTS.
The paper complained bitterly that the dreaded Eastern States were getting the cream of the crop. Sydney and Melbourne were getting all the two-legged migrants. Fremantle was dipping out.
Where would it all end if the Immigration Department was failing to count the number of legs on its West Australian immigrants?
Decades after my stint in the Fremantle office, and my daily hopeful hunt for crime, vice and newsworthy tragic accidents, I was renting an old two-story house in Fothergill Street, swimming my daily laps in Fremantle pool, and researching a novel.
In the Fothergill Street house I’d sit on the upstairs veranda with the girl who later became my wife, and drink wine, and our view was of the same 19th century skyline of pine trees and limestone you could see in historic photographs of the port.
We could see over the old stone prison walls to the harbour and beyond, and the lines of waiting tankers and container ships in Gage Roads brought the scene abruptly up to date.
Then the wider Indian Ocean stretched to the horizon and to Rottnest Island, and the romantic panorama of Fremantle, the town of many stories that been my inspiration as a writer, became timeless again.
Robert Drewe grew up on the West Australian coast and now lives in North Fremantle. His novels, short stories and memoirs have won national and international prizes and been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre around the world.
He lives right on the beach;
With an old shoreline that runs through his living room.
And as he sits on the ancient carpet reading,
with the energy in the ebb & flow of the ocean,
he touches the warp & weft of its weaving,
and feels the tension that excites a knowing of more.
The red dingo dog, Nyungar call ‘Dwert’, stares straight at him,
keeping an eye out for stray custodians that care about the lost;
or those that care to listen.
Finally, a past-present-future dissolve.
Ode to Leo Marx - The Machine in the Freo Garden.
I think about this question a lot more often as I get older. “What makes Fremantle special.” And “why do I live here…”
There are other beaches and other towns and other communities. And the physical ties that hold you to a place can sometimes seem to weaken as your life becomes more… sort of… insular. I think that’s the word I’m looking for?
I think this simple photograph is one of the best ways I can come up with to give an accurate answer.
I see this view every morning of the year and I never get tired of it. Sometimes it’s dark and raining, sometimes freezing cold and there’s a nor-wester blowing some bad weather in towards us - and sometimes it’s perfect. But I’m always excited to get down to the water’s edge and experience whatever the ocean’s got to throw at me. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s not all that much fun. From July until October it can get pretty clogged up with seaweed, the water temperature gets down to its minimum of around fourteen degrees and the winter swell can knock you off your feet. But not once have I walked back up that pathway regretting having done it.
It’s weird how such a simple thing like throwing your body into the ocean everyday can grow to have so much impact on your life - physically and mentally. And sure, there are plenty of other places to live where that could still be part of my life, but I feel like my body has somehow absorbed some of the wet saltiness of this place and everywhere else feels a bit like an alien environment. I’ve got to know the feel and direction of the waves in every season, and I can tell where I am from the look of the ripples in the sand below me when I’m swimming.
And there’s the beach community that I’ve got to know over the years. The solitary girl who walks for miles and never really acknowledges anyone, ‘Geoff with a G’ with his singular gait who sometimes stops for a quick chat, and I can see the Troy’s in the distance up on the soft sand carefully going through their gentle exercise routine. There’s Graeme in the water on his way down to Port Beach - I know it’s him by the way his right arm punches into the water. And I know Dale and Alison are out there somewhere ‘cos I recognise their gear on the beach. And there’s that bloke that I’ve seen for about 25 years walking up to the dog beach and back most days. Last year he started saying hi and recently we stopped to talk about a seal he’d seen the day before. I guess some people take a while to warm up…
It all starts and finishes with that view down the path.
This place Manjaree (Bathers Bay) is significant to Walyalup’s history with a collection of multiple events over the last several hundred years including trade, arrivals, reshaping of place, dispositions and displacement. A place rich in cultural and colonial collisions and encounters. It continues to fascinate and enchant on so many levels.
You thought that it never could happen.
To all the people who you became.
Your body lost in legend.
To be so very tame.
Leonard Cohen
Fremantle is a groovy adaptable place that allows you and your trusty friends to remember and share all the other people and characters we have been.
Groovy in a solid timeless kind of way, where the musical beat remains in the background to the colourful pleasures of relaxed clothing, a crazy hat, jingly-jangly jewellery, loving dog and a splash of ridiculous conversation and genuine love for one another.
Is this place for real?!
Wrapped up in dress-ups, big hugs, kisses and lots of laughter. Where hearty crafty woollen jumpers come out to play just for a few days in our easy winter. Where the smell of jarrah burning chimneys are now hard to find. One of the few places in the world where respectful travellers say “thank you driver” as they disembark from their public bus.
Freo is pretty relaxed and forgiving on a good day.
You find its subdued quirky culture in the ‘burbs & up & down its main streets. As it matures with all its carcerial hardships, and disappointing national football team, we find new joints popping up in strange and wonderful places. A good sign for a happening evolving city. Out there in Hilton, Monument and Hammy Hill and Beacy. Where the range of good things and good times shrink and swell, burp and fart their own crazy way to prosperity or failure. Our other selves make it possibly dynamic.
How long did it take for Sealanes fishery to realise it could sell the best fish n chips alongside a slippery side window? How long can a Main Street be, as the distant Roma restaurant reinvigorates itself to fancy pants Vin Populi. Or a university hospitality training school into a vinyl playing Greek cafe with a back lane that takes you far away and hopefully elsewhere. Pay back Notre Dame, perhaps. And a experimental culture club that now comes from The Reuben Room.
Where the western anchor point Chalkys Cafe somehow hangs in there, in the shadows of that nasty, nasty Roundhouse. Not far from Mr Patroni’s magical laboratory of all things architecture. Where late in the night, low down in the basement you can find him staring proudly at a newly constructed design model spot lit on his front desk. How suitably indulgent, perhaps.
How long can it be?
Where Gino’s Cafe still remains the knuckle of all joints. Where a coffee or a spaghetti marinara can last for days, almost. Where people and automobile watching is at a premium. Where those older waiters are long gone to the transient one year visa holders. With their long faces drawn from elsewhere. Where the basketweave of Laminex is made from real Laminex.
Where we gasp and say — home sweet home — as we wheel our returned luggage back over our salty thresholds.
Where the Capris restaurant remains solid and forever tasty just like Mother would come to expect. Where the pinafore greets you with the warmth of history, an occasional smile and a good healthy story. Where the back dunnies are now world heritage status. Kept clean (unlike at filthy Gino’s). And the lost tin-pressed ceilings almost forgotten, unfortunately. Like the dishwasher who lived for a longtime in the back upstairs sunroom.
Not far from neighbouring Old Papas on the corner. Long gone but for the memories of laden footsteps up those back stairs to the enticing contraband. I would sketch design ideas in the side window under morning light to find their way to the new WA museum.
Try trundling out to the Hilton Bowling Club — the Bowlo — on a Friday night to squeeze in a few frothy jars. Remarkably priced and unbiased, with a music scene treasured by those serious yarning locals. Where rampant mandolin and the double bass are punctuated by harmonic vocals, slick licks and the respected moves and love of the Fisher family. While the lads in the courtyard enjoy some hearty giggles and joyful friendship. Where real bowls and bakelite are never to be seen.
Those lads remind me of old retired sailors sitting on the Cicerello docks ruminating about the big catch, when octopus was first eaten in Fremantle restaurants. And the smells of boiling acacia saplings along Solomon Street would be disguised by the cray pot repairmen. They try to hold their ground, just like that mighty moment when the slippery Endeavour replica prematurely edged its way down the fishing boat slipway, self released from the ship wright’s so-called ‘colonial triggers and daggers’. It just couldn’t wait to leave Fremantle. A poignant irony prevailed over the crowd on that late December afternoon of 1993. Now it is far away in Sydney town playing itself as a ‘museum ship’ to further spell the self conflicting narratives of displacement.
When will we ever learn?
Now that Juicy Beetroot is also gone, where would we be if we lost Mannas on South Terrace? Those hearty salads, fresh smoothies, sparkly faces and expensive organics. Juicy’s 3pm takeaway salad bargains were legendary. How good were their darling dhals?
I grab a rubbery hotdog from the Bulldog’s footy club bar and remind myself of the photo gallery on its walls. History told in athletic black & white. When traditional footy was gutsy footy, and innocent cheers could be heard escaping from the inside of those horrible nearby limestone walls.
I continue along the Terrace past the generous public seats at Greg Leaver’s Ronnie Nights to glimpse at Kate & Abel — a clever pop-up in trying commercial times. Another Kate Hulett project — the Freo photographer of distinct repute and generous doyenne of many things Freo arts and culture. Her ideas and books are special. Not unlike my mainstay at New Editions. Now located at one of Fremantle’s best, sunniest of street corners. I sometimes pop in just for the music?!
And what about Frank Carboni. Mr Meat House. Where the vegans hold their breath on Wray Avenue. His award winning sausages have traveled the world, and his deep love of the family’s Tuart chopping blocks are a well kept secret. Frank’s morsels are bought, sold, traded and consumed right across Fremantle — enticing Princis to move to Bicton. Watch as the chefs across town pick up their daily orders and share a quick joke. Frank is a mighty bloke, and his love of the Carlton Football Club goes way back. As does his footpath sign writing skills. Their sporadic eclecticism is way out there. He was slightly embarrassed to admit that he employed a sign writer recently to provide a new curb-side sign. He’s just been too busy. His obedient staff run around like ants. They all avoid the calculator as we watch our tallies written and confirmed on the white paper sheets. Old school with biro. Fremantle’s very own Contemporary Meat Museum (FCMM).
Just like the vegetable mafia lads from South Freo’s old Foodland store. Alleged and possibly reliable patrons of nearby Ada Rose, some say. As kids, my daughters returning from the dog beach use to play games in that Foodland to find the oldest use by date goods kept on the dusty shelves. They found fun. And seriously old food. Their numeracy skills became acute. We would walk back to Beacy via the hill on Lefroy just near that crazy man Jalikua — the potter opposite the school. His colour spun dishes remain unique, like his motor bike skills, having gifted many special wedding presents across the country. I once spotted one of his treasured electric blue plates in a boarding house in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We swing by the Gas House and watch the Fremantle Biennale crew hard at work dreaming of being site-responsive. Such challenges for Indigenous Fremantle. A place of inclusive Walyalup like no other. Place holders of meaningful place.
It is then I find myself at Mojos in North Freo. A ‘stoned-crow’ of a place now world famous for non-stop live music (and the biggest bar fridge). Here, one late night coming home from university I heard a troupe of trombone all the way from Cuba.
Arghh. Our glorious Fremantle. Don’t you just love it?!
…a place of all the other people and characters we have been (or want to be).
Gloria Turnip
11/2024
All In One Hard Fought Day - Fremantle Trades Hall - 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours play.
It is not surprising that so many significant locations throughout the history of civilisation have been located in the littoral zone where a river or waterway meets the ocean.
Like the diverse marine life that populate the waters of these nutrient-rich environments, it is here that ranging populations of fauna and flora congregate to feed and breed.
Walyalup Fremantle located at the mouth of the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) takes its place as one of these significant locations. This is a place of purpose… recorded over millennia in detail and fragments through songlines and language.
As residents of Fremantle for 27 years, my family and I have been nurtured and transformed by this special place. It is with a feeling of both fulfilment and humility that I imagine our story may sit as another grain of sand along these vital shores.
