Fremantle, founded in 1829, tells the story of Western Australia through its hotels. From the colony’s first four inns to the bustling port town of 1890, The Inns and Outs of Fremantle traces how pubs shaped its streets, culture, and community. To know these hotels is to know Fremantle itself.

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Welcome to this edition of Newsgram! 

Back in April I told you about a town on the edge of the Indian Ocean where you can still walk the same streets your great-great-grandparents once did. A place where colonial jails still stand, where the old inns shaped politics and society, and where a town hall from 1887 still anchors the community.

Today we are going to have another look at the town of  Fremantle in Western Australia through the eyes of author and historian Alan Graham. He’s spent more than forty years documenting the details of this remarkable port city. In part one of our conversation we examined the early days — how Fremantle was founded, who shaped its growth, and why its hotels tell us more about survival than simple recreation.

To set the stage: Fremantle wasn’t founded until 1829, decades after Sydney and other settlements in the east. Unlike them, it was meant to be a “free” colony — no convict labor, just settlers trying to build a life on their own. That sounded noble, but in practice, it was brutally hard.

Alan Graham – Well, they were very tough. The colony was formed in a bit of a rush, really. The eastern states had been formed from 1788 on the east coast, and by then I’m talking about cities like Sydney. But Fremantle and Perth, Western Australia, weren’t formed until 1829. That’s when my book starts. And where was Sydney at the help with convicts being transported from the UK to the east states? We’re going to be a free sector, so all the people coming out to Western Australia were going to be looking after themselves. No help with convicts or anything like that. And probably the colony got off to a bit of a bad start. No real planning went into it. So the 1830s and 1840s, and going into the 1850s, were very, very hard times for these new settlers to Western Australia.

He says many of the new settlers were expecting opportunity instead of the barren, unforgiving landscape that they found. So they immediately left. 

Alan Graham – And often people turned around when they arrived here and thinking, hang on, we’re not going to stay here. This is not what we thought it was going to be like. They thought it was going to be some type of utopia.So the 30s and 1830s, 1840s, and part of the 1850s would probably be the hardest times in Western Australia’s history.

Alan’s first book, The Inns and Outs of Fremantle, covers 1829 to 1856. It’s framed by two governors who, in different ways, defined the colony’s drinking culture and politics.

Alan Graham – Well, the two governors I talk about mostly are the gentleman called Governor Stirling. He was the very first governor. He had been here to WA in Western Australia in 1827.And he’s the person who wrote the report to say that Western Australia could be a good place for a colony. But he probably embellished the report a bit and made it to be grander than what it turned out to be. When the colony was started, he then became the governor for the next eight years. But really a lot of people thought, gee, Stirling, you kind of led us a little bit along here with what you kind of promoted. 

Stirling painted Western Australia as a land of plenty, but it was more mirage than reality. By the 1850s, Governor Kennedy faced a different challenge.

Alan Graham – Western Australia is taking convicts. So we took 9,700 male convicts from the UK between the years 1850 to 1868. Now, when Governor Kennedy arrived here in 1855, there’s a real big problem with drinking in the colony. So he thinks, gee, we’ve got too many hotels. So he set out to de-license a number of those hotels. So the start and finish of my book starts with Governor Stirling, and it finishes with Governor Kennedy, and it traces the drinking history between those years, 1829 to 1856.

You can de-license all the hotels in town, and people will still find a way to drink — ask Al Capone. From Stirling’s exaggerations to Kennedy’s crackdown, Fremantle’s first decades were shaped as much by leadership as by the settlers themselves. In his new book, Part Two of the trilogy, Alan takes us from the 1850s to the 1890s.

Alan Graham – Well, okay, the hotel numbers have been reduced now because of Governor Kennedy’s impetus, and really then there’s a moratorium on hotel numbers. So, for instance, Fremantle had nine hotels, and it’s now dropped back to five hotels in 1857. And it stays that way until 1872 when there’s a change to the licensing laws, and over time Fremantle starts to build and increase its hotel numbers again. People took the opportunity of a change in the licensing laws to think, well, hang on, this is a good opportunity to get into the hotel trade. So you start to see the hotel numbers increasing incrementally. But what’s just as important with my book is I call it the ins and outs, so the emphasis is on the ins there, I double NS, and the outs.

Fremantle wasn’t just about hotels. Streets, inns, and public buildings like the Town Hall  were giving the town a recognizable shape.

Alan Graham – For instance, our town hall was built in 1887. So that’s a big part of the storyline of the new book. So now I’ve got part one and part two of the trilogy published now.

But while hotels and town halls tell us about the people and politics, the sea was Fremantle’s engine. Ships brought goods, passengers, and ideas, shaping the town’s character as much as any building or law.

Alan Graham – Well, we’re a port, so we’re pretty much a seafarer town. We still didn’t have our own Fremantle harbour. We have a very prominent international harbour now, but that wasn’t open until 1897. We had a couple of jetties, which weren’t that really popular with seafarers because they were very exposed to some fairly rough ocean off our coast here in WA. So there’s a lot of negative stories from seafarers talking about, OK, there may be a jetty, but it’s still a precarious one to unload at. But nonetheless, we either had the jetty where we had men working on the jetty unloading, so we’re a port, so a lot of people working on the jetties and servicing the boats. Often ships unloaded at sea, so they had what they called lighter men, where their cargoes would be put onto sort of barges and then brought onto the shore as well. So we’re pretty much a sort of maritime town.

Precarious or not, the port kept Fremantle alive — fueling trade, agriculture, and wool exports. The old jail still stands too, and if you’re visiting, it’s worth a wander. In fact, while we’re on the subject of the jail, you need to hear about the famous escape of the “Fremantle Six.”

Allen Graham – Here is a hotel in Fremantle that’s now called the Orient Hotel. But in the 1870s, that was a hotel called the Emerald Isle. And it was run by a fellow called Maloney. So he’s got Irish connections. But one of the big folklore stories of Western Australia’s history is the escape of the Fenians. Now, I don’t know whether that’s a story that’s come up to your audience before, but we had a lot of transported convicts in the 1850s. A lot of them were people from Ireland, but there was a kind of plot that was hatched. Some of these Irish Fenians were actually smuggled out. They escaped from Fremantle jail on an American waiver called the Catalpa. Now, it was an Irish American that was actually placed himself in Fremantle at this hotel, the Emerald Isle, and was able to steal the six Fenians out of Western Australia. So it was a big international event in world history at that time. And those Fenians escaped on this American waiver called the Catalpa and made their way back to Boston.    

Smithsonian Magazine calls the Catalpa rescue “an audacious prison break as elaborate and preposterous as any Ocean’s Eleven script,” so it’s definitely worth looking into.

As Alan says, sometimes history isn’t just something you read about — it’s something you can walk. Fremantle’s streets, its inns, and its jetties carry the stories of those who lived and worked here long before us.

Alan Graham – As I said, I’ve got this website, Fremantle History Walking Tour. I’ve had good reviews on that 

Whether you read his books or stroll the streets with a tour, Alan Graham makes it easy to step back in time and experience Fremantle through its inns, ports, pubs, and hidden corners. With Fremantle’s 200th anniversary coming up in 2029, maybe it’s the perfect excuse to add Perth to your travel bucket list.

Alan Graham – Yeah, we’re celebrating our 200th anniversary in 2029. So we’re five years short of that at the moment. So my books are kind of meant to come out to be a little bit of a matching that sort of big anniversary date in 2029.

And yep — books, plural. It’s a trilogy. The first two are already out: Part One dives into the early settlers, hardships, and convicts. Part Two explores Fremantle’s growth, laws, and architecture. And Part Three? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The Inns and Outs of Fremantle 1829–1929: A Social History of Fremantle and its Hotels by Allen Graham. Available now wherever you like to buy books. 

And that will do it for this edition of Newsgram from Webtalkradio.com

The post Inn’s and Outs of Fremantle, Part 2 appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.