Perth Voice Interactive

FORMER Melville councillor Pam Neesham met up with the Chook this week for a chat about the former Woodside Hospital. 

She talked of her enormously successful family who, despite a raft of successes in many fields of endeavour, are best known for decades of success in AFL, water polo and other sports.

That’s how the wildly successful ‘cousin’ Sam Kerr’s name arose.

She didn’t bat an eye as she ticked off all the top-level Olympic and other representation and wins in her immediate family, and especially daughter Stephanie’s part in the Australian women’s water polo World Cup win in 1995. 

The straight-talking, ferociously independent local pollie from 1989 to 2001, said she’d been following the campaign to save the Woodside hospital site over the past few years.

She said three of her four children with husband David had been born in the maternity hospital, as had about 40 per cent of the ever-growing clans she had married into in the 1950s. 

“But it could have been much more,” she said offering to ask around the Regans, Millers, McManuses, Duggans, Sheas “and all the rest I hope to be talking about early next year” when she gives a talk on the family’s successes at the Melville History Society.

Mrs Neesham added she just couldn’t understand why the development of the site on such a scale was even being proposed in the middle of a residential suburb when Fremantle, no longer a retail centre, was crying out for new purposes as a city centre.

And what could be better than health services.