Perth Voice Interactive

“WITH a looming Bicentenary and a Fremantle council disinterested in Fremantle’s history, what is the future for the state’s oldest public building – the Round House?” asks Fremantle Society president and Friend of the Round House, John Dowson.

Let us develop this conversation with a review of a new history of the Round House as Fremantle’s first gaol in two books by Steve Errington: The Round House 1831-1856, the early years of Western Australia’s oldest building – and how it survived, and its companion volume: Locked up in Fremantle 1829-1856, Prisoners and Patients on the Marquis of Anglesea and in the Round House, published in 2023 by Hesperian Press.

The subject of the books is the ancient landmark on Arthur Head at the end of High Street, Fremantle, in its role as the first Fremantle gaol from 1831 until 1856, and the people who spent time there. 

The material is a rare social history for an historic place. 

It explains how it was used – as gaol, lock-up, hospital, asylum, and quarters, and now as museum and tourist attraction. 

The author, Steve Errington, has experience in researching and publishing WA history as a sports history writer, and editor of the Royal Western Australian History Society Journal Early Days. 

He has long-term connections with the RWAHS and the National Trust (WA). For him, the subject place is personal: he has been a volunteer guide at the Round House starting in 2014.

Largely from a thousand handwritten official documents in the State Records Office, Errington has found accounts of some 2400 named individuals housed there between 1831 and 1856.

They were men, women and children, sailors, colonial settlers and indigenous people, convict ticket-of-leavers and pensioner guards and their wives.

He has followed up the stories of those who kept them locked up and the gaolers’ families who lived there with them. 

Some of the stories are surprising: people who escaped if only for a while, people who returned many times, and people who found romance (spoiler alert p 52). 

The detective work of following up individuals like these must have been exhausting, but in these cases so rewarding. 

Locked up

The documented details of all these individuals have been collected in the companion volume: Locked up in Fremantle. 

This companion volume is organised in alphabetical name order. 

As the author notes – many of the names are not recorded elsewhere, and so this volume becomes an important companion to the Dictionaries of Western Australians by previous authors.

The coverage is guided by the records and even-handed.

The punishments, the deprivations, and the suffering of the various inmates is a palpable part of the human story. 

The role of the place in locking up and holding ‘Aboriginal’ people (some 400 individuals out of the 2400 between 1831 and 1856, and later more of them on their way to Rottnest Island) is acknowledged, as is the undoubted discrimination and reports of truly awful conditions. 

It is important to record all of these facts, to tell these stories so that we can learn from them and produce a better future together, for all of us. 

The Round House book concludes with an account of the demise of the place with the loss of its original use, the threats of demolition for the sake of safety, for views, or by neglect. 

And each time champions for conservation emerged, with historians to the fore. 

In 2022, Errington’s concluding paragraph was: “One hundred years after the first call for tenders to demolish it, Western Australia’s oldest building is in safe hands and volunteer guides stand ready to welcome daily visitors.” 

In 2025 the guides are still ready, but is the place in safe hands? 

There is serious neglect of maintenance to the seaward limestone walls, neglect of interpretation upgrades, and a Fremantle council considering giving it all up to the state government.

For conservation architects and planners, the Round House building is valued for its design in a strong geometrical form, construction with local limestone, and position on the high ground at the focal point of the main town street. 

• Continued next week

by INGRID VAN BREMEN