THE Roundhouse will be festooned with giant yellow stickers this Fremantle Festival, and history buff Les Green isn’t best pleased.
A volunteer heritage guide for 10 years, but speaking with his private citizen hat on, he says his personal view is the stickers on WA’s oldest building are “disrespectful” and could damage the walls.
“It’s a blot on heritage,” he says. “People died here!”
Apart from being completely out of character, the glue used to attach the FIFO-yellow spots to the building are damaging to the ancient building, he says.
But Freo council insists they’re safe following ongoing testing, and says they’re intended “to promote the Fremantle festival and to showcase WA’s oldest public building in a whole new light to a whole new audience”.
A look at a sample 32cm sticker pilfered from the building shows grit does pull away with the glue. It’s only a small amount but it all adds up and Mr Green says the council shouldn’t be accelerating the wear the old place suffers from wind and salt and visitors.
The idea was given the all-clear by the city’s heritage architect Alan Kelsall “to ensure the heritage fabric will not be compromised”.
• Les Green reckons dolling up the Roundhouse—where people were imprisoned and died—with yellow spots is in bad taste and could damage the building.
“[The stickers] will actually be attached to the mortar (which is replaced regularly), not the limestone itself,” community development director Marisa Spaziani says.
“Agneishka never would have let this happen,” another roundhouse guide tutted, referring to Mr Kelsall’s predecessor, Agneishka Kiera.
We asked how many the council planned to stick on and Ms Spaziani replied, “there will be enough polka dots to have an engaging impact and to provide a conversation starter, which it seems to be doing already even before they’re placed!”
The roundhouse was completed back in 1831, its historic round design based on philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” model for a prison meant to be “a new mode of obtaining power over mind” as inmates felt they were always being watched.
“Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened,” Bentham bragged of his design. “The gordian knot of the poor law not cut, but untied, all by a simple idea in architecture.”
As early as 1929 the royal WA historical society recognised its heritage importance with a plaque. It was handed over to the Fremantle city council in 1982 and then opened to the public with the help of the volunteer heritage guides.
The roundhouse was the Swan River Colony’s original gaol (the cells along the rim are unbelievably tiny) and was notorious for its housing of Aboriginal prisoners.
by DAVID BELL