A TOUR guide, historian and industrial relations manager walks into a Freo pub.
There’s actually not a joke brewing there, but there is a humorous note to Fremantle History Walking Tour operator Allen Graham’s recent book launch at the Orient Hotel – it took him 40 years to write the definitive history of Freo’s watering holes.
“When I was a much younger man (and single at that) I planned to write a coffee table book on Fremantle and its hotels, but once I had started researching them it became a consuming interest and their history deserved more than a coffee table treatment,” Graham explained.
And so the idea of writing a book came about, before he struck another problem.
“Over time it stretched out, and then I realised I had more material than I could use.”
So the former president of the Fremantle History Society (who does hold a degree in industrial relations from UWA) decided he’d have to turn it into a trilogy, with the first instalment covering 1829 – 1856 launched last month.
• Tour guide and author Allen Graham and his new book – 40 years in the making.
Social history
Inns and Outs of Fremantle: A Social History of Fremantle and its hotels from 1829 – 1929 is more than just a look at the buildings and occupants themselves.
“It’s through the lenses of hotels, but really it’s tracing the evolution of the city,” Graham said.
“It’s not highbrow, but if you know Fremantle history you have to rely on Place of Consequence and Hitchcock, but that’s getting a little stale.”
Joseph Hitchcock’s The History of Fremantle: The Front Gate of Australia was published in 1929 just three months before his death, while A Place of Consequence by Bob Reece and Rob Pascoe came out in 1983 – around the time Graham started pondering his coffee table history.
Inns and Outs reveals that some things never change; the Swan River Colony’s administrators were troubled by the drunkenness in the fledgling town’s streets almost from the moment they stepped ashore.
Things got so bad that governor James Stirling banned the sale of alcohol between settlers and just months after arriving in 1829 and before year’s end had appointed constables and magistrates to bring the situation under control.
Constables
That led to applications from four locals, all of which were granted; Robert Thomson for the Stirling Arms on the corner of High and Packenham Streets, William Rolfe Steele for the South Sea Hall Public House on the corner of High and Henry, William Dixon for the George IV on the corner of High and Cliff, and an unnamed hotel for Robert Collins on Mouat Street.
Graham says the city embraced the hotel culture, and the book’s finish in 1856 heralds the end of Fremantle’s golden age of hotels. By that stage there were nine operating, though a new and autocratic governor, Arthur Kennedy, had just announced measures to rein them in. The threat to their favourite watering holes was perhaps one of the issues fuelling local discontent, which spilled out at a public protest in August that year.
Inns and Outs of Fremantle
Hard cover: $65, softcover: $55
To get a copy contact Allen Graham 0412 933 360.
by STEVE GRANT