WITH Fremantle council considering a new home for the Fremantle History Centre, this week’s Thinking Allowed comes from the FREMANTLE HISTORY SOCIETY which says a prominent place right in the City’s new admin building could bring the community together to learn more about their heritage and themselves.

THE City of Fremantle should aim to develop a shared sense of identity and civic pride within the community by reinforcing everyone’s sense of belonging.

The Fremantle History Centre could help this come about by promoting opportunities for Fremantle’s diverse communities to become more deeply involved in their shared histories and heritage.

Locating the Fremantle History Centre in a prominent and easily accessible public space on the Walyalup Civic Centre’s ground floor, with user-friendly technology which opens up its unique local history collection, is crucial to achieving this goal.

The History Centre must become a focal point for community engagement and involvement in learning about Fremantle’s diverse history and heritage; it should be a place where every community member, including the underrepresented, will feel welcome and motivated to participate.

History is important.

The History Centre should be located where it is as easy for as many people as possible to learn about and appreciate what we have inherited from the past.

Fremantle’s heritage provides tangible links between the past and present, is part of the fabric of our everyday lives and is central to our sense of identity.

Reaching a wider audience raises the community’s awareness of the many ways that places valued as part of Fremantle’s heritage embody the knowledge, beliefs, skills, traditions and investment of successive generations.

This has the potential to connect more people with these places and generate a sense of shared identity and community.

History is often dismissed as being about the past and having little relevance to the present, other than perhaps as an attractive backdrop to people’s lives.

The new Fremantle History Centre, if designed as a focal point for the community, could challenge these perceptions by demonstrating that history can be engaging, thought-provoking and relevant, allowing people to view Fremantle’s history in new ways that have a positive impact on their perceptions and feelings about the city.

Past & Present 

Fremantle’s development was the outcome of evolution and change as successive generations adapted their inherited surroundings to suit a changing world and support the regeneration needed to remain a thriving centre of trade.

These changes sometimes transformed the city and explain why the layers of Fremantle’s history are often described in terms of its periods of development and regeneration.

Fremantle’s heritage buildings and their settings retain evidence of its historic success as a prosperous port-city and serves as a reminder that part of the city’s success was its attractive, compact, relatively densely populated and walkable urban centre.

It provided diverse facilities, local services and places to work, which people could access by foot or public transport for most day-to-day needs.

In many ways that’s now recognised as sustainable design.

People still find these defining characteristics attractive, not only as reminders of the past, but because they fulfil expectations of what a successful urban centre should be.

Cities such as Fremantle are more likely to be successful when they retain and promote the distinctive characteristics of their different places, giving equal attention to the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. 

It requires Fremantle’s growth to be managed in ways that are informed by its history.

While Fremantle must understand the challenges from competing centres, it should also appreciate its advantages and resist the temptation to mindlessly mimic them and lose the very character that made it uniquely attractive.

It should build on its inherited strengths to offer something different: a lively, walkable city centre with real character and a mix of attractive urban qualities not found in anonymous town centres.

That means deepening our understanding of the inherent value of Fremantle’s diverse and multi-layered character and using that knowledge to inform change.

Enduring relevance

In many parts of Fremantle there are strong links between the past and the present.

Its heritage is central to the city’s distinctiveness, and it remains relevant because of the ways it is linked to the city’s social, cultural, environmental and economic wellbeing.

Achieving the interdependent benefits linked to this vision depends on a broad-based consensus and a long-term commitment to it, not only from the state government and the City of Fremantle but also from the people who know and understand the area intimately; building owners, businesses and institutions, and the people who live and work here.

Tension between conservation and other public policies usually arises from a perceived need to endanger heritage values to achieve other important outcomes.

 Such tensions are best reconciled by pursuing them in mutually supportive ways through informed dialogue, mutual understanding and respect.

Stakeholders need to appreciate the value of Fremantle’s multi-layered character and use that knowledge to inform change collaboratively. 

Knowledge is a prerequisite for successfully managing change.

From knowledge flows understanding and from understanding flows informed decision-making and intelligent actions.

It is here that the Fremantle History Centre has a vital role to play in helping bring communities together by highlighting our historic surroundings in ways that explain and celebrate the many diverse influences that created the city’s distinctive character.