LOOKING through the windows of The Wray Hotel, Ian Mathersul and his beloved movie star niece gazed out at the old Beacon Theatre as he recounts stories of a past young life.
Suddenly he stops short, noticing the iconic art deco building standing naked and bare, with her sign, her name, her title nowhere to be seen.
Trapped in time, absent and empty against a grey winter sky, South Fremantle’s historic landmark, now painted a soft pale green, was once a white- and red- striped movie theatre — a glamourous night out beneath the stars with the opportunity and the promise of a local romance.
In August 1937, the Beacon opened with lines of people wrapping around the block.
• A faded outline of where the Beacon’s sign was chipped away hints at its glorious past.
Musical numbers on black and white screens starring Jane Powell in Small Town Girl and Fred Astaire in Swing Time, alongside comedies featuring Judith Barrett and William Hill, the theatre quickly became a South Fremantle hot spot.
However, a shift occurred in 1959 when television was introduced into Western Australia.
Promising the same experience of the pictures but from the comfort of home, cinema attendance saw a drastic decline and resulted in many venues closing their doors, including the Beacon.
Since dropping the curtain for the final time in 1961, the theatre has housed many different lives, moulding and conforming to society’s demands and needs; gutted from the inside-out, painted, manicured and groomed.
Transforming from a cinema to a Stammer’s grocery store, a Video Ezy, a chemist and a medical centre… currently the upstairs of the building remains cocooned to emerge into something new.
Now all that remains left of the Beacon’s sign, despite her heritage listing, is the cracked divots of carved-out letters, a shadow of what once was the shiny crown of the building.
• Ian Mathersul’s first job was at the Beacon Theatre when it was in the guise of Stammer’s grocers.
Back at The Wray, Ian tells his niece, Mandy, about his first job when the Theatre was in the shape of Stammer’s.
Where white projection screens and rows of red velvet seats once stood, shelves of cans and flour and benches of fresh produce took centre stage.
Leaving school at age 14, in 1962, Ian saw a local advert in search of a store boy.
With all the confidence a young teen could muster, he called Stammers up and managed to convince them to give him the job.
Two checkout chick girlfriends and two years of unloading fruit and veg later, Ian’s master mariner father JE Mathersul – whose name and history are etched in Fremantle’s Welcome Walls, strode into the supermarket and offered him the chance to broaden his horizons.
“Your pop came in and asked me to go to the UK with him,” Ian recalls to Mandy..
Whilst his father visited family, Ian found himself in Cardiff working on Barry Island at a fun fare selling tickets to the seasonal tourists and adrenaline enthusiasts.
The fare grounds, crowded with the bodies of sunburnt holidayers, was a place of peak entertainment during the very few but warm sunny weeks in Wales.
A year later, when Ian’s feet landed on Australian soil again, he tumbled into the wool industry.
Shearing sheep in the sweltering heat of Western Australia’s outback at 17, Ian began to move up the ranks quickly.
Sometime in the ‘60s, a hailstorm swept over Fremantle, falling from the sky and shattering like glass, clumps of ice frozen along the streets.
Ian was working PJ Morris’ woolstore along Mouat Street. He remembers a day of filtering through the bins where the wool had clumped and frozen together.
Attending technical college from 1968 to 1969, Ian scored gold by earning top marks in wool classing.
He became skilled in the craft of blending wool to match the correct specifications of length and colour, identifying the flaws and the faults – buyers couldn’t get a better deal.
Joining the Australian Wool Testing Authority in 1974, Ian worked as a quality assurance controller and three years later was in the lab working on quality control systems and promoting objective wool measurement.
• Iconic Hollywood duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers helped turn the Beacon into a social mecca for Freo folks during cinema’s Golden Age.
After 37 years years with the authority, Ian left the wool world but behind him lived on the title of his legacy: the “Wizard of Oz”.
Commemorating Jasmine, Ian’s younger sister who passed away in April earlier this year, his family had chosen to gather at The Wray. “Live, live, live. Love, love, love,” was what she used to always say.
Breaking bread, the family ate dinner together and looked back in time to the memories both distant and close.
Memories that like the Beacon Theatre sign, were gone and lost in time but still embedded somewhere deep within in our architecture.
by ISLA TOMLINSON