SRO's Damian Sheppard, 01 June 2025

some of these tales are from beyond Perth. I'm cheating a little bit, so apologies in advance for any implications that everywhere in WA is a suburb of Perth, because of course it's not.

it was called, and who was it named after? And I think you know that I don't think we know enough about our own backyard, if I can put it that way.

a careful process to formal name places across way. It's overseen by what's called the Geographic Names Committee, and that was actually established way back in nineteen thirty six as the Advisory Committee on the Nomenclature of Towns after approaches the government from the WA Historical Society, and the chair of that original committee was doctor J. S. Batti, who was also the State Librarian, and by nineteen thirty six, he was also the chancellor of the University WA and

Chairman of the State Archives. Boord so busy chap fascinating history of his own that perhaps we could buil about some other time. But before nineteen thirty six, naming places was what you might kindly call a bit of a free for all. So I was sort of leading to some pretty interesting place names, sometimes not actually, and basically people just made up the names and they ended up being used if they sort of stuck through common usage.

So there's some pretty good examples. And I'm going to cheat a little bit and go outside per first, but we'll come back. So way down near Denmark that's in WA of course, not a per suburb, but there were two places that went by the names of Hell's Hole and another one called Cold and Wet. Now they might have been astutely named, particularly Cold and Where, I guess, but it seems the locals weren't so keen on that name.

So by nineteen twenty three, before there was a geographic names committee, the Denmark Tourist Association decided to rename Hell's Hole to Somerset Hill, which I'm sure would be familiar to quite a lot of our listeners tonight, and there was the place called Cold and Wet was actually on the Denmark railway line, and thats just died right up

until nineteen ten. All the place exist, of course, but the name was still used up to nineteen ten, and it was named It was renamed marty Up for a while, then to Yonger and then finally to Burnham, which people again might be familiar with. Now heading a little bit further north, we near Bunbury, there was a place known for a while as wood Wood, which is one of

my favorites. That was home to a hindermill for quite a while, and apparently it had a reputation for a super tough game of footy, apparently more fighting than gameplay, and some pretty wild Saturday night dancing. Must have been quite a place to visit. And then further north again at mandra as the little old town of the first half of last century transitioned to the big one that

we know today from around the nineteen seventies. It's interesting to see not necessarily the place name, but the local road names as well. That's a whole nother story, of course, but some of the roads there start getting this Italian flavor. So we've got the Baldy Drive and Galileo Loop. Hello if you live on those I guess you could see a connection today with the canal development, evoking a sort

of Venetian feel if you like. So back in Perth proper probably our favorite at the SORI, and some listeners might be familiar with this one. The part of Maylands was actually known for about one hundred years as Pineapple or the Pineapple Estate. The backstory is that apparently one of the earliest that was bought a pineapple to Perth. Don't think it too much of that now, but back then perhaps that was more exotic days before modern quarantine laws,

and they cultivated them in the area. So kind of got this name which stuck for quite a long time.

It's human nature after all, to have different opinions. So turning to connections from the suburbs to Perth City, in nineteen fifty three, there were calls to rename the Causeway as the Willem Debauning Causeway, and that was competing with a call at the same time from the RSL to the Queen's Causeway, along with Riverside Drive as Elizabeth Drive, just ahead of the Queen's visit to Wa in nineteen

sixty four. And it's really interesting to think about than how naming sort of played out more recently with Elizabeth Key of course. And then there's also a statue of William de Blaming near what we still call the causeway on the Burswood Park Herriage Charm. I'm sure people have passed him by. Back then, most people coming to w A were still coming from the UK, so local place names tended to follow from the old country if you

call it that. Safety Bay south of Perth, for example, was set to be renamed or set to be named Liverpool. And there were countless Yorks and Margaret Rivers all over the state for a long time, so they didn't really

have that sort of uniqueness to them. Over time, apparently there were about one hundred Yorks, but there's only one caliberon and so the interesting thing is around the time you get federation, the use of Aboriginal names becomes much more popular, although they are often weren't true to the

actual words and used by original people. They were translations, of course, made by often by surveyors moving through a country and asking local Aboriginal people what they called features in the landscape, maybe a bend in the river, the valley or a hill. A really good example is Cawgolei,

so not imperfectain. But back in eighteen ninety four the Lands Department proposed to call it hanans Fined for obvious reasons, and that Cabina actually overruled that, opting for the name Calgoli, which derives apparently from the optional name for the native silkie pair that car cooler. So early adoption of those names, which have a much more sort of unique flavor to them.

So that's going to be Bayswater. Apologies for the Basy folks. So looking at the police files from about one hundred years ago, so we're going back to the twenties and thirties, there are reports of regular nude bathing in the river. Might be a bitchually a bit at the tub, but you can imagine a time before hot showers than modern bathrooms.

So yeah, imagine you're heading home from work. You've got a hard summer's day work in the local factory or probably even a farm in that part of the world, and there's no air conditioning, so you want to call off and have a bit of a wash. You're going to take a wash in the river. Unfortunately, that was happening right alongside the old pal Mal Promenade in Baisi offending the young couples taking an evening stroll, probably older

couples too, free sort of frightful things to see. There this correspondence from the Basy Road Board to the Commissioner of Police that advises them that they want to nip this evil in the bud. You know, highly offensive stuff. But it wasn't the only problem behavior. There are also reports of children roaming the neighborhood with small rifles and shooting up sanitary pans. So I guess they're talking about the outhouses, which I'm sure was great fun for the kids,

but not so much for the occupants of the outhouses. Well, and that would have been where you've gone if you were living in those houses didn't have them inside of them. So according to the archives, people would also take their rifles, believe it on us, take their rifles up to Kingspark for a spot of shooting. So it's just absolutely well things they had a control, really, it doesn't it, mind you. On the flip side, justice could be pretty harsh back then.

There's this police charge sheet from the Victoria from Victoria Park in nineteen thirty four, and there's a mugshot of this poor young guy there. He looks about fifteen, probably even younger, and with riding a bicycle with no hands, absolutely criminal offense there. So it sort of worked this

both ways. Back then, in the twenties and thirties, the population of places like Daisy was nothing like it is today, and that area was essentially sort of semi rural, so there was no police station there, and so a lot of these reports are coming through sort of making a

case for there to be a police station there. In fact, back then in the twenties and thirties, there was just one police officer assigned to the district and he was equipped with a pushbike that was his equipment, and a police station actually didn't get established there until nineteen fifty five,

a long long time later. So moving down the river a little bit, we get to Nedlands and Crawley, and there were back then in that area there was still only about one hundred and twenty five houses or dwellings in the area, so very sort of scattered through that area. But along the river there were these camps. Apparently by the early twenties they are about eighty camps that have been set up along the river there where the local blokes would come in for a weekend getaway and a

few more than a few drinks. So the police report that these chaps are getting in the words in the book are beastly drunk and going up to the local tea rooms and singing that's been terrible. And apparently they were going about in bare feet, short pants and only

wearing a jersey exclamation mark. By this time there were also trans of course running through the area, and at one stage in the nineteen twenties there's this report of a wild brawl on one of the trams, and that seems to be the trigger then, so in nineteen twenty one, Medlands actually get the police station and the report seemed to sort of quiet down in the archives there. So just looping back for a moment then to place names.

The interesting thing about Nedlands. People might have heard this, but you can trace that back to Colonel John Bruce apparently who acquired land near dal Keith turned the last century and he gave it to his son Edward, who he named who called Ned of course, so you probably guessed that eventually became known as Ned's Land.

So by the time he gets to the early in nineteen hundreds down we conduct the story at Dale Case before the break So heading back there again, there's this artesian board that's set in the area, and it comes to feed into this hot pool there, the Keys Hotpool, so a bit like Baisy this becomes this popular bathing spot, and apparently that was clothing optional for some people. So the local mirror newspaper reports a series of what they

call hijinks, including midnight skinny dips. So this is early in the very early nineteen hundred, so very off for the time. It would be pretty pretty bad now, but this was a time before many people had motor cars, of course, though there were also these lots more There are a lot more stories of ferries traveling up and down the river, and of course there were a lot more sort of ferry stops up and down the river. It's really interesting to see it sort of coming back

into public discussion again. But there's this great postcard in one of the archive files from the Como Jetty in nineteen twenty two, and it shows this elaborate shelter there that looks a bit like the sort of Arc de Triomph or something, but it took us a while to work out what it was. But it's actually just a

shelter for people there. So you get these fairies traveling up and down to these spots and they'd go into the bridges of course, so on the dodgy behavior front, there are reports in the police files of pickpockets around the ferry stops. You know, you get a few more people, so you're going to get the pickpockets there. You can imagine as we get into depression year at years as well, pretty tough time. But even reports of children dumping sacks of wheat or coal dust on ferries as they passed

down the bridges absolutely shocking. But even more worrying reports of people using dynamite for fishing in places like Como the nineteen twenty so I can't I can't imagine that type of fishing was very peaceful and relaxing, well especially for the fishing course, but absolutely astounding they have a fair spare stick of dynamite here and there and go fishing with that. Hard to get your head around.

with sort of water towers and things like that. But often I've thought, what's over the fence there, and you see this unmarked building, if it's like a historical building, and you wonder about the history and how important they are or were back in the day. So we've got this really interesting story about one of those sort of

structures in the archive. So way back in November nineteen oh five, there's this young scientist that travels from Perth from Bremen in Germany to undertake research of international significance in suburban to Bayswater of all places. It is quite quite a mystery. So the backstory to this one is that as the earth rotate, it actually wobbles a little bit, and there's this international program to measure the sort of

degree of the wobble. Back in the late eighteen ninety eighteen nineties and they set up this series of international latitude stations. So they back then they're using nighttime measurements, they're looking at the stars and they're sort of tracking how the Earth is moving there. And so two stations are established in the Southern Hemisphere, one in Argentina and

one in Bayswater and Earth. So the mystery is why Bayswater, given it's well, it's elevated lightly although person you know, pretty flat really, and it's at the right latitude, but we don't quite understand how it came to be with sort of global importance there, So that's a little bit of a mystery. So it's at the corner of Hamilton and Station Street and there's this small observatory that's built there.

So they start these observations back in Berlin and then they're sort of communicating with doctor Hessen in Perth in Bayswater there, and he's working away for three years on doing this. You can just imagine the painstaking sort of effort he would have gone to. And they're sort of doing this sort of hand computation as they go. So perf and based Water are much smaller places than you can imagine how intrigued the locals would have been seeing

that said up. So there's this German guy working away at night in this this sort of little shed. And we've got this one photo that appears in the Western Male on the fourteenth of April nineteen o six, and it just looks like this little weatherboard shed. But they in the photo it's opened up and you can see like a sort of bud light instrument on a plymph

or a pedestal inside. Must have looked very, very curious. Anyway, doctor Hesson actually becomes quite well known in the neighborhood and highly regarded in the scientific community, makes some friends and is in Perth for a while. But then the mystery deepens even greater because the day before his Duke returned to Germany in February nineteen oh nine, he goes off to Lake munger and tries to take his life

with a revolver. Amazingly, he's able he survives the event, although he's in this intense pain I can just imagine, and he managed to communicate with the ground the mayor and comes to his rescue. So he's only twenty seven and he recoups recuperates for several months in Perth, and then sails back to Europe eventually where he continued his work, but sadly, he did die after a short illness at the relatively young age still of forty nine, so he had a few more years there, but did die young.

So it's quite a mysterious story. The reasons for why he was he was there in that particular location, doing it at that location, and then his file up actions quite quite an interesting mystery there. So the one thing we could say is all of that research did sort of count to, you know, building scientific knowledge. So that's that's a that's a nice sort of side to that story. I guess community continues to be important to this day.

scheme through the metropolitan area during the twentieth century. And it's quite bizarre to see these old maps with a huge amount of features in them. They've just the amount of detail is incredible. They've mapped out water features and everything from chuck pens or fowl yards as they're called on the maps. They've got our houses of course, lots of those, minus the poptholes from the local hooligans, pats, tennis courts, fish ponds, aviaries and the earliest swimming pools.

So well before you know that was kind of established as a more popular thing in Perth. And this very mysterious set of underground urinal not quite sure what that is exactly, probably don't really want to think about it. That was a bit odd. But the other feature that we've wandered about is the good old Aussie barbecue and thought, well, you know, the right time. We're probably past the summer,

but it's interesting time to think about it. So my challenge and invitation to listeners is to help us there by visiting this site which we call retro maps. You can easily just google that. Put retro maps in State Records Office. You'll find it and see if you can find barbecue in there, perhaps the Perth first backyard Barbecue. Let us know if you do find it.

south unfortunately, but worth a have having a look. And then from the library collection, going back to the sort of police for I can recommend Dom Pashley's book from the year two thousand called Policing Our State, which includes these sort of fascinating stories of policing from Perth suburbs

in days past. And there's also Dodgy Perth by one of our clients online fascinating and a great laugh mostly at ourselves of course, of course, so we're still unearthing fascinating stories on Perth Path which we'd love to share through our Facebook page and on our web page under stories from the Archives. So that's sro WA dot gov. But are you encourage people to go have a look what.