When Alan Bond bought the building from the Commonwealth Bank in 1978, he was granted permission to build his Bond Tower of fifty storeys ‘consequent upon the retention of the Palace Hotel in perpetuity’. However, when Bond invited the R&I Bank, which was owned by the state government at a time when Brian Burke was premier, into a joint venture partnership to complete the tower, it was then decided that ‘in order that the development be economically viable’, the hotel needed to be demolished. The only exceptions were the facade and the foyer area, which now stand beneath the glass canopy of the tower.
Construction ended in 1988 and Bond occupied the top three floors of the high-rise, with the forty-ninth floor given over to a secure art gallery that housed Van Gogh’s Irises. When things turned sour for Bond he sold his half-ownership of the tower back to the people for 108 million dollars and vacated his penthouse, leaving the top three floors of the building empty for nearly a decade. When Saracen Mineral Holdings vacated their lease to this part of the building in 2009, it was discovered that Bond’s fiftieth-floor offices were still in their original condition, so that Bond’s desk, chair and boardroom table were invitingly advertised as part of the new lease.
According to Jenny Gregory, the widespread opposition to the demolition of the Palace Hotel, the kind of redevelopment that was happening all over Australia at the time, needs to be seen in the context of what she describes as Perth’s early awakening to the value of the city’s heritage that went beyond colonial-era buildings such as The Deanery, The Cloisters and the old prison (now housed within the walls of the Western Australian Museum). Gregory believes that before the same kind of opposition to unconsidered development was harnessed in Sydney and Brisbane, Perth residents, under the auspices of the National Trust, were prepared to actively engage in protecting the heritage of their older twentieth-century buildings and river landscapes, though often unsuccessfully.
Public protest regarding heritage in Perth really began with the advocacy of the Royal Western Australia Historical Society and the formation of the National Trust in 1959, partly as a result of the threat to the Pensioner Barracks at the head of St Georges Terrace. This vast three-storey red-brick Tudor edifice was designed by Richard Roach Jewell to deliberately resemble a castle, with twin entrance towers and mock battlements and overt Christian symbology.
In the time of Governor Hampton, the barracks were built by convicts to house those members of the Pensioner Guards sent to guard them. Later, the great engineer C.Y. O’Connor had his offices there, where the Port of Fremantle, the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme and the Mundaring Weir were all designed. It became clear in the 1950s that the automobile-oriented Stephenson-Hepburn Plan for the Metropolitan Region, commissioned to outline Perth’s development into the late twentieth-century, required the construction of the Mitchell Freeway, effectively bisecting the western end of the city; in turn, it became clear that the Barracks were likely to go.
The protest movement to save the Barracks came during the tenure of David Brand, Western Australia’s longest-serving premier. His name is synonymous with the iron-ore boom and the mantra of progress, at a time when Perth’s population jumped forty per cent in a decade. Like many Western Australian premiers, Brand was a moderate conservative who came from humble beginnings, educated to Year 7 level and brought up in the hardscrabble post-Depression years to identify with a core governmental role of attracting investment to the state. Together with his Minister for Industrial Development, Charles Court, another future premier and knight from a humble background (his father was a plumber), Brand established the Kwinana industrial area, sparked by the eighty-million-dollar Anglo-Iranian oil refinery and later the lifting of the federal government’s iron-ore export embargo that had been in operation since 1938. Court and Brand also played a role in the development of the divisive bauxite and wood-chipping industries in the south-west.
Neither the Brand nor the Court governments, which ruled Western Australia almost uninterruptedly through the 1960s and 1970s, were particularly impressed by the counter-cultural change sweeping the world during the period. They sensed that the new-found wealth of the state and the rapid growth in population and employment were under threat from those who questioned unfettered development. There has long been a tradition of public protest in the city centred upon The Esplanade and Forrest Place, with the latter particularly remembered for Vietnam antiwar demonstrations and the literal rubbishing of Gough Whitlam with cans and tomatoes by angry farmers in 1974. There was a major riot during the Depression on St Georges Terrace involving thousands of unemployed protestors, and unionists and workers subsequently rallied on The Esplanade. Trade unionist Paddy Troy famously got around the bureaucratic restrictions limiting protest on The Esplanade by speaking from a boat in Perth Water.
It was in the context of increasing union militancy in the 1970s that Premier Court and his government introduced the notorious Section 54B to the Western Australian Police Act. According to Jenny Gregory, strikes within the Perth metropolitan area escalated from between twenty-five to thirty-three a year in the mid-1960s to 436 a year by 1982. Section 54B ruled that any ‘crowd’ of more than three people that gathered ‘to discuss a matter of public interest must first have the written permission of the Police Commissioner’.
Such draconian measures to limit free speech and the right to protest were unnecessary in the less radicalised Perth of the mid-1960s. In part due to the success of the Brand Government’s economic policies, particularly in a city that lacked a strong industrial or manufacturing base, it’s probable that Perth wasn’t ready for the kind of cultural reform instigated by a charismatic or flamboyant leader in the mould of a Don Dunstan or a Gough Whitlam, and perhaps still isn’t. Which makes the metaphorical black eye that Brand sustained as a result of his plan to force the demolishment of the Barracks all the more remarkable.
In a rather Perth manner, perhaps, and one that reflected the strong links between conservative government and police enforcement throughout the Brand and Court years, in 1966 the police commissioner banned a planned motorised rally in support of the Barracks on the grounds that it would create traffic ‘blockages’ and ‘disturb people in church’. As Jenny Gregory points out, this might have been Australia’s first heritage rally. While the wings of the Barracks were ultimately removed, Brand then immediately referred to the need to pull down the remainder for the sake of ‘the demands of the car’. When members of his own government voted with the opposition to withdraw the demolition order, he was humiliatingly forced to accede.
If the Barracks and the Palace Hotel protests defined the struggle to save ‘Perth’s soul’ in the 1960s and 1970s respectively, it was the fight to stave off the redevelopment of the Old Swan Brewery that defined the generation of the 1980s. This was a far more complex dispute that brought to the fore the corruption of the WA Inc period, the issue of state versus federal responsibility for protecting sites of significant heritage, and, in particular, the newer discourse of Aboriginal land rights. My grandfather Ollie worked as a brewer at Swan for close to forty years, and the Emu Bitter longnecks that my father drank when I was a child – and that I liked to open every night with an Emu Bitter bottle-opener – came from Ollie’s generous brewery allowance.
My mother remembers visiting the brewery as a child with Ollie on Saturday mornings as he did his rounds. She would stare at the huge copper kettles that were two storeys tall, the stirring of the vats with big paddles, the cold area with lagged pipes on the walls (and the instructions never to ‘touch the pipes as you wouldn’t be able to remove your fingers and if pulled your skin would come off’). She followed her father up and down stairs and ladders, to the lofts with the smell of the hops, then over to the malt house across the road where the original stables were, with the wooden kegs all in rows on the ground level, and finally to the bottling plant.
As an indication of the lack of industrialisation in Western Australia at the time, and as a measure of the popularity of bee
r, it’s worth pointing out that in the early 1960s the Swan Brewery was the state’s single largest employer. George Seddon described the Joseph John Talbot Hobbs–designed industrial brewery as ‘a latterday castle-on-the-Rhine’, and generations of Perth children delighted in the lights that flashed across the building’s facade at night.
The Swan Brewery moved its operations first to the Emu Brewery around the corner on Spring Street in 1966 and then to Canning Vale in 1978 (and as of March 2013 to South Australia). The ‘castle-on-the-Rhine’ became an industrial ruin, set beside the increasingly busy Mounts Bay Road that tracks the broad river into the western suburbs. The site had been built upon and added to since 1838 when a steam-driven timber and flour mill operated there. It was subsequently used as a tannery and traveller’s restaurant until Swan Brewery acquired it in 1877.
Friends of mine who managed to gain entry to the abandoned buildings during the 1980s recall the novelty of an industrial ruin in a peaceful riverside setting, but also the spookiness of the pitch-black darkness in some of the rooms, the knowledge that street people lodged there at night and an atmosphere of haunted silence.
The brewery originally drew its freshwater from the spring that emerges at the foot of Mount Eliza. It’s still popular with people who come to fill drinking containers, believing that the water has healing properties. But the site of what is now called Kennedy’s Fountain was originally Gooninup, a campsite and ground of importance that the Whadjuk had used for millennia. For them it is a Nyitting (cold times), or dreaming, place, where the Wagyl, the serpent spirit who created the river, left the waters and ascended from the base of the limestone cliff up onto the area by the Pioneer Women’s Memorial in what is now Kings Park.
Nyungar man Barry McGuire recently described the Kings Park area to me from across the river, at Point Heathcote, which is an early stage in the ‘male ceremonies of coming into the Law’ that includes another stage at the foot of Mount Eliza. Here, young men were housed in a cave of great importance to the Whadjuk people – now bricked over – until they’d learnt ‘how to be within their community’. At Gooninup, stones of significance left by the Wagyl were maintained by the Whadjuk people, and sacred objects used in ceremonies were hidden in different places around the foot of the bluff.
Barry’s father spoke English as a third language, after Nyungar and Italian, and while we stared across Melville Water, Barry sang the stories of the places around Kings Park in language, then translated gently into English. He finished with the story of Yellagonga, who was at his Goodenup campsite (now Spring Street) when his people first heard the European paddles coming up the river, ‘whoosha-whoosha’. Barry told of the women ducking their heads in fear of the Wagyl, and only Yellagonga with the authority to stand on the riverbank and watch the newcomers arrive.
The importance of the Kings Park area is also something native-interpreter Francis Armstrong described in 1836, specifically the status of Gooninup as a ceremonial site and the home of the Wagyl’s eggs. So it makes sense that when the brewery was put on the market in 1978, many Nyungar saw this as an opportunity to have the site returned to its traditional owners. Instead, entrepreneur Yosse Goldberg bought the buildings, which he sold on to the state government a few years later.
Goldberg didn’t profit much from the deal, although he later made millions after Burke and the Minister for Minerals and Energy David Parker set him up to buy the Fremantle Gas and Coke Co and then sell it back to the government. Laurie Connell took his usual cut as a ‘consultant’. During the WA Inc Royal Commission in the early 1990s, it was discovered that as a result of the sale, Brian Burke’s ‘Leadership Fund’ had benefited to the tune of roughly half a million dollars in cash, some of which was kept in a calico bag in Burke’s office.
When the state government revealed its plans for the Old Brewery site in 1986, there was a public outcry at its size and ambition, not to mention renewed Nyungar protest against redevelopment. The area was quickly registered under the state Aboriginal Heritage Act to prevent further work, and a protest camp was set up in the car park opposite the brewery, with large banners spread across the cliff-face of Mount Eliza. Supporters of the project pointed out that the brewery was built partly on reclaimed land and therefore couldn’t affect the Nyitting site, while protestors wanted the land put aside for public use or returned to the Whadjuk people rather than have it fall into private hands.
A land rights protest in the heart of a modern city brought underlying tensions to the surface between so-called radical and moderate Nyungar leaders, between unions who supported the Nyungar and workers who wanted jobs, and between anthropologists who recognised the site’s Indigenous heritage and the pre-Mabo legislation in place at a state and federal level. Although the state government was clearly bent on pushing the development through, the Hawke federal government initially vetoed the project after experts found the site to be deserving of permanent protection under the federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act.
It’s not clear how the declaration of permanent protection under the Act was rescinded after the 1989 ALP state conference in Perth, with prime minister and ex-Perth boy Bob Hawke present, but shortly after the conference this is precisely what happened. Despite years of legal action, protests involving thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens, union bans and mass arrests, the redevelopment ultimately went ahead.
The Old Brewery complex now boasts apartments, a micro-brewery and niche dining options that claim to offer a ‘quintessential West Australian experience’, whatever that means. I was overseas for the entirety of the brewery dispute, but even my fond memories of my beloved grandfather’s stories – the characters who worked beside him over the years, the men lining up for their free middy of beer at every break, the challenges of keeping beer production going in a thirsty state – have been tempered by the stories of friends who protested and in some cases were arrested. There is now a subdued air over that once brightly lit section of the river that so entranced me as a child, and a sense of ambivalence that to me is unfortunately more suggestive of a ‘quintessential West Australian experience’.
The expanded ‘Old Brewery’ still faces the Swan River, connected by a walkway to Kennedy’s Fountain over the streaming traffic of Mounts Bay Road, and the diminished Barracks Arch still remains on the edge of the inner city, on a little cutaway at the head of St Georges Terrace. I suspect that the numerous people who don’t know the Arch’s longer story barely notice that it’s there, but it’s always a reminder to me of my childhood fascination with what I imagined were the remnants of a walled castle. It stands alongside the visual oddity of the 1939 First Church of Christ, Scientist building, which with its Deco lines, air of orphic mysticism and mausoleum solemnity used to remind me of the crypts of kings and queens I had seen in books, making me wonder who was interred there.
A short distance from the Church and the Arch lies London Court, a whole arcade dedicated to the Mock Tudor. My boyish imagination assumed London Court was a remnant of the medieval period, but it was built by mining tycoon Claude de Bernales in 1937. De Bernales was something of a tycoon’s tycoon, even if he started with nothing and ended with little. Credited with keeping the worst effects of the Depression away from Western Australia, and by extension the rest of the country, de Bernales both perfected a technique to extract gold from low-grade ore and managed to convince the federal government to reward the production of gold, whose price was then at record levels, with a substantial bonus. The son of a Basque father, the grandly named Major Manuel Edgar Albo de Bernales, and an American mother, Claude de Bernales studied in Germany before emigrating to Western Australia in 1897, aged twenty-one. With a fiver in his pocket, he started up as a machinery salesman and repairman in the goldfields. He’d cycle from mine to mine with a clean collar and fresh shirt in reserve, slowly buying up leases with his savings. He purchased a couple of foundries and, ahead of his time, also bought badly indebted companies for pea
nuts. He understood, according to historian John Laurence, that these companies ‘had such heavy overdrafts that the Bank of Western Australia could not afford to wipe them off their books’.
‘Immaculate Claude’, charismatic and handsome, introduced a touch of style into both the coarse mining game and staid Perth society, according to Ron Davidson. He certainly makes the modern mining CEO look like a bland corporate functionary, ‘dressed grandly; [in] spats, suede gloves and a blue velvet cloak’. He lived in what is now the Cottesloe Civic Centre, with a sweeping view over the ocean. He was a notorious seducer, with mirrored panels in his bedroom, and was able to attract substantial European investment for his various enterprises. James Mitchell, state premier from 1919 to 1924 and 1930 to 1933, once requested that he not be allowed to remain alone with de Bernales, ‘lest he sign away the state’. Like many flashy entrepreneurial types in Perth’s history, de Bernales over stretched and came dramatically undone; however, unlike most of the city’s other boom-bust merchants, de Bernales is still fondly remembered.
While London Court now seems somewhat cute, I was certainly captivated by the wares in the shops of the closely packed ‘medieval’ alley. Like so many children over the years, I waited expectantly for the hour to chime, so that St George might battle his dragon and the armoured knights might begin their tournament above the clock. I wasn’t aware that the child-friendly scale of London Court, with its statues of Sir Walter Raleigh and Dick Whittington, its mini-replica of Big Ben, and its plaster representations of unicorns and lions and copper ships, was the result of an error. According to Jenny Gregory, the Court was designed in Melbourne for a site ‘that was assumed to be dimensioned in feet, but was actually in links, so the whole building had to be scaled down’. A link is approximately two-thirds of a foot.
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