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Victoria Quay
Fremantle Society blog entries
June, 2022: Victoria Quay - Neglect of Maritime Heritage of a Port City: Neglected Fremantle (3)
In Neglected Fremantle and Neglected Fremantle (2), The Fremantle Society asked you to consider the area near the railway station like Pioneer Park and the old pumping station lying neglected for decades.
Also lying neglected for decades is everything in the top photo here, except for the two architects from the Fremantle Society committee surveying the neglect, two of five architects on our committee.
This is the slipway precinct. The three cranes pictured are all that remain of many that once prowled the wharf. A fourth, outside E shed, was quietly dismantled and sent to the rubbish tip.
None of the cranes nor the submarine have been maintained properly. They sit sorely neglected.
But, recently, the Premier visited Victoria Quay to provide funds to get the submarine fixed. He also provided $7.5 million for the area near A shed, to help Gage Roads Brewery customers shelter and find their way to and from the brewery.
The Fremantle Society have seen the plans and they are appalling - a suburban garden response to a maritime industrial heritage landscape of great significance.
It took 8 years for the Fremantle Society to get Fremantle Ports to do a conservation plan for Victoria Quay and Fremantle Council do not even have a copy.
The second image [not included] shows the year 2000 Waterfront Masterplan, and very little of it has been implemented.
The slipway area next to the maritime museum is an important heritage precinct and the Fremantle Society supports the vision put forward by Professor Geoffrey Shellam's committee some years ago. But, such visions are not on the radar of anyone in charge.
The government's recent vision to turn Victoria Quay into film studios turned out to be a disastrous idea, as predicted by the Fremantle Society after meeting with numerous film experts.
Planning for Victoria Quay continues to be carried out in secret, with very little effort to respect the area's heritage values or to sensitively reanimate links between port and city.
There needs to be more than alcohol and coffee to activate Victoria Quay. The maritime culture must be brought to life. The sheds that line the wharf and follow the curve of the river upstream are rare, important, and undervalued. They should continue to provide the scale for future development in the area. Protecting the authenticity of the water related heritage is key.
While Fremantle Ports has done good work recently interpreting their own history through film, photography, and events, the physical attributes of the Quay need recycling into maritime related attractors, and an immigration museum.
During the overscaled ING proposals of 2007, the opposition to high rise development on the wharf was intense. Will the public rise this time to get good results?
The Fremantle Society has drawn up interesting ideas which will be put out for comment. Two of the contributors are the architects pictured above - Matt Wallwork and Ken Adam.
John Dowson
President
The Fremantle Society
0409 223622
25 February 2022: Film Studios Scrapped—Breaking News – You Are Reading This Here First
Exactly a year ago Mark McGowan and Kate Walsh stood on Victoria Quay breaking news of a $100 million film studio for the area. One year on The Fremantle Society can reveal that the election promise has been canned.
The project that McGowan promised would bring thousands of jobs to Fremantle will not go ahead and is to be scrapped due to massive cost blow outs.
- The site was a ludicrous choice.
- The deal with the Labor Party donors to build the studios was reminiscent of WA Inc.
Fremantle journalist Mark Naglazas wrote three insightful articles last year about problems with the proposal.
Community leaders Simone McGurk, Josh Wilson, and Andrew Sullivan as then acting mayor of Fremantle, bear partial responsibility for the millions of dollars and time wasted due to their blind advocacy.
Fremantle needs grown-ups who understand proper planning based on a good appreciation of existing plans and policies, and of the special nature of Fremantle itself.
The arts and culture need investment in Fremantle, but juvenile hyperventilation on thought bubbles keeps leading us astray.
Fremantle has lost four museums, and even if four new ones were built we would not be back to where we were 15 years ago. Also, we keep losing performance spaces, and while the location of the proposed film studios was wrong, there are plenty of incentives the government could be funding for the film industry in Fremantle to (as Professor Ted Snell said) "draw from and harness Fremantle's spirit."
In terms of major projects, Labor have given Fremantle a raft of shockers:
a) Moving the port, when most Fremantle people want it to stay
b) Demolishing the heritage listed gateway to Fremantle - the wooden traffic bridge, when it could be repurposed as a New York style highline bridge as advocated by the Fremantle Society.
c) Building the horrendous unsightly $100m million truck intersection at High Street and Stirling Highway.
d) Stopping the airport train at Claremont instead of Fremantle, halving the number of trains for Fremantle passengers.
Fremantle deserves a lot better.
John Dowson
President
The Fremantle Society
0409 223 622
3 March 2021: Award Winning Hollywood Director Backs Fremantle Society
26 February 2021: Governments Drunk With Power
New Urban Precinct for Film Industry Needs Sensitive Planning
(The wonderful photograph above by Fred Flood c. 1930 pays homage back then to Fremantle wharf right where, 90 years later, the State Government wants to locate huge boxes for a privatised business of film making. Even in 1930 Fred could see the magic of the second most isolated port in the world, with the lumpers arriving early for work, the railway lines criss-crossing the quays, the O'Connor statue framing the important Immigration Buildings - statue since relocated - and the overhead bridge linking the port to the town and the railway station. If Fred Flood could appreciate this place 90 years ago, why do all the clowns appearing for the photo shoot last week for the film studios on this very location, not have the same appreciation for a site that now has 90 years extra history?)
Why is so much contempt for community shown by our local Council and the State Government? Excluding the community from genuine consultation is resulting in new developments that suit developers but not communities.
Fremantle's King's Square development was foisted on the community by ignoring what the community wanted and by ignoring what Dr Carmen Lawrence calls: "all the reasonable principles of heritage protection and city planning." The consequence is, as she said at the recent Fremantle Society AGM: "No matter what businesses set up there, the new building is and will be a blight on the City of Fremantle for the next 100 years."
Now a massive series of simplistic boxes are set to be plonked on the heritage listed Victoria Quay for film studios, by a State Government drunk with power.
Local MP Simone McGurk headed a secret Victoria Quay committee last year that excluded community experts. It seems she wants to consider heritage at the end of the process instead of at the beginning.
It would be interesting to know if any members of her committee actually read the key documents for the area like the Conservation Plan (which Fremantle Ports has been unable to locate). The Conservation Plan is a key document commissioned by Fremantle Ports after 8 years of lobbying by the Fremantle Society. It identifies what former City Architect Agnieshka Kiera calls: "a State heritage listed significant place for WA."
As Fremantle architect Sasha Ivanovich wrote to the Fremantle Society: "Fremantle CBD together with Victoria Quay, is one of the few, if not the most, valuable civic heritage sites in Australia."
While film studios may be a great idea, the proposal is so large it will create a new urban precinct, one that requires sensitive bulk and scale and design. And, it should not be a privatised land grab without significant public access.
The over-large sheds being proposed wipe out the heritage listed lumpers' cafeteria, built during WW2 on the express orders of Prime Minister John Curtin. They wipe out the scale of the area by being too tall and bulky.
This juicy election sweetener is perhaps supposed to distract voters from Labor's intention to close the port - something else the community weren't consulted on.
John Dowson
President
The Fremantle Society
26 February 2021
0409223622
20 February 2021: Huge Boxes for Victoria Quay
Premier Unaware Victoria Quay is a Heritage Precinct
Unaware that Victoria Quay Fremantle is a famous heritage place that has 124 years of history related to shipping, immigration, and trade, Premier Mark McGown today announced he will spend $100 million of taxpayers money building huge boxes on the heritage site for the film industry.
Unless he has plans for a Disney style theme park, these huge boxes will in the main be privatised and off limits to the general public.
The photos above from ABC News show the Premier today in Fremantle with the utterly useless Heritage Minister David Templeman out of picture. The large boxes get bigger the further they are from the viewer, and bear no relationship to the low scale heritage protected sheds along the quay.
There are plenty of expert plans and documents which point to the importance of Victoria Quay, as a twin to the West End and needing respect and enhancement of its maritime history, and an immigration museum. Development on the Quay Is welcome, but must respect the heritage of the place.
There is no room for this massive complex.
The Fremantle Society spent 8 years campaigning to get Fremantle Ports to do a conservation plan for Victoria Quay. Knowing that the secret Victoria Quay committee headed by Simone McGurk (which no community group was on) had finished its work, we asked last year to see a copy of the Conservation Plan so we could get people to read it. It clearly lays out the significance of Victoria Quay and the need to protect its form and scale. We are still waiting for Fremantle Ports to find their own copy.
A copy should be given to the Premier and the Heritage Minister to educate them about the heritage significance of the Quay. It is too late to give a copy to Mayor Pettitt, who said on his blog yesterday he has been working on this project to destroy the character of Victoria Quay for a year, to match the damage he has done to King's Square.
John Dowson
President
The Fremantle Society
John.dowson@yahoo.com
0409223622
Fremantle Society Newsletter October 2014
References and Links
Dowson, John 2001, Fremantle: the Immigration Story, Fremantle Society.
See also: Roel Loopers' view of the movie studio proposal - 'Mad Mark and the Freo movie madness', 21 February 2021.
See also: Roel Loopers' 3 March 2021 post on the movie studio proposal - 'Destruction of historic Victoria quay unacceptable!'
See also former president Roel Loopers' post, 5 March 2021: 'Simone McGurk's insulting Victoria Quay comments'.
See also: Victoria Quay.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 26 February, 2021 and hosted at freotopia.org/society/campaign/wharf.html (it was last updated on 11 May, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.