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Artillery Barracks
'Artillery Barracks' is situated on a 3.87 hectare site centred around Cantonment Hill, a 33 metre high natural feature which dominates Fremantle Harbour and the estuary of the Swan River. From the earliest days of the Colony of Western Australia, the military significance of the feature for the defence of the Perth settlement was recognised. It was selected as the site for a coastal artillery garrison and acquired the name 'cantonment' which means 'military quarters'.
Construction of the barracks began in June 1910 at a time when the Commonwealth Government was initially investigating Cockburn Sound (now the anchorage for HMAS Stirling) for the establishment of a naval base. The first stage of construction, completed by June 1911, included an orderly room and guard room, two-storey barracks for forty men with detached kitchen and bath blocks, quartermaster's store and gymnasium. The materials used externally were brick and local Cottesloe stone with tiled roofs and the completed cost was £12,848.
The second stage, which was completed by December 1913, included a further barracks block, a hospital, a residence for the commanding officer, quarters for two officers and a warrant officer, and a block of quarters for three married non-commissioned officers. The same building materials were used in this stage.
The Artillery Barracks complex is on the Register of the National Estate and the National Trust's Register of Classified Places. The Barracks constitute one of the few complete groups of historical buildings in Western Australia where the buildings involved were constructed in a relatively short period - three years - resulting in a very fine grouping of carefully related buildings, constructed in similar styles and materials.
References and Links
Major-General Peter Phillips 1996, The Heritage Homes of the Australian Defence Force: One Hundred Australian Homes and Two Hundred Years of History, Defence Housing Authority: 74.
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 18 June, 2020 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/artillerybarracks.html (it was last updated on 26 July, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.