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Deanery
Corner of Pier Street and the Terrace, 1859
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Alfred Stone's photograph, 1861-2, from SLWA. The Library's caption says that the building to the left is the original army barracks, designed by Henry Willey Reveley, and that the earlier St George's Church may be seen behind it.
The Deanery, 1859, was designed by Richard Roach Jewell for the Dean of St George's Cathedral, George Pownall, probably with some input from Pownall himself, due to his interest in Gothic archictecture.
City of Perth:
In the 1830s the Government installed a public whipping post and stocks on this site for criminals to be exposed to mockery, with the aim of reducing crime through public humiliation. The mildest of offences were deemed punishable; in 1833 two children who had been caught stealing fruit from the Government gardens were placed in the stocks and their parents were ordered to flog them publicly. It was also briefly the location of Perth’s first gaol, a temporary lock-up, prior to the completion of Perth Gaol on the corner of Beaufort and Francis Streets in 1856. However this temporary lock-up was constantly mocked, as the inmates escaped easily from the mud walled structure. The romantic style gothic house now seen here was built in 1859 by ticket-of-leave men and housed the Anglican Deans of Perth until 1953. (Text from a City of Perth walking trail pamphlet)
Cyril Bryan:
THE DEANERY. To the Editor. Sir, - Dean Moore in "proving" that the first gaol stood on the present Burt Hall site, has only scratched on the surface of history. The gaol he talks about was really a lock-up attached to the old officers' quarters (now displaced by the Burt Hall) when Colonel Phillips established himself there as Commissioner of Police. The first gaol stood on the present Deanery site, and for that I have the evidence of Surveyor-General Roe and Alfred Hillman (his draughtsman [draftsman]) and Captain Irwin. I speak from documents, not from hearsay, save when that is substantiated by documentary evidence - and that in the original. And I might add that I knew the old officers' quarters before and better than Archbishop Riley, for they were almost my home; and I am acquainted with their history from the time they were built. As for my "legend that a native was executed somewhere on the spot," permit me to express my intense astonishment at Dean Moore's ignorance of local history. If the trial and shooting of Midgegaroo on the site of the Deanery is "legend" then Lieutenant-Governor Irwin is a practical joker of the first magnitude. - Yours, etc., CYGNET [Cyril Bryan, letter to the West Australian 31 July 1936: 22.]
Simon Nevill's conjectural sketch map: 22.
References and Links
Wikipedia page, from whence the top photo
Heritage Perth page for the Deanery.
Neville, Simon J. 2007, Perth and Fremantle: Past and Present, privately published, WA.
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 9 June, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/deanery.html (it was last updated on 28 March, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.