Shenton House
Cliff Street
Sir George Shenton (4 March 1842 – 29 June 1909) was a prominent businessman in colonial Western Australia, the first Mayor of Perth, and a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Council for over thirty years. He is remembered in the name of the suburb of Shenton Park.
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The building complex in the centre is George Shenton's Fremantle house - before he moved to Perth - in Alfred Stone's 1860s (c. 1865) photograph of the Green, with his stables on the right. (Click to see it in larger size.) The thin white line extending across the middle of the photo out to the right is Cliff St. All of the dark grassy area in the foreground is the Green. Where the stables stood is now the site of the Dalgety building, where the MSC now has its offices, on the corner of Cliff and High Sts. Behind the Shenton buildings, to the right, is the Residency, which was demolished in 1967 for the railway line and a carpark. Hard to pick out in the photo at the rear, just to the right of the stables, is the first lighthouse. You can see it more clearly in the next snap.
The three storey building on the left is Daniel Scott's house, later the Seubert's boarding-house: Hitchcock tells about living there at one time.
And this is Stephen Stout's photo, Battye 5770B-33. No date given, but I'm guessing it's c. 1864-5, as that's when Stout had his studio 100 yards away in Henry Street.
This is from the period when Shenton's house (after he relocated to Perth) was in use as the headquarters in Fremantle of the Adelaide Steamship Company - the name of which on the building would be more easily seen if I had taken a better photo of the photograph hanging in the company's later building at 12 Mouat Street.
References and Links
Dowson, John 2003, Old Fremantle: Photographs 1850-1950, UWAP.
Walter, Irma 2014, Stout-Hearted: The Story of Stephen Montague Stout, Hesperian Press.
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 8 July, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/shentonhouse.html (it was last updated on 8 April, 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.