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Swan Brewery

Point Lewis, 1888. The first owners of the land, after colonisation, were the de Burghs of Guildford. They sold it to Ferguson & Mumme. The original building was a flour mill called the White House.

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Photo 1889 courtesy SLWA. J.M. Ferguson & W. Mumme's Swan Brewery, with Mt Eliza behind it. One of the brewery's two paddle-steamers is unloading hops and malt.

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Photograph by Alfred Pickering, c. 1900-1910, courtesy SLWA, call number 014019PD (from Facebook), perhaps taken from Point Belches (Mill Point). Tap/click. The caption: 'Swan Brewery from ferry boat WA'.

A major brewery close to Perth city, the Swan Brewery, was established at Point Lewis on Matilda Bay not far from Mount Eliza, near the site of previous buildings, one of several of which was a steam mill. After the mill failed, its building was used by the government to accommodate convicts. ( '... the Mount Eliza men slept in a nearby Steam Mill while constructing their new quarters'. Gibbs: 64)

Plan of the brewery site, G.W. Leeming, 1895, SRO Cons 3868 item 346, via Heritage Perth in Facebook

The State Heritage Council has published an excellent report (v. infra) on the former brewery and other buildings on the Point Lewis site, recording that activities conducted there included: boatbuilding (innovatively using jarrah); the first Aboriginal school; the first use of steam for flour and timber milling; and tanning. It was also the villa and stables of the de Burgh family from 1846.

ANU: The buildings, which include a tall, high roofed structure with dormer windows and a turret, were built in 1838 as mills for timber-cutting as well as flour-grinding. The steam mills were later taken over as a convict depot, then used as a tannery, then a restaurant. In 1879 it was acquired by the Swan Brewery Co. who sold it in 1979 for redevelopment. ANU openresearch page.

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The man on the right probably lives in the Old Men's Home which was established in the former convict hiring depot under Mt Eliza, and was in existence 1872-1906, until the men were moved to a new home in Claremont (now Sunset Hospital, Dalkeith). Photo from the archives of WA Newspapers, nd., from Austen. Mounts Bay Road passes the front of the Swan Brewery, as it still does in 2023.

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It's not impossible that this photograph was taken on the same day as the one immediately above. SLWA (in Facebook).

References and Links

Austen Tom 1988, The Streets of Old Perth, St George's Books, Bell Publishing Group, Perth.

Gibbs, Martin 2001, 'The archaeology of the convict system in Western Australia', Australasian Historical Archaeology, vol. 19: 60-72.

Oldman, Diane, 'Mt Eliza Convict Depot', on her Sappers and Miners website.

WA Heritage Council page for the Old Swan Brewery Precinct (2186), and its thorough descriptive entry for the same.

Heritage Perth page.

ANU openresearch page.

Freotopia

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 28 June, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/swanbrewery.html (it was last updated on 18 November, 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.