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Whaling Company, Bathers Bay
The Fremantle Whaling Company was established in 1837. Its derelict building may be seen on the right of both of the following photos. In the early 1850s, Campbell writes (13) that the former whalers' building provided temporary accommodation in 1851 for military pensioners who had come as guards on convict ships and were now employed as warders.
Fremantle Library photo #2034A by Stephen Stout, c. 1890. Library caption: The second lighthouse (1876/1878-1905) built on Arthur Head is to the right. Below is the TW Mews shipyard in Bathers Bay, established between 1840 and 1860. Next to the right is the abandoned building of the Fremantle Whaling Company, demolished in the 1890s.
Photo reproduced in Hitchcock's 1929 History, page 148. His caption describes the scene as 'old lighthouse and shipyard, about 1865'. The building on the left is, as the sign says, Thomas Mews' premises. The right-hand building, demolished in the 1890s, is the ruin of the Fremantle Whaling Company (est. 1837) building. Hitchcock's 'old lighthouse' is ambiguous - as that is actually the second lighthouse built there in 1879, so his date is misleading, and should probably be 1880s. However, the remains of the 1851 lighthouse can be seen just to the left of the newer one.
References and Links
Campbell, R.McK. 2017, Henderson & Coy, privately published in association with the Faculty of Architecture, UWA.
Hitchcock, J.K. 1929, The History of Fremantle, The Front Gate of Australia, 1829-1929, Fremantle City Council.
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 6 May, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/whalingcompany.html (it was last updated on 15 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.