Fremantle Studies no.1, 1999
Journal of the Fremantle History Society
Introduction
When the Fremantle History Society was launched on 12 October 1994 one of the aims of its original steering committee was to eventually organise seminars on Fremantle history, making available to the public recent research and findings by both amateur and professional historians. This aim was realised with the holding of the first Fremantle Studies Day in May 1996, which was attended by a large and varied audience. Another equally successful Studies Day followed in 1997.
As well as organising Fremantle Studies Days, the Fremantle History Society holds monthly general meetings which take various formats. One of these is the presentation of talks, sometimes by professional historians and researchers and sometimes by Society members who have interesting memories and experiences to share.
We felt that at least some of the wealth of fascinating material generated in Studies Days and at general meetings should be preserved for future researchers, but as papers presented were quite lengthy it was not possible to publish them in our quarterly newsletter. Unfortunately as a non-profit community group charging minimal fees for membership we were in no position to finance the publication of an historical journal. We were therefore delighted when the WA History Foundation and the City of Fremantle agreed to come to our assistance. We thank them for their generosity, and hope they find pleasure in this publication; the first, we hope, of a continuing series.
We owe a special thanks to our talented contributor Alec Smith, long renowned as a Fremantle raconteur and personality, who provided us with his original cartoons to embellish his text and also the cover of the publication. Jamie Dineen of the Fremantle City Council went to endless trouble to perfect the design of the layout and prepare the publication for printing. We acknowledge particularly the extraordinary efficiency and dedication of our indexer, Brian Wall, who took on the task at a moment’s notice and under extremely trying conditions.
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 25 July, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/fhs/fs/1/introduction.html (it was last updated on 2 June, 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.