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The Coombe
City of Mosman Park:
The Chine and The Coombe were private holiday destinations in the late 1800s.
'The Chine’, whose name means a 'deep ravine’, was the northern valley. In the 1880s, the site was owned by Henry Charles Prinsep, a draftsman for the Lands and Surveys Office and later Chief Protector of Native Affairs. Prinsep built a cottage and jetty on the property for family holidays and cut a cave into the cliff to use as a storeroom.
The southern valley was known as ’The Coombe’, meaning a short valley or deep hollow. Western Australian Commissioner-General Alfred Robert Thompson used this site as a holiday retreat before selling it in 1883. Perth merchant Rice Saunders then purchased the land a few years later and built a homestead that included a cottage, caretakers’ accommodation, boat sheds and a freshwater well.
Little development occurred in the early 20th century, but both The Chine and The Coombe experienced dramatic changes as Mosman Park grew. In the 1950s, both valleys were subdivided and sold for residential development. In the following decades, retaining walls were installed to allow for construction on the steep cliff sides and the area became filled with houses.
Heritage Council:
Physical Description
The Coombe reserve is a small park at the foreshore. It has lawns, a narrow beach, a playground, limestone cliffs and a mixture of native and introduced vegetation. Native river rushes at the water's edge. Some small caves. Private building in cliff face, high walls and gates.
Statement of Significance
As the site of some of the earliest European settlement in the area, this foreshore is significant. However the area has been extensively altered and subdivision has reduced open space to a tiny fraction of the original locations. The reserve has social significance as the remnant of the site about which early history revolves.
References and Links
as above
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 11 May, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/places/coombe.html (it was last updated on 9 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.