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Jack Kent, 1991:
NAVY COMMANDER RESIDENCE
HISTORY
The building was constructed after August, 1941 and before April, 1942 as a residence for the Australian Navy Commander in charge of the boom defence yard. The residence was situated on the first floor and the ground floor used for offices. The Fremantle Credit Union established an office in the building in 1965 but it is unlikely that the Australian Navy used this building following the end of World War II.
CONSTRUCTION
The building is a two storey timber framed construction, of simple form, with the access stairs to first floor on the outside of the building. The roof is corrugated asbestos cement sheeting and the external walls are clad in corrugated asbestos cement sheeting running horizontally. Both floors are of timber construction.
ASSESSMENT OF CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
The simple form and construction of the former Navy residence is a well proportioned and pleasant building. It has an appropriate scale for residential use but retains the more industrial aesthetics of Victoria Quay by the use of similar materials and construction.
The building's fabric is principally intact and, as such, demonstrates previous naval use of Victoria Quay. Its significance is enhanced by the two brick boom defence buildings which together form the physical evidence of the wartime Navy operations and state defence network.
This group of buildings add to the intensity of historic themes of Victoria Quay with the history of its own. This history deserves to be fully researched before the significance of Boom Defence group of buildings and associated structures can be fully determined.
References and Links
Top photo: GG 2022; bottom Jack Kent 1991.
Hutchison, David, Jack Kent, Agnieshka Kiera, Russell Kingdom, Larraine Stevens, Tanya Suba, 1991, Victoria Quay and its Architecture its History and Assessment of Cultural Significance, City of Fremantle; Part II: Jack Kent: 'Architectural evaluation of existing buldings and assessment of their cultural significance', 54 pp. This is page 13.
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 17 May, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/port/navycomm.html (it was last updated on 27 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.