Randwick Stables, 24 Rockingham Road, Hamilton Hill.
RANDWICK STABLES Centenary Celebration
Join us for this community event celebrating Hamilton Hill’s living heritage Randwick Stables on Sunday October 8th from 11am-2pm.
The event will feature:
🎶LIVE MUSIC: String Quartet, Zoë Merralls’ band & Brendon Foley
🐴PONY RIDES
🖼️HISTORICAL DISPLAYS
🐑PETTING FARM
⚔️BLACKSMITH DISPLAY
Randwick Stables was established in 1923, and listed as a Category A living heritage site in 2001.
History Council page excerpt:
Randwick Stables comprises a series of paddocks, a timber framed bungalow, stables, laundry stone well, water closet and metal clad stables constructed for Frederick Charles John ‘Jack’ Marks, a member of the prominent horse racing Marks family. At the turn of the century, South Fremantle and the northern parts of Cockburn like Hamilton Hill became the location of semi-rural industries such as market gardening and horse racing stables. In the early 1900s Lot 4 of Cockburn Sound Location 5 was subdivided and lots 23,24 and 27 were transferred to ‘Jack’ Marks in 1924. Horse racing played an integral role in the development of South Fremantle and Hamilton Hill with the first horse races in the Swan River Colony held at South Beach on 3 October 1833. Horse stables were a characteristic feature in residential areas located near South Beach. At the height of the horse racing industry it is believed 400 horses were stabled in the area and trained at South Beach.
Cockburn Council:
HORSE RACING IN COCKBURN
The Cockburn coastline has played host to many horse races since the earliest days of European settlement. Early settlers held a pony race beside the beach at South Fremantle in 1833, complete with stands, food stalls, and entertainment - quite an accomplishment for a colony only four years old! Though the main racing industry developed closer to Perth, settlers in the Cockburn area entertained themselves with a number of local meets. In the 1880s a racecourse was marked out at Woodman Point, and in the 1890s Walter Powell developed his Coogee Hotel racecourse. These races became a fixture of the Fremantle-Cockburn society for decades. In the early 1920s, famous ex-jockey Jack Marks built Randwick Stables on Rockingham Road in Hamilton Hill, taking advantage of fertile soil to grow feed, and the nearby beach to exercise the animals. The following thirty years, a lively training and racing culture with stables owned and run by prominent racing names such as F.W. Johnson on Forrest Road, and A.W. Cooper nearby, as well as a host of smaller stables owned by Fremantle businessmen. Randwick Stables is still standing on Rockingham Road and the legacy of horses exercising along South and CY O’Connor Beaches remains to this day.
References and Links
Facebook page for the Stables.
Facebook page for the Community Garden.
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 26 September, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/places/randwickstables.html (it was last updated on 26 September, 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.