There is an excellent history of the Fremantle Rowing Club available online here. I'll borrow the first paragraph.
FRC:
The Fremantle Rowing Club was formed on 19th July 1887 at a public meeting chaired by Dr. H.C. Barnett and held in the Oddfellows Hall in Fremantle. This public meeting had been called as the result of a motion by B.J. Solomon at a preliminary meeting which had been called to discuss the possibility of the formation of a Rowing Club in Fremantle. This preliminary meeting was held in the Fremantle Town Hall, (the Town Hall had been officially opened on 22nd June 1887) on Monday 11th July 1887 and was chaired by Douglas G. Gawler who must be credited with having initiated the movement for the formation of the Club. Upon formation Douglas Gawler was immediately appointed Captain and he retained that position for nine years.
The first boatshed was between the road and rail bridges, near the former, and opened in 1888. It would have been where the 1939 (present) wooden road bridge comes to the southern side of the river.
References and Links
Ralph Jeffreys, History of Fremantle Rowing Club 1887-1987, online.
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 30 May, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/clubs/rowing.html (it was last updated on 30 October, 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.