Fremantle Primary School is a state school in Alma Street. It was built on the site of the former Alma Street Cemetery (1831-1855), and until 2000 was known as South Terrace Primary School.
The current school, built in 1961, occupies the block bounded by Brennan, Alma, Attfield, and Stevens Streets.
The Fremantle Intermediate School was built in 1904, around the corner from the current site. In 1927 it was renamed South Terrace State School (i.e. primary school). The buildings continue to exist as Block A of Fremantle Hospital; in 1987 they were used as the Day Care Centre at the NW corner of the complex.
Fremantle Infants School (ie, kindergarten), aka Alma Street Infants, was on the NE corner of Alma Street and South Terrace; the corner of Fremantle Hospital where the Emergency Department was until it was closed in 2014.
Both of the older schools were referred to from 1952 as South Terrace Primary School, and that name was retained for the new school in Brennan St (built in 1961 on the site of the former [[../cemeteries/alma.html|Alma St Cemetery]]) until another change in 2000 to Fremantle Primary School.
Davidson:
The Fremantle Society oral history group’s last major project was the South Terrace Primary School Oral History Project, which ran from August 1994 to January 1995. The group had dwindled by now to half its former size, with only Alice Smith, Daphne Goulding, Zoe Griffin and Phoebe Freeman remaining, with Larraine still taking an advisory role. They interviewed twenty-one former students, while eight other students produced written recollections of the original school, which is now part of Fremantle Hospital. A front-page story in Fremantle when the project was completed noted that ‘All former students referred to the original South Terrace Primary School as the “Big” school, and the then adjoining Alma Street School as the “Infants” school.’
Tapes and recollections were stored in the Local History Collection, with copies in the Fremantle Primary School library. Nearly ten years later a very successful book [Wharf Rats] was produced by the school’s P & C Association that must have drawn heavily on this invaluable resource. (72)
Sign at the Fothergill entrance to the park – in 2023 unreadable through degredation.
References and links
- Website: http://www.fremantleps.wa.edu.au/
- Davidson, Ron & Dianne Davidson 2010, Fighting for Fremantle: The Fremantle Society Story, Fremantle Society.
- Garrick, Phyl & Chris Jeffery1987, Fremantle Hospital: A Social History to 1987, Fremantle Hospital.
- Lang, Karen & Jan Newman 2004, Wharf Rats and Other Stories: 100 Years of Growing up in Fremantle, Fremantle Primary School.
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 4 August, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/schools/fremantleprimary.html (it was last updated on 6 December, 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.