Dalkeith House Campaign
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Story of the preservation of the Fremantle Markets, as told by Ron & Dianne Davidson in Fighting for Fremantle, in an excerpt from Chapter 4, 'The Battles Begin', pp. 43-45
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... a councillor, John Green, wanted to demolish
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Dalkeith House at 160 High Street and replace it with ‘a state of the art' funeral parlour. Councillor Green already had a funeral business in Fremantle; he also had no idea of the history of the house he wanted to demolish. Dalkeith House had been the iconic home of James Gallop Jr and it had a considerable history involving trade union militancy. In 1952 there had been a large demonstration when all the tenants, mostly workers on the wharf, were evicted. Two thousand unionists from the Seamen’s Union, the Waterside Workers Federation, the Railways Union and Paddy Troy’s old union, the Painters and Dockers, threatened strike action to close the wharf. The Painters and Dockers were deregistered over this threat. When he heard of the threat to number 160 in 1974, Paddy Troy declared it ‘was sacred territory’ because of the earlier action and could not be touched.44 The following year Councillor Green died suddenly and the threatened building became a community school for a while, then a home for the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, incorporating a padded soundproof screaming room for therapeutic purposes. It eventually became the home of Jenny Archibald while she was president of the Fremantle Society and later a
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councillor and then mayor of Fremantle. Since 1994 it has been the local base for the Dharmapala Buddhist Centre.
Endnote
44 Personal communication, John Troy to Ron Davidson, 6 October 2008.
References and Links
Davidson, Ron & Dianne Davidson 2010, Fighting for Fremantle: The Fremantle Society Story, Fremantle Society: 43-45.
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 18 May, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/society/campaign/dalkeith.html (it was last updated on 10 May, 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.