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Literary Institute Campaign
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Story of the preservation of the Literary Institute (Evan Davies Library/now Dome), as told by Ron & Dianne Davidson in Fighting for Fremantle, in an excerpt from Chapter 4, 'The Battles Begin', pp. 45-47.
page 45
The City of Fremantle grant also provided $3000 to assist in a study of the feasibility of restoring the Evan Davies Library building in South Terrace and converting it for permanent use as a theatre. Part of the building had been used
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for some time by an amateur drama group, the Harbour Theatre, and this group had made the submission to the Department of Urban and Regional Development for the National Estate grant.
Initially the Council, by a slender majority, actually voted to reject this grant. There had been repeated attempts to tear down the historic building. The modernisers wanted an emphatic win — a demolition — to reassert their dominant position within the Council. They mocked its usefulness. You could fire a shotgun down South Terrace and not hit anyone, strident moderniser Esme Fletcher told Council.49 The Society felt it was at a turning point in Fremantle’s fortunes and pulled out all stops to save it, even though the building was not in the main historic precinct of the West End.
The Evan Davies building was a carryover from the days of working-class education and literary institutes. In the 1950s, it had been the state’s first free municipal library, for which Councillor Davies had been a passionate worker. In November 1972 the Fremantle City Council resolved that the library site ‘be developed as parkland when the building is no longer required for library services.’ It would have to be a very small park. The library moved into a new building beside the town hall in 1974. In August 1975 Councillor Warren wanted the earlier resolution reaffirmed. But in the 1975 elections two more Fremantle Society committee members had been elected to Council: Gerard MacGiil for North Ward and Don Whittington for Hilton. When Councillor Warren moved adoption of the 1972 motion, councillors Lauder and MacGiil played for time and moved to refer the matter back to the original committee, the Executive Committee. To everyone’s surprise this was carried.50
It was by now a complex motion with a couple of negatives to negotiate along the way. Was this part of the plan? Certainly some modernisers may have thought they were voting to demolish the building when they supported the motion. Over the next year there were further attempts to demolish Evan Davies, through the Executive Committee claiming that parkland would provide far greater amenity for the citizens of Fremantle. But Mayor McKenzie, as chair of the Executive Committee, refused to move the motion. Les Lauder and Gerard MacGiil again quickly moved the matter back.
Led by Les Lauder, Gerard MacGiil and Don Whittington, the Society and Harbour Theatre lobbied relentlessly to have Council accept the National Estate grant and fund the study. In record time Rob Campbell produced a favourable report on the building which included a notional design developed by theatre
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design consultant Peter Parkinson. This design assumed that the whole building would be made available for theatre use.
Petitions were also organised; by August 1975 the Council had received two petitions from the public. One, with eighty-two signatures, came from local traders and shoppers who asked that the building not be restored. The other, presented by Les, carried 2742 signatures from people wanting it restored and turned into a theatre.51
Mayor Bill McKenzie called a public meeting on the matter in October 1975, which was attended by several hundred people. Discussion largely concentrated on the expenses associated with restoration. Fremantle Society representatives argued that if Fremantle destroyed a historic building classified by the National Trust it was unlikely to receive grants in future from the National
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Estate. In the end the meeting voted overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the building, and requested that Council staff prepare a financial report.
Despite the large petition and the feeling of the public meeting, the modernisers persisted in moving the motion for demolition. However, they were swimming against the tide. In May 1976 four more Fremantle Society members were elected to Council: Amelie Whittington, Peter Newman, Mark Staniford and June Boddy. The numbers were shifting. By late 1976 the Fremantle Society newsletter could announce that the Evan Davies building was safe at last. It had been saved on the casting vote, once again, of Mayor Bill McKenzie, and the Council had accepted a $35,000 National Estate grant for its restoration.
After the victory Bill McKenzie told Les Lauder: ‘I don’t know what you see in most of these old buildings but I know that what you are doing is the right thing.’52
Endnotes
49 Witcomb & Gregory, From the Barracks to the Burrup, p. 276.
50 Fremantle City Council minutes, 21 August 1975.
51 Fremantle, vol. 3, no. 4,1975.
52 Les Lauder, email to authors, 2 December 2009.
References and Links
Davidson, Ron & Dianne Davidson 2010, Fighting for Fremantle: The Fremantle Society Story, Fremantle Society: 49-52.
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/litinst.html (it was last updated on 11 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.