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Alma Street
Alma Street, Fremantle. Alma Street runs east-west from South Terrace to Hampton Road. It was named for the Battle of Alma (1854) in the Crimean War (gv infra), the street having been made after that date, and many Enrolled Pensioner Force guards having fought in the Crimea. The Alma is a small river in Crimea; it flows into the Black Sea. Name appears 1855.
Many former soldiers who fought there came to the Swan River Colony as 'enrolled pensioners' as guards on convict ships, 1850-1868. They were encouraged to come, hoping they would bring families and work as tradesmen or warders, by promises of free blocks of lands, many of which were taken up in North Fremantle, in so-called Brucetown, named for their Commandant.
Alma Street Cemetery is the name given to the first Fremantle cemetery, as it was established in 1831 to the south of what was later named Alma Street.
From 1850, Alma Street formed the southern boundary of the Convict Establishment, with Henry Wray's residence on the corner with South Terrace, the western boundary. There was probably a convict-built wall running up to at least Attfield Street, if not Hampton Road, but there is on longer any trace. I just walked the length of it to check. However, there is the end of a convict wall at the Alma Street corner with Attfield Street – or what used to be Attfield Road before it became in internal hospital access road (which you still drive up and down).
References and Links
Fremantle Hospital, (part of?) Development and Land Use Policy Manual, 1988 (pdf) – shows Alma Street on the plan.
Wikipedia: During the Crimean War of 1853–1856, in the Battle of the Alma near the lower reaches of the Alma river, the allied British, French, and Ottoman armies defeated the Russians under Prince Aleksandr Sergeevich Menshikov on 20 September 1854.
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, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/streets/alma.html (it was last updated on 16 November, 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.