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Hale Street
Hale Street in Beaconsfield once led to John Healy's (1823-1898) farm, and specifically to the grand farmhouse, which still stands in a modified form in Strang Street – and so was called Healy Street.
Hale Street now proceeds south from Lefroy Road (which ran through H.W. Lefroy's farm) in the direction of Strang Street. It terminates just before what looks an easement on which nothing is built - it may have been a stream, and I suppose is still a drain. And then a little south of the termination, Strang Street starts, and curves away southeast until it comes to a sharp corner at the entrance to the Healy farmhouse - now the Portuguese Club (before suddenly going due south as an afterthought to get to Clontarf Road, before Clontarf Hill). If you were heading for the farmhouse from the town it would have been the logical route for the track to have taken. I'm guessing that the original Healy Street forded the stream.
The connexion with the Healy farm would have been long lost by 1956, when it might have been felt that the Hale family needed their sons to be remembered as war heroes (tho the first war was also long over by then).
According to the Library, the street was renamed for brothers Edgar and Vernon Hale who were athletes in Fremantle before WWI. Edgar was killed in WWI and Vernon died after returning to WA as a result of his wounds. Changed 1956/57.
References and Links
City Library.
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 7 October, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/streets/hale.html (it was last updated on 18 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.