Town Lot 105 was on the corner of High and Pakenham Streets, where the 1910 Bank of Adelaide building is now to be found. It was next to Town Lot 104 on Packenham, and Town Lot 81 on High.
The first owner of Lots 104 and 105 was Daniel Scott (Mitchell). Robert Thomson may have begun trading on Lot 105 in the Stirling Arms (from 1 January 1830, when his licence was granted) while it was still in Scott's ownership. On 31 March 1831, Thomson exchanged his Lots 102 and 103 for Scott's 104 and 105.
On 27 March 1832, Thomson (because he was moving to Rottnest to take up farming there) transferred the ownership of the two lots to George French Johnson, who was shot dead in a [[../events/duels.html|duel]] on 13 August 1832. The next known transaction is the purchase of the lots from Johnson's executors by William Rolfe Steel, on 16 June 1836.
Thomson had to leave Rottnest because the government resumed it for use as a prison, and he went back briefly into hospitality on 28 December 1839, when he bought Lots 104 and 105 from Steel (who had another hotel nearby). However, on 1 March 1844 he sold the lots to James Woodley Davey.
Hitchcock 1919, writing about 1869: "A space of vacant land extended from where the Madrid Restaurant now stands to the corner of Packenham-street." Which suggests that the Stirling Arms had been demolished by that time.
References and Links
Fremantle History Centre. Look for the PDFs called:
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1829-1837
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1855-1879
Hitchcock, J.K. 1919, [[../books/hitchcock1919.html|'Early Days of Fremantle: High Street 50 Years Ago']], Fremantle Times, one of a series of articles on 'Early Days of Fremantle' publ. 21 March - 20 June 1919.
Hitchcock, 1929.
Mitchell, Peter, personal communication, publication forthcoming 2023. Most of the details above are from his painstaking research, for which we are all very grateful.
Tuckfield, Trevor 1971, 'Early colonial inns and taverns', Early Days: Journal and proceeedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 7, 3: 65-82; Part 2, 7, 7: 98-106.
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 6 December, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/lots/105.html (it was last updated on 19 October, 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.