The Welcome Walls are a memorial on Victoria Quay that commemorates the many immigrants who arrived in Fremantle via ship. They're located around the entrance and cafe of the Maritime Museum.
The Welcome Walls were built in 2004, with architects were Cox Howlett and Bailey Woodland overseeing their design. Since then, the walls have been extended, with some newer ones being made of glass instead of steel panels on a frame.
In 2024, a number of the glass panels were broken (either through the effects of the environment, or vandalism, it's unsure). A large area of the wharf had also been declared unsafe and so it and the walls on top of it were fenced off and out of bounds.
David Hutchison, Fremantle Walks, 2006:
An outdoor gallery of the Maritime Museum. These walls — an initiative of the Government of Western Australia — pay tribute to the immigrants from many lands and cultures who have made major contributions to the development of the state. The walls were completed in 2005. Migrants, or surviving relatives, were invited to apply to have their names engraved on the 152 stainless steel panels. Other names can still be registered for inclusion. A computer database, ‘Passages’, is accessible via terminals in the Maritime Museum. This is a dynamic, evolving information source including records of arrivals by sea and archival photographs of the ships and ports from whence they came, and of the people who stepped ashore on Victoria Quay.
WA Museum (edited):
In Fremantle, over 400 panels commemorating the names of migrants who arrived through this area have been erected at the WA Maritime Museum at Victoria Quay. They pay tribute to those migrants who arrived by sea, and to the many benefits they gave to their new home, enriching the lives of all Western Australians.
The Welcome Walls began as a one-off project in 2004 as part of the commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Swan River Colony. It was originally planned to display about 2,000 inscriptions. The three stages of the Welcome Walls now display more than 21,000 inscriptions, paying tribute to some 45,000 immigrants to Western Australia.
In 2022, as part of the landscaping in front of the Maritime Museum, it is proposed that the Welcome Walls be moved.
Gallery
References and links
- WA Museum: Welcome Walls page.
- Dowson, John 2001, Fremantle: the Immigration Story, Fremantle Society.
- Fremantle Ports website.
Wikimedia Commons category: Welcome Walls, Fremantle
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 17 May, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/port/welcomewalls.html (it was last updated on 27 April, 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.