Woodside

18 Dalgety Street, East Fremantle

The former hospital was built in 1902 as a family home by [[../people/moorewd.html|William Dalgety Moore]], best known for founding the company W.D. Moore and Co, from which well-known businesses Dalgety’s and Moore’s grew.
Note that this is the front of the original house - facing north, towards the main (then Canning) road. The development proposed in 2022 will have the effect of making the southern side, facing Dalgety Street, appear to be the entrance to the old building.

View of the house from Canning Road (Highway) when 'wood side' meant something.
From Dowson 2004 from Battye P10540 (detail).

Woodside was purchased by Dr Edwin East in the 1926 and used as a private hospital.
After being converted to flats in 1946, it was bought by the state government and opened as a maternity hospital in the early 1950s.
Wards and wings were added to the original house at this time.

The State Heritage register notes that the hospital was established to meet the demands of the local community, and went on to be a leader in the evolution of modern maternity practice in Western Australia, including the introduction of home-birthing and post-natal support services.

Lee:
Woodside closed as a hospital in 2014, will continue as an aged care facility.
This was the home of the [[../people/moorewd.html|Moore]] family, and that building substantially remains.
([[../bib.html#lee|Lee]]: 147)

Fremantle Library Local History Collection photo #5126, c.
1985, with the following caption.
Library:
Woodside Hospital in East Fremantle was originally built as a home for [[../people/moorewd.html|William Dalgety Moore]] who owned an importing and exporting business in Fremantle.
In the 1930s, Dr East purchased the property and used it as a private hospital.
During World War II it was converted to flats.
The State Government bought it after the War and it was opened as a Maternity Hospital in 1954.
Matron Leggett was the first Matron.

In 2022, the buildings are fenced, with security signs, and seem to have been neglected since the hospital closed - as may be seen in the next three photos, from 6 July.

In 2022, a proposal has been released to develop the property as an aged care establishment:

Woodside plans under attack

Fremantle Herald, 6 August 2022, editorial comment by Andrew Smith (Herald's disclaimer: Andrew Smith lives in Dalgety Stret and is a former mayor of East Fremantle.)

OUTRAGE, consternation, dismay.
That’s the immediate reaction of local resident Joanne Taggart – and she says of many other homeowners – to the proposed development for the former Woodside hospital site between Dalgety and Fortescue Streets in East Fremantle.
On top of that there is her bitter disappointment at East Fremantle council’s failure to hold a public information meeting on what is arguably a very large commercial aged-care venture slap bang in the middle of an historic residential area.
Ms Taggart was advised recently by council planning officers a public meeting was not on “due to Covid-19”.
In the minds of some it’s a planning process gone mad: it’s strongly encouraged by the WA government, fuelled by the Covid emergency, a serious shortage of diverse housing stock, huge population projections for WA over the next 30 years and a failed effort by the WA government over decades to rein in urban sprawl due to a too-cosy relationship between an over-reaching development industry and the government, at a very real cost to many other property owners throughout Perth and WA.
The proposal by town planners Planning Solutions is for Fresh Fields Projects (WA) PL, a partnership between Hall and Prior an aged care provider and the WA Fire and Emergency Service Superannuation Board, a WA government statutory authority.
The formal development application has been released for public comment with a very short time frame for such a huge and disruptive project, expiring next Friday.
After that the council, currently offering only one-on-one consultations with concerned residents and adjoining property owners, will provide its recommendations on the change of use for the site and the scale of the development to a WA government development assessment panel (DAP).
The DAP, dominated by three WA state planning commission appointees, and with only two council members, is a ploy introduced several years ago by the Barnett Liberal government to bypass local councils and deprive local people of much of the say they used to have.
This process, which heavily favours developers, has been enthusiastically embraced by the WA Labor premier Mark McGowan and WA planning minister Rita Saffioti.
According to Ms Taggart the council’s failure to hold a public meeting is a clear sign the council has already embraced the proposal, has been promoting it in the council’s website and e-newsletters as an integral part of the council strategic development for the town and wants to see it rushed through.
Ms Taggart says her concerns and those of many people she has spoken to are:
• the fact that the site does not appear to be zoned for some of the purposes and height of the development;
• the massive scale of the proposed building – in many parts up four to five storeys;
• the levelling of the ground with infill which worsens the height;
• the diminishing of the original heritage-listed Woodside hospital to be surrounded by the huge buildings proposed;
• the change of use of the site from residential to commercial with what looks like a medical centre with five consulting rooms and other uses not necessarily connected to the dementia-care facility;
• the fate of two homes on the south side of the site purchased by the developers after their owners complained about the scale of the development;
• the huge increase of traffic to and from the facility in all the surrounding streets;
and,
• the failure to consider the proposal against the recommendations of the recent Royal Commission into the deplorable state of the aged care sector.
None of these issues, she says, have been fully explained or considered by local home owners.
In a strange twist of planning logic, the two homes to the south are to be absorbed into the project as additional residential space, with the backs of the homes to be demolished and the yards of both places, approximately 1,000 square metres, to be converted to a car park.
Ms Taggart was at great pains to stress she is supportive of residential aged care facilities in the street but not on the scale presented in the application.

Electors force public meeting

Fremantle Herald, 20 August 2022

Editorial Comment
by ANDREW SMITH, publisher

CRANKY electors have sprung into action to force East Fremantle council to a public meeting over a massive aged care facility about to drop into their midst.
Just as the Chook was going to print, Joanne Taggart and Meagan Cox on behalf of local home owners around the historic Woodside hospital site submitted a petition to the council with 149 signatures, 49 more than required, to trigger the public meeting under the WA local government act.
It’s a meeting the council now has to call, for a comeuppance it simply cannot avoid. And the locals want it called before the council submits anything to the WA government’s Joint Development Assessment Panel, so they get a chance to press home their concerns.
The council has failed to call a public meeting itself, blaming the Covid-19 pandemic, and opted for its planning staff dealing one-by-one with affected residents trying to grapple with the complexities of town planning, hundreds of pages in all. Since the Herald’s first editorial comment last week the matter has blown up and has put the planning staff under a lot of pressure.
The closing date for individual submissions is now this coming Monday, August 15, at 11pm. Local residents expressing a mix of anger, bitterness, disappointment and despair want the council to explain fully and publicly all the implications of the aged care development they say is asking too much of the attractive residential area where many of them have complied with all the planning rules and invested their money to turn East Fremantle into one of Perth’s Top 10 sought-after suburbs over the past few decades.
Residents are particularly angry the council has had numerous meetings with the developer – even taking a tour to inspect a similar facility the applicant owns – and has been promoting the proposal as part of its strategic plan for the extra population the WA government wants to shoe-horn into existing built up areas: All the while doing little to rethink its too-cosy relationship with land developers who have turbocharged Perth’s urban sprawl for decades.
Residents feel the council has left the developer a clear field to manage all the development processes so far and that they have failed to call in any independent experts to make sure the council’s and residents’ interests were being protected.
Worse, many residents think it’s a huge potential conflict of interest for the WA government to be so central in deciding the current proposal through the WA planning commission when its own agency, the WA Fire and Emergency Services Superannuation Board, reports directly to the WA premier and treasurer Mark McGowan, and is also a partner and mortgagee on the site.
And it’s fast become a much wider issue than the Dalgety Street/Fortescue Street Woodside precinct with the potential sale of the Juniper aged care facility on the corner of Preston Point Road and Wolsely Street.
With the huge growth in aged care facilities East Fremantle is ‘ripe for the picking’ with its large homes and blocks for top end service providers like the current contender for the Woodside site.
The WA government planning pressure on land use planning has seen the outbreak of a number of suburban skirmishes which are fast becoming urban warfare. On the one side are developers, many cosying up to the WA government and its planning agencies, most of them ‘fat cats’ with well paid day jobs.
On the other side are disaffected and angry residents who have to devote their own time and money after hours to try to defend their interests when they know their local councils should be doing this.
More often these days local councils are either nowhere to be seen, passively hand-balling the difficult developments up to the WA government agencies or worse, actively supporting the developments against residents’ interests.
Melville council recently lost the Attadale wave park proposal – at its heart it was a huge entertainment and bar area – and in the process local electors fought tooth and nail to have the application quashed, then at the next election, unceremoniously dumped the long term mayor and many of his supporting faction.
In the 2016 battle against the Barnett Liberal government’s proposed amalgamation with Fremantle when the current mayor Jim O’Neill and the then council folded, local residents rose up and voted the measure down. All were shocked by the failure of the mayor to fight the proposal, the council’s endorsement for the mayor along with the then Fremantle mayor Brad Pettitt to take up $150,000 jobs proposed by the WA government to oversee the amalgamation, and in the process simply hand cash-strapped Fremantle council over $70 million of East Fremantle ratepayer-owned assets.
A detailed legal opinion circulated at the time by Denis McLeod asserted the Body Corporate structure of local councils, despite their existence via an Act of the Parliament, meant they were first and foremost responsible to their constituent members, that is, the ratepayers, and not to any other governments of the day. Few councils are observing this key legal principle as they tug their forelocks deferentially elsewhere.
While all who’ve spoken to the Chook say they want to see modern, state of the art residential care for the elderly and others in need, they want the development to fit into the existing area.

Many are critical of the scale of the current development – in particular a huge four and five storey buildings in an area where all the homes are single storey or limited to two storeys – and they want it to serve the local area not a wider region, especially if it means a drop in the existing local amenity.
They are particularly unhappy with what seem to be commercial scale medical consulting rooms, a wellness centre with a pool, gym and ‘exercise studio’ with a huge waiting area described as ‘incidental’ uses in the development application, as well as sizeable training facilities, community meeting spaces and a cafe designed to draw in a much wider number of people plus cars and on a scale much larger than the needs of residents in the proposed 158 bed centre warrant.
What they feel is being proposed is a large range of commercial facilities – better suited to a regional centre like downtown Fremantle – which have forced the new proposed buildings out to the boundaries and up several storeys beyond what is permitted by the current zoning. And if approved they feel it’s certain to degrade their area with a huge influx of people, traffic and parking not directly linked to the residents in care.
Most imagined the development would be much lower in scale and fit in with their attractive and important heritage precinct which includes the original historic Woodside home of William Dalgety Moore. He was one of the 1880s gold rush era Merchant Princes of Fremantle.
Moore supplied vital hardware – wheelbarrows, shovels, pans, sieves and camping equipment – to thousands of gold miners who flocked to WA, with many walking their way to the Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie goldfields and beyond.
They don’t feel this important part of the state’s history has been respected and they also feel too many of the longstanding buildings from the site’s role as a very important maternity hospital over decades are being swept off the WA heritage register, and the site, to allow so many new buildings on such a huge scale.
Disclaimer: Herald publisher Andrew Smith lives on Dalgety Street and is a former East Fremantle mayor.

Fremantle Herald, 21 July 2023.

References and Links

Charlesworth, Helene 1997, Small but Strong: a Pictorial History of the Town of East Fremantle 1897-1997, Town of East Fremantle: 30-31.

Garrick, Phyl &Chris Jeffery1987, Fremantle Hospital: A Social History to 1987, Fremantle Hospital.

Lee, Jack 1979, This is East Fremantle (The story of a town and its people), East Fremantle Town Council.

Fremantle Shipping News piece, 8 August 2023.

Woodside Facebook page

Freotopia

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 29 November, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/hospitals/woodside.html (it was last updated on 21 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.