A Sunday Adventure Resident contributor, Tim
West Australian resident, Tim, is a photographer and creative writer; he shares his love of Fremantle and happy childhood memories exploring his local ‘hood.
Ready for mischievousness we excitedly hiked through Goat Hill bush looking out for dangerous snakes and bucks (although the last of the wild goats were long gone by then) onward towards the scariest most haunted building in town - the dilapidated convict built gothic masterpiece, most famously remembered as, the old “Fremantle Asylum”. We quietly snuck over a limestone wall, across an empty yard, through a barbed wire fence, along the southern side to the seclusion of the back areas. I was never very keen to go inside but buckled under peer pressure and followed on, scrambling barefoot over shattered glass, sheets of rusty iron and piles of junk to enter through a broken window. Fifty plus years later my memory only o ers a few glimpses of, what seemed like, a huge cavernous hall filled with half-finished life-size statues that were surrounded by rickety sca olding. To a young boy, this abandoned sculpting studio, was full of frozen ghosts about to ascend mysterious staircases that led nowhere, above musty dusty floors littered with severed arms, decapitated heads and other assorted plaster body parts. We didn’t venture in very far for fear of meeting a crazy spectre straight out of the old local legends. It felt like I had survived a deadly ordeal by the time we re-emerged, quickly exiting before a plasma hand clamped onto my shoulder.
I am a proud Fremantle-born man with my strongest childhood memories the aroma of freshly baked biscuits while travelling down South Terrace past the Mills and Wares factory. Contrasted with the stench from travelling further down Cockburn Road, past Robbs Jetty abattoir and tanneries. But the most exciting thing for a boy was to go down Hampton Road past the Fremantle Prison to spot guards patrolling along the top of the wall, with real rifles slung over their shoulders. In the late 1960s, when I was a South Fremantle High School student, I planned to meet up with a couple of school friends for a Sunday adventure. It was a hot midsummers day, Fremantle was deserted with most adults generally staying indoors and, as usual, us kids ruled the streets. Our small posse of boys set o from East Street across the John Curtin High School oval, bravely walking over the top of the old cemetery. Along the way we scared each other with imaginary tales of what befell the hundreds of dead bodies buried below us. I recall jumping up against my mates at the suggestion of skeletal hands emerging out of the green to grab our ankles. Long before Ord Street was extended to run along the front of the swimming pool there was just vacant shrub land that surrounded the southern and western fence line of our destination.
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