Outer Harbour Heritage Threat

WESTERN Australia’s earliest settlers lived and died at ‘Clarence Town’ near Woodman Point from 1829 to 1831. The State heritage-listed colonial ‘treasure’ remains undisturbed. Until now.

StreetWise visited the abandoned ghost town near Fremantle where Outer Harbour proponents want to build one of two highways to the Cockburn coast. Published in the Easter issue of Freo StreetWise Magazine, the proposed Outer Harbour highways will run either into the horse exercise beach south of the Alcoa jetty in Kwinana or Thomas Peel’s abandoned site opposite the Naval Base coastal shacks overlooking Cockburn Sound.

Also known as Peel Town, Clarence was established just months after Sir James Stirling arrived in WA. Archaeologists working at the bush site in Beeliar Regional Park near Mount Brown have unearthed stone and timber buildings and cultural artefacts, including what they believe to be the graves of up to 30 to 40 people, mostly women and children, left behind by nearly 500 settlers who arrived here in three ships including Gilmore (December 15, 1829); Hooghly (February 12, 1830); and Rockingham (May 14, 1831).

The Mount Brown site is significant to the Nyoongar people who moved between estuaries and water sources along the coast, including Woodman Point, long before Europeans tried to settle here. Peel himself is said to have lived on the cliff edge now occupied by the Naval Base shacks.

Clarence Town is linked directly to the first year of settlement in WA. The community of British settlers looking for a new life in WA lasted less than two years, most having moved closer to the new Swan River Colony while others moved east. Undisturbed, the bush site has not been built over, making it a valuable historical and archaeological site.

Artefacts unearthed over the past decade include the foundations of tents erected with postholes made of  English hardwood and yellow bricks used to line fireplaces. Broken glass, ceramic, dinner plates, bottles, smoking pipes and coins.

Descendants of Peel’s failed settlement still visit the Woodman Point area to pay their respects. Clarence residents include identities such as Bailey, Elmslie, Oakley and Littleton. They lived near Gilmore doctor Littleton, who was criticised by WA Governor James Stirling as having done little to ease the plight of his fellow Clarence settlers who were ill or dying of disease and starvation.