1851-1874: Pensioner Guard Village
slwa.wa.gov.au/dead_reckoning/government_archival_records/n-s/pensioner_guards
- After the Napoleonic Wars, deserving veterans were placed on small allotments within various British colonies.
- These soldiers were called pensioners & in Australia, they were used to guard convicts.
- The pensioner guards & their families who settled at Freshwater Bay were given two lots of land beside Freshwater Bay & Butler's Swamp (now Lake Claremont)
- The early colonists farmed wetlands like Butler's Swamp. However, their tiny settlement was too far away from Perth & Fremantle for them to walk to any place of employment.
- Butler's Swamp had always been a Whadjuk settlement and the European farming of this land had obvious implications for the Noongar
- Early settlers to the area were forced to work away from home or send their wives into town to work as washerwomen.
slwa.wa.gov.au/dead_reckoning/government_archival_records/n-s/pensioner_guards
- In September 1853, a convict depot was established at Freshwater Bay.
- The depot consisted of 5 different buildings & a well.
- Between 1855-1857, it was used as an invalid depot for ticket of leave men until it was re-established as a convict depot.
- In 1862, a new stone building that could house 40 men & a warder's cottage replaced two of the wooden buildings.
- These new buildings were on the southern side of the new alignment of the Perth to Fremantle track.
- During the 1850s-1870s, the convicts worked on building & maintaining Fremantle road.
- They also quarried the stone for a small school built in 1861 on the shores of Freshwater Bay for the children of the settlement.
- The convicts were reported to be generally well behaved, not required armed guards to prevent escape or enforce road work.
- Their work on the road enabled mail to be delivered by road rather than by river.
- In 1881 the Butler's Swamp train station opened
- A mailman would set off from both Perth & Fremantle & meet at the Halfway Tree in Claremont, a Tuart that could be seen from two kilometres.
- This tree sadly met its fate in 1920 when it was pruned so severely that it died.