Step back in time | The dark history of Fremantle Arts Centre

The Fremantle Arts Centre is a beloved and celebrated institution within the community.

However, we shouldn’t forget that its history is not so pretty.

Today people know it for: the beautiful echoes of music bouncing around the limestone walls on balmy summer Sunday nights that can be pleasantly heard throughout the city; a courtyard that provides mottled shade to picnic rugs and parents with their babies and preschool-aged kids enjoying coffees and snacks; and the art courses and exhibitions that are a constant delight for all ages throughout the year.

If we go back to the beginning, the Gothic revival style building constructed by convicts over four years starting in 1861 was a purposebuilt institution named Fremantle Lunatic Asylum.

It was for mentally ill convicts and settlers who were often individuals that the colonial authorities deemed to be simply uncooperative or problematic.

Once entering the 1.8m tall guarded walls, prisoners (as they were called) often remained there anywhere between 20–40 years or until their death. Their heads were shaved, and they were housed in cells 2.7m by 2.3m with separate quarters for men away from the women and children.

The documented abuse and neglect experienced by inmates is harrowing and an important reminder of the need to treat all people with respect and compassion, but particularly those that are vulnerable.

The asylum eventually became regarded as unsuitable due to overcrowding and the inability to separate violent patients from docile ones, however its conversion to a Women’s Home in 1909 did not do much to change the treatment of its detainees.

The Women’s Home housed predominantly poverty-stricken women abandoned by their families for ‘socially deviant’ behaviours—there were many state ward girls and women imprisoned for prostitution, promiscuity and suffering from debilitating and untreated venereal diseases; elderly women; and unmarried women.

The Home continued to operate with little improvement until 1942. Between 1942 and 1973 the building was a WWII Navy Submarine Depot and then a technical college.

Since 1973 it has been known as the Fremantle Arts Centre—an institution that champions art, literature, and history. While the centre celebrates the life-affirming joy of art and music (its recent exhibition Hundreds and Thousands that ended in January provided colour saturated immersive artwork for children), it has also taken inspiration from its history, for example the Lost and Found company performing Medee in 2015.

The opera, by Darius and Madeleine Milhaud and based on Euripides’ Medea from Greek mythology, explores a woman’s psychology in a dysfunctional family dynamic who makes the confronting decision to kill her two sons after being abandoned by her husband.

The choice to perform the opera within this Fremantle building was very deliberate. One can only hope that the ghosts haunting the limestone structure today can take some solace in the unfettered cultural expression of the Fremantle Arts Centre, particularly when its art provides a voice to those who have been similarly marginalised and cruelly mistreated.

However, it’s also worth saying that the eerie feeling that does often overcome its visitors could be the past inviting us to reflect on the current plight of the marginalised in Australia. Asylum seekers indefinitely detained on our shores, the abuse of teenagers in juvenile detention centres and the growing rate of homelessness for elderly women and victims of domestic abuse are sobering stories we hear in the news that are not a far cry from the dark history of the Fremantle Arts Centre. Learn more about Fremantle’s past at the Fremantle History Centre.

Its collection includes books, photos, biographical files, newspapers, council minutes and agendas, publications, maps and plans.