Bookable
An Apollonaut travel guide
Limestone in Fremantle.
An introduction to Fremantle and the prison its convicts built.
On this page
Read the city
Fremantle Prison stands in Fremantle, on Walyalup. Its Gatehouse faces The Terrace, with cottages built for prison staff along the same street.
A guide can give context without turning a place into a backdrop. Notice how the prison walls meet the streets around them, and how the Gatehouse presents the prison to the town.
Limestone and convict labour
Convicts quarried the limestone for the prison on the site itself and built the walls, the Gatehouse and the Main Cell Block, following a British prison design.
Begin with a detail and ask how it was made, repaired and maintained. A photograph alone cannot tell you who cut a block or laid a wall, or the conditions in which they worked.
A prison chapter
Fremantle Prison shows one side of Western Australia’s history: a prison built by convicts and used for 140 years, now conserved as a World Heritage site.
Look at the meeting of the two: the order of the cell blocks, and the lives of the people confined within them.
Make room for context
Pair this reading with the prison’s history and the Journal. This is an introduction for visitors, not a claim that our team manages these places, commissions their conservation or represents their makers.
Read at the source
Sources & further reading
Links lead to the original publishers.
