Armadale

Armadale is a suburb of Perth within the City of Armadale, located on the south-eastern edge of the Perth metropolitan region.

Armadale is a suburb of Perth within the City of Armadale, located on the south-eastern edge of the Perth metropolitan region. The major junction of the South Western and Albany Highways, which connect Perth with the South West and Great Southern regions of Western Australia respectively, is located within the suburb. It is also the terminus of the Armadale railway line, one of five major railway lines to service Perth.

Plentiful in natural resources, the area now known as Armadale was long occupied by Aboriginal people prior to the founding of the Swan River Colony. Records of encounters with the original Aboriginal inhabitants of this district are sparse in detail, but early on there was conflict between these inhabitants and the settlers, which led to the establishment of a small garrison at Kelmscott.The township of Kelmscott was gazetted in 1830, and for the next sixty years was the administrative and social hub for those colonists who took up land between present-day Kelmscott and Byford.

Interest in settlement at Kelmscott waned soon after the township was established, the district's inaccessibility (no road from Perth having yet been formed) and a general shortage of labour being factors mitigating against farming in that area. However, several large land grants had been taken up in the district, including one of over 8000 acres (Location 31) initially held by John Adams, and over the next few decades this allocated land presented a constraint to others seeking land for settlement in the area.Parts of these larger allocations were subdivided and on-sold, and smaller allocations were taken up alongside them. Thus, during the 1840s a number of farming properties were established in the foothills along the Canning River, Neerigin Brook, Wongong Brook and Beenyup Brook. Names of these early settlers included White, Stuart, Martin, Armstrong, and Mead.In late 1846 the Swan River Colony's first mine was established in the area now known as Armadale. The mine was the first undertaking of the Western Australian Mining Company, formed that year, and the object was to extract lead or copper - the ores of both metals having been in evidence. Land was purchased, and over the next few years shafts were dug by contractors.There was little yield, and in 1850 shareholders resolved to wind up the operation. One of the shafts of this mining venture is still extant south of Bedfordale Hill Road.By 1835, a road had been surveyed from Perth to Kelmscott and within a few years roads to Albany and Bunbury were also marked out enabling the establishment of overland mail services. However, it was not until 1851 that work began to properly form the road between Perth and Kelmscott.The work was assisted by the arrival of convict labour in 1852, and during the next few years the roads from Kelmscott to Albany and from Kelmscott to Pinjarra were formed. It was at the junction of the roads to Albany and Pinjarra that the township of Armadale was born when an enterprising settler saw opportunity to establish a wayside inn there, some time around 1853. The property was sold to Thomas Saw in 1856, and together with his father-in-law, Henry Gibbs, in 1856 he applied for a wayside licence to sell liquor. Their wayside inn was named the Neerigin Inn after the brook that flowed out of the Darling Range at this point.For many years the district was known as Neerigin or Narrogin, and a hotel bearing this name still stands on the site of the original wayside inn.In 1889, the northern section of the South Western Railway was constructed from Perth to what is now Armadale, and in 1897 a station was built at this location to service the sparsely scattered population of this district. It has been claimed that the station was named 'Armadale' because a name other than Neerigin had to be found to avoid confusion with the wheatbelt town of Narrogin, and that from this the town which sprung up near the station took its name. Other theories have also been put forward for the origin of the name. What is certain is that the name was not in use before the arrival of the railway.The railway provided impetus for growth in the district, and in May 1893 local residents held a public meeting to discuss the creation of a roads board that could give attention to the maintenance and development of local roads.At this point in time, roads in the district were the responsibility of the Canning, Fremantle, Jandakot, Murray and Wandering road boards for all of whom it was an outlying and unimportant area. In October 1894, Parliament agreed to the formation of a roads board which on 12 December 1894 was gazetted as the 'Kelmscott Roads Board', later to be the Armadale-Kelmscott Roads Board (1910), the Armadale-Kelmscott Shire Council (1961), then the Armadale Town Council (1979), and now the City of Armadale (1985).