Fremantle Prison now serves as one of Western Australia’s most popular tourist attractions, and as a reminder of Bon Scott’s life and crimes.
As I check in to my room at the Warders Hotel tucked away in the backstreets of Fremantle, an earworm in the form of AC/DC’s gritty hitThis hotel was once the permanent home for warders of the adjacent and notorious Fremantle Prison where a teenage Bon Scott, AC/DC’s literally short-lived but iconic lead singer, was once briefly an inmate.
Years before that event, among the most heinous Fremantle Prison guests of Her Majesty was Eric Edgar Cooke, Perth’s infamous serial killer who operated in the late 1950s and early 1960s and formed the basis for author Robert Drewe’s bookBriefly a resident and subsequently a fairly regular visitor to the historic port city of nearly 35,000 over the decades, I’ve always felt Fremantle truly makes Perth, rather than the opposite being the case.
Beyond its impressive crime and punishment quarter, the rest of Fremantle’s lively city centre – including the boho, architecturally magnificent High Street – is packed with restaurants, cafes, pubs and bars.
The prison, like the National Heritage hotel, is remarkably intact and preserved, from its imposing gatehouse entrance to its eerie gallows, where Cooke was hanged in 1964 for the murders of at least eight Perth citizens.Despite being afforded subsidised accommodation within walking distance of their workplace, the early convict-era warders, some drawn directly from the British penal system, were poorly remunerated and led working lives almost as regimented as the prisoners.
Today, Warders Hotel forms part of the Convict Establishment, a unique precinct that links the Fremantle Prison, the Fremantle Courthouse and the former police station, all within metres of each other.Proving that crime can pay, at least in the tourism context, the latter retired complex is being transformed into a 106-room accommodation facility by the owners of the Warders Hotel.
The prison’s residents are long gone, so a guest like me at the Warders Hotel, or the forthcoming Garde, can sleep much more peacefully, enjoying a host of mod-cons including espresso machines and milk frothers, no less. More than the original occupants ever had.
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