Established on 21 January 1851, the Swan River Mechanics' Institute was the Swan River Colony's first cultural centre. In time it was to house an extensive and well-used subscription library and a natural history collection including botanical, zoological and mineral specimens. In 1909 it was renamed Perth Literary Institute. [1] The institute was located on the south-west corner of Pier and Hay Streets in Perth.
Its founding president was Surveyor-General John Septimus Roe, who held the position until his death in 1878. Other officers included Joseph Hamblin (chairman), Bernard Smith (treasurer) and Harry Hughes (secretary). [2] [3] Roe's botanical collection, which was kept at the institute, won him membership of the Linnean Society of London. The second president was Luke Leake, who held the position until his death in 1886. [1]
Although ostensibly formed for the educational benefit of the working classes, the Mechanics' Institute was mostly dominated and sponsored by men of the middle class [4] and tended to pursue mostly literary goals as well as providing a recreational facility for that group. Hay describes the activities: "the educated gentry 'improved' the workers through the medium of occasional lectures, discussion classes which emerged from literary meetings, the establishment of a reading room and a project to build a scientific museum". [5] Institute rules prevented discussion of current political issues; in 1856 a carpenter by the name of Joseph Chester was expelled from the Institute for criticising government policies. [6]
The Swan River Mechanics' Institute was the first such organisation formed in the colony, followed closely by the Fremantle Mechanics Institute on 8 August 1851. [7] Other mechanics' institutes were formed in Albany in 1853, Busselton and York in 1861, Guildford (as a branch of the Swan River Mechanics' Institute) in 1862, Greenough in 1865, Northam and Toodyay in 1866, and Bunbury in 1867. [8] Ex-convicts were not accepted as Mechanics' Institute members and hence a number of alternative working men's associations arose in the 1860s to cater for working classes. Membership was by subscription, and required no qualification other than that the applicant be a respectable member of the community.
Early meetings took place at the Court House and at a temporary reading room at the Boys' School in Murray Street. [9]
A site for a Mechanics Institute building in Howick St (later Hay St) was gifted by the government and surveyed in August 1851. The land was vested in trustees, and managed by a committee appointed by its members. [5] [10] The corner stone for the new building was laid by Governor Fitzgerald on 25 May 1852. [11]
Moves to establish a permanent museum in the city during the 1880s saw the Institute's specimen collections move to premises at the recently closed Perth Gaol in 1892. These collections laid the foundations of what became the Western Australian Museum.
In 1899 the original building was replaced by spacious two storey premises on the same site, which included a concert hall with seating for 400 people and a lodge room with accommodation for another 200. The building's architect was William G. Wolf, who also designed His Majesty's Theatre and Hotel in Hay Street. [12] The foundation stone for the new building was laid by the Premier Sir John Forrest on 20 June 1898. [13] The premier was a former Institute president. The West Australian described the building:
[The hall] is a magnificent apartment, 70 feet x 31 feet, with platform, dressing rooms, and so forth. This and all the rooms on the same floor facing the street have French casements opening on to the balcony which surrounds the building. The edifice is in the Italian style of architecture, and the main entrance to the institute is from Hay Street. There are six shops in the building facing the same street, and a block of offices in Pier-street for letting purposes. The room in which the lending library is to be situated is 40ft. x 25ft., and faces Pier street, and the reading room measures 40ft. x 24ft.
At the time of its opening in 1899, the library contained 6,000 volumes and membership was 389. [12] The cost of the building was £10,721.
Its name was changed to Perth Literary Institute in December 1909 [14] and at about the same time its inventory showed the library to contain 564 books related to history; biography, 359; essays, 382; travel and geography, 421; general science, 275; social science, philosophy, and theology, 238; poetry and the drama, 199; serial and miscellaneous, 333; statistical and works of reference, 398; and fiction, 6,274, and a grand total of 9,443 volumes. [15]
In 1957 the institute was taken over by the Perth City Council and became City of Perth Library. [18] Soon after the Institute's subscription library was replaced by a free lending library.
The City of Perth library was established in the Council House in 1963 and remained there until 1995.
The Perth Literary Institute building [19] was demolished sometime in the 1970s and the site now includes the Perth Law Chambers. [20]
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to Swan River Mechanics' Institute . |
The Swan River is a river in the south west of Western Australia. Its Noongar Aboriginal name is the Derbarl Yerrigan. The river runs through the metropolitan area of Perth, Western Australia's capital and largest city.
John Septimus Roe was the first Surveyor-General of Western Australia. He was a renowned explorer, a member of Western Australia's legislative and executive councils for nearly 40 years.
Subiaco (known colloquially as Subi) is an inner western suburb of Perth, Western Australia, north-west of Kings Park within the boundaries of the City of Subiaco. Historically a working class suburb containing a mixture of industrial and commercial land uses, since the 1990s the area has been one of Australia’s most celebrated urban redevelopment projects. It remains a predominantly low-rise, urban village neighbourhood centred around Subiaco train station and Rokeby Road.
The Causeway is an arterial traffic crossing in Perth, Western Australia, linking the inner-city suburbs of East Perth and Victoria Park. It is carried over the Swan River at the eastern end of Perth Water by two bridges on either side of Heirisson Island. The current Causeway is the third structure to have been built across the river at this point.
WAY 79, also referred to as WAY '79 and WAY 1979, was the official 1979 sesquicentennial celebration of the European colonisation of Western Australia.
The Foundation of Perth 1829 is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by George Pitt Morison. It depicts a reconstruction of the ceremony by which the town of Perth, Western Australia was founded on 12 August 1829. Morison painted the work as part of Western Australia's centenary celebrations, and presented it to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in February 1929.
Barrack Street is one of two major cross-streets in the central business district of Perth, Western Australia. Together with St Georges Terrace, Wellington Street and William Street it defines the boundary of the main shopping precinct of the central city.
County Peak, also known as Mt Quajabin or Quajabin Peak is located in the western zone of the West Australian Wheatbelt, about 120 km south-east of Perth.
Perth was founded by Captain James Stirling in 1829 as the administrative centre of the Swan River Colony. It gained city status in 1856 and was promoted to the status of a Lord Mayorality in 1929. The city inherited its name due to the influence of Sir George Murray, then Member of Parliament for Perthshire and Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.
The Perth Gaol was a gaol (jail) built in Perth, the state capital of Western Australia, between 1854 and 1856 to house convicts and other prisoners. It is located just west of Beaufort Street.
George Thomas Temple-Poole was a British architect and public servant, primarily known for his work in Western Australia from 1885.
Bremer Bay is a coastal town situated on the south coast of Western Australia in the Great Southern region between Albany and Esperance, at the mouth of the Bremer River. Bremer Bay is 515 kilometres (320 mi) southeast of the state capital, Perth, and 180 kilometres (112 mi) east of Albany.
Claise Brook is a stream which empties into Claisebrook Cove before running into the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia. The area surrounding the stream is on the outskirts of the Perth CBD and is part of the suburb of East Perth. Claise Brook was once an important water course from which the numerous interconnected fresh water lakes north of Perth emptied into during the wet season before entering the Swan River.
The 1829 town plan of Perth, Western Australia was an elongated grid pattern that reflected the city planning principles of the day, and was typical of colonial Williamsburg (1699) and the Edinburgh "new town" (1768). The plan expressed enlightenment principles of the town as the seat of civic power within a large and productive agricultural hinterland. Contrary to these ideals, Perth became the commercial center of the colony, and later, metropolitan region with a layout that has remained relatively unchanged to the present day.
William Lane Milligan (1795–1851) was a British military surgeon. He became an early resident of the Swan River Colony in Western Australia.
Richard Gallop was among the first European settlers to arrive in the newly established Swan River Colony of Western Australia. He landed there on 6 October 1829 aboard the ship Lotus, accompanied by his brothers James and Edward. They were recruited as agricultural labourers from the English village of Sullington in West Sussex, and were indentured to work for Colonel Peter Latour for seven years.
The City of Perth Library is a public library service provided by the City of Perth. The library is located on Hay Street, next to the Perth Town Hall. It is part of the redevelopment of Cathedral Square, located between St Georges Terrace and Hay, Barrack and Pier Streets.
Samuel Pole Phillips was a prominent Australian pastoralist and politician.
Pier Street is a street in the central business district of Perth, Western Australia. It runs from St Georges Terrace to Wellington Street, continuing immediately north of the railway until Brisbane Street very close to where Brisbane Street meets Bulwer Street.