My Favourite Freo Street - Paget Street

In this popular Fremantle Shipping News feature – My Favourite Freo Street – we ask a range of Freo folk to nominate their favourite street and tell us why they chose it. In this contribution, Vivien Encel* – who has lived in Hilton for the past 27 years – explains why she has chosen Paget Street, Hilton as her fav.

Lined by flame trees, Paget Street runs parallel to Carrington Street, between South Street and Winterfold Road. I moved into Snook Crescent, just around the corner, around 1998. Some of these are my memories, others have been gleaned from the Fremantle local history library and from Facebook pages, a rich source of local recollection. Along the eastern side of the street, as part of a 2001 Paget Street Project by a local Aboriginal kindergarten, Hilton Primary School and the Fremantle Council, concrete pavers tell the story of times gone by in Hilton.

Hilton (or Hilton Park, as it was originally known), an outer suburb of Fremantle, was built in the late 1940s, a rare Australian example of the “garden suburb” town planning concept. Developed in England at the turn of the 20^th century the concept became influential in the 1930s and 1940s. There was to be a sense that homes stood in a large park, with generous lot sizes (the old quarter acre block), wide verges and few front fences. The design was to include a central spot where civic, community and recreation facilities would be located, radiating tree-lined crescents.

On a recent spring day I walked the length of Paget Street, starting at Winterfold Road, which marks the boundary between Hilton and Hamilton Hill across the road from the Sims Road shops, passing the four crescents which begin their journey through the centre of Hilton at Paget Street – Oldham, Snook, Nicholas and Rennie. The flame trees are not yet in full bloom, but the air was filled with the chatter of birds –koolbardi (magpies), djiti-djiti (willy wagtails), darlmoorluk (28 parrots), bandin (New Holland honeyeaters), and the more recent eastern states interlopers, the rainbow lorikeets and kookaburras.

Between Nicholas and Rennie, half-way down Paget Street, is a little hub consisting of a former police station and three shops.

I’m not sure when the police station opened, but in 1998 the Liberal Court government made the unpopular decision to close it down. Following persistent efforts by the local community and politicians, the Gallop Labor government reopened it three years later. Despite the high crime rate in Hilton, it was auctioned off by the Liberal Barnett government in 2011. The property was later bought by a local chapter of the Hells Angels as a club house. Ironically, the crime rate fell once they moved in. In February 2019 a large celebration was held to greet visiting Angels from interstate, including one who claimed to be attached to the gang’s LA chapter. Club members greeted each other on the road, which was closed by police at both ends. For two days police cars could be seen on side streets, lights flashing, and around 40 police officers lined both sides of Paget Street, stopping and questioning both Angels and local residents as they drove through.

Next door is a deli, originally Jessups, a family business owned by Laurie and Lorna Jessup. Later it was Stan’s Deli, where local kids came to play Space Invader machines. Two Italian brothers who made fresh doughnuts owned it for a while, before it became Joe’s Deli. In the early 2000s break-in attempts forced the Vietnamese owners to install steel shutter doors, which remain to this day.

The shop next door was originally Woodwards, the first self-serve grocery store in the area. By the late ‘90s, when I moved in, it was a Save the Children op shop, and later became a New Age store, selling books, crystals and other hippie artefacts, and offering fortune-telling services. It is now a Real Estate office, run by local resident Lauri Curtain.

On the corner of Rennie Crescent South is Mumma Bee’s café, a popular meeting spot for locals and the latest iteration of the café which replaced the original butcher shop, Bill the Better Butcher, run by Bill Horn, which closed down in the 1990s. Horn and his wife Norma were well-known locals, and Bill owned and trained a racehorse called Village Kid. The Horns also owned a large billy goat that wandered around the back of the shop. Local school kids on their way to Hilton Primary School, just down the road in Rennie Crescent, used to stop to feed it. In recent years various local musicians have provided weekend entertainment to café patrons in the al fresco area outside.

Heading further down towards South Street, on the other side of Rennie Crescent South, is the Hilton Community Health Centre. This was established in the 1950s at the same time as the shops, when the Hilton Park estate was subdivided by the State Housing Commission. The brick building next door is the local PCYC, which started operations in 1976, incorporating the old weatherboard Progress Hall, originally a scout hall. From 1965 Shirley Bickley operated a ballroom dancing school in the hall, which is still there, along with a gym, a toy library operated by Fremantle Public Library, playing courts and workshop spaces. For the past couple of years volunteers have run a breakfast club inside, feeding many students from Hilton Primary School.

On the corner of Rennie Crescent North is Moorni Boorn Park, once known as Black Stump Park. Local legend has it that around 1938 a large tuart tree nearby was hit by lightning, leaving a black stump. Children’s play equipment is set among grassed and treed areas in front of the “sump”, a fenced-off area of tall trees which attract magpies and other bird life.

Many of the houses along this part of the street were originally built as State housing between 1946 and the early 1950s. Some are brick, some timber-framed with fibro or weatherboard cladding.

Down the South Street end of Paget Street is a large Coles supermarket, the subject of a mass suburban protest movement a couple of years ago. A residents’ action group was formed and a very large proportion of Hilton residents signed a petition to keep the popular IGA going. Local resident Ben Lawver emerged as one of the major leaders of the well-supported but unsuccessful attempt to keep Coles and Liquorland out of the suburb. Ben’s profile in the community saw him successfully run in the council elections soon after. Ben is still very active in the community and will be standing for Mayor at the upcoming election.

Older residents remember that across the road from the corner of Paget Street and South Street, Starline Cinema was a drive-in as well as an open-air deckchair-style cinema, which was pulled down in the early 1960s. And here my walk ended, as I crossed the road, leaving Paget Street for Charlie’s café on South Street, where you can buy arguably the best coffee in Hilton.

By Vivien Encel

* Vivien Encel works as a teacher and writer and is a long term lover of Fremantle.

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