ARTIST UNKNOWN
late 19th century

This small group of amateur watercolours was recently discovered in the U.K., in one of three albums formerly belonging to Henrietta Elizabeth Trimmer (1805 - 1889) of Rushmore Hall, Suffolk. One of these albums, which included a view of Strawberry Hill, near Albany, was acquired by the National Trust of Australia (W.A.). Amongst the European picture postcards, copies of engravings, caricatures, transcriptions of poetry, etc. commonly found in such domestic scrapbooks, another of the three also contained several antipodean souvenirs, probably sent by family members. Three of Mrs Trimmer's brothers-in-law migrated to Western Australia in 1829; one, Arthur Trimmer, was part of Governor Stirling and John Septimus Roe's exploring expedition from the Swan River Colony overland to Albany in 1835, and was later appointed magistrate at Albany.

Although the authorship and date of the present works remains uncertain, they are clearly of Western Australian origin, and depict aspects of the coastline at the mouth of the Swan River, showing (inter alia) H.W. Reveley's 1830 Round House ('the great jail upon the hill'), (1) the second (1875) Fremantle lighthouse, and Mews' boat yard (formerly a whaling station). Together, they form a rare and interesting record of the now much altered Fremantle foreshore as it appeared at the end of the 19th century.

(1) Janet Millett, An Australian Parsonage, or, The Settler and the Savage in Western Australia, Edward Stanford, London, 1872, p. 12