History of the Coogee Hotel & Post Office
Above: A picnic at the hotel about 1905 – probably for a sporting event or a local business’s employee picnic.
In 1898, Walter Powell, an accountant in Fremantle, was granted a liquor license for a small hotel opposite Coogee Beach known as Four-mile Well, a property owned by his wife Letitia. He called it Powell’s Coogee Hotel in his promotions, though it was most often simply known as Coogee Hotel.
See the full Coogee Hotel article on the Cockburn History website.
The Garden of the West.
He immediately set about extending and improving the property and turned the area into a sporting haven and picnic spot, calling it The garden of the West. It became known as the Honeymoon Hotel, attracting visitors from all over Perth and WA. Local clubs of cricket, hunting, cycling, shooting and horseracing all met at the hotel or stopped for a drink. Powell built a racecourse beside his hotel and set up prizes to encourage local owners to participate.
In the mid-1920s, Powell’s brother-in-law Jock McKinnon opened a small shop and post office in the hotel grounds. This took over business from the previous post office/store slightly further south, run by Powell’s siblings, Blanche and Fred, who retired to Fremantle.
Powell died in 1923, after handing the license over to his son. The license changed hands several times in the next few years, until in 1927 the De-Licensing Board decided there were too many hotels in the area and withdrew the Coogee Hotel liquor license. The hotel was offered for rent as a seaside holiday home the next year.
In 1931 the empty hotel was purchased by the Anglican Church to be a holiday home for their orphans
It was used only during the summer months for this purpose. In 1946, fearing it would be overtaken by squatters desperate for housing in a post-war shortage, they renovated it and opened a permanent home there.
The building was almost demolished.
The house remained an orphanage until 1968, when Main Roads announced it was resuming the land to build a high-capacity road to Rockingham and the building would be demolished. The orphans moved out, but the Hotel was not knocked down, instead becoming headquarters for the Coogee Progress Association and various other offices.
A north wing was added in the 1990s and the site was heritage listed in 2001. It is owned by Main Roads, and there is no concrete plan for its future.
Local history questions or anything to add? Please let us know by commenting below.
This article can also be seen on the Cockburn Libraries’ Local History blog and first appeared in the October 2015 edition of Cockburn Soundings
Hi Leah,
I am a decendant of Walter and Letitia Powell, charlotte and jock mackinnon where my great grandparents!! My mother spent a lot of her childhood at Coogee, would be so very interesting to see more about the family history, perhaps a person at azelea lee homestead? A contact, I would dearly love to bring my mother for further discussion some time, do you have a contact person for the azelea lee homestead?
Kind regards
Hi Peta,
It’s wonderful that the Powell descendants still live in the Cockburn area! The volunteers and officer at the museum would love to hear from you and your mother, so if you’d like to send them an email through the contact form here then I’m sure they can arrange a suitable time.
Regards,
Leah
I was living at the Sawseaside Anglican Home from 1949 to 50. I am looking for information on whether there was a Coogee Railway Station as I have read on TROVE newspaper reports about the Fremantle-Coogee Railway in the 50s. I recall going to the Anchorage Meatworks (and swimming at the Beach where the Omeo wreck was then accessible from the shore) to collect our meat and I thought we walked along a railway track. I am working on a book project on this subject.
Hi Victor,
There was a railway running through the area, though there was never a Coogee Railway Station. The railway was built out to Robb Jetty in 1898 with the advent of the cattle trade, and extended to Woodman Point in 1903. It was an industrial railway, used to transport livestock, limestone from the quarries and kilns at Coogee, and explosives from the magazines at Woodman Point.
It was a point of contention for Coogee residents that passengers were not allowed on the trains, and their mail still came from Fremantle by horse and cart. Occasionally a special event (like a company picnic or an agricultural show) would prompt the railway department to put on a passenger train, but according to Walter Powell of the Coogee Hotel, these were often prohibitively expensive and kept ‘a trade secret’, so nobody knew about them anyway. These trains would stop specially at Coogee Beach, where passengers would climb down as there were no platforms.
This state of affairs continued throughout the 20th century, and the only way into Fremantle from Coogee remained by road – horse and cart or bicycle, and later bus or car.
Regards,
Leah
That is very interesting and very helpful as it sort of confirms my memory that I don’t think I ever saw a train in that line in the year and half I was there. Nor when we cam down from Swan for the Christmas holidays. I am sorry I did not respond earlier. I have also had a dialogue with Christine Elaine from Azelia on this subject and that sort of took over. I was also interested in the Coogee Bus service on which we travelled to school, I went to Beaconsfield Primary and my memory of the bus was it was a small type charabanc type with a protruding engine, Ford I think and blue and cream. I found an image of the one of the larger regular buses that I sent to Christine.
Hi Leah, I am part of the team renovating the Coogee Hotel currently. Im compiling all the information i can find about Walter and his family and the uses of the hotel till now. Does anyone know any great stories?? I had heard a rumour that Walter used to water down the whisky but i can’t find anything to back that up. We would like to pay homage to its history somehow for patrons to see. I would love to know how to go about getting copies of images. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
Hi Susan,
The watering the whisky story is true – see the article from 1899 here!
I’ve sent you an email with more info.
-Leah