City of Gosnells Information
Gosnells is an LGA in the south east of Perth which was formally declared a city in 1977. Gosnells had by that stage been a gazetted municipal area since 1907.
Gosnells is located twenty kilometres southeast of the Perth CBD. The City covers an area of 128 km square and has an estimated population of 106,724, although a considerable amount of this is state forest merging east into the Darling Scarp.
The east coast of Australia was claimed and settled by Britain in 1788, but by the early 19th Century the British feared that the French might claim the western half of Australia led to the British settling it themselves.
Early settlers were given grants of land in proportion to the value of goods they brought with them. The first Europeans to settle the area included Thomas Hester and John Davis, who arrived in 1829. Another early settler was John Randal Phillips, who named his farm “Maddington” after Maddington in England after which the current suburb within the city of Gosnells is named.
By 1900, the population of WA had increased due to the gold rush of the 1890s. This increased the demand for land for houses, orchards and market gardens to be established close to Perth. Two major watercourses - the Southern and Canning Rivers - run through the area, and with the road to Albany and a Perth to Bunbury railway line, the land around Gosnells was divided it into smaller holdings by 1910 and the large properties provided the names of a number of the suburbs: “Kenwick” and “Maddington” gave their names to newly developed areas split off from them and “Seaforth” and “Thornlie” also gave their names to areas of housing although they were not subdivided until much later.
The piece of land that gave the city its name was purchased by developers from the family of Charles Gosnell in1903. This land was marketed as the Gosnell’s Estate.
Until 1950 the area grew slowly, with market gardens, orchards and farms established amongst the residential housing lots. After the Second World War Perth saw the largest influx of migrants since the 1890s gold rush. More subdivisions took place with the emphasis being on smaller residential lots and in the five years from 1954, “Thornlie” was transformed to a suburb of the same name complete with a bus service, shops, street lighting and rubbish collection.
A real estate boom in the Sixties saw the population of young families grow further and a proliferation of primary schools then new high schools soon followed and further development in the Seventies saw the suburbanisation of areas such as Huntingdale and Langford.
With so much redevelopment taking place, many of Gosnells’ old buildings were demolished but by the late 1980s increased value was placed on sites of historical interest.
The municipality of Gosnells is no longer small townships but rather a part of the Perth suburbs relatively close to the CBD compared to other urban areas. |
