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Fremantle Elders Woolstores
Credit where credit's due... a big shoutout to Greg Corbett for giving us full access to the Woolstores. He did complain to us about not giving him "kudos" so deadset legit... apologies for not doing so earlier.
The Elders woolstores in Fremantle was born out of Western Australia’s early 20th-century wool boom and wartime exigencies. During World War I, the British government arranged for the Australian government to purchase all of Australia’s wool, creating an immediate need for large storage facilities. In response, Elder Shenton & Co (a stock and station agency that would later become Elder Smith & Co in 1918) commissioned Fremantle’s wool store in 1917, opposite the railway station. This woolstores on Elder Place was built to warehouse enormous quantities of wool destined for military and civilian use. It was soon leased to the Commonwealth’s wool committee to handle the wartime stockpile of wool.
By the mid-1920s, competition in the wool trade spurred a second major woolstores development nearby. In 1924, Goldsbrough Mort & Co, a prominent eastern states wool broker, expanded into Fremantle and acquired land north of the Elders site. This included purchasing the old St John’s Anglican rectory property in 1925 for £13,000.
In October 1926, Goldsbrough Mort’s plans for a massive three-story brick wool warehouse were approved, with local architects Hobbs, Smith & Forbes designing the complex. Built by contractor J. Hawkins & Son, it involved an outlay of approximately £60,000 (including the land and a private railway siding to efficiently shunt wool bales). It was completed in 1927 and fronted what became Goldsbrough Street, marking the beginning of an extensive woolstores complex on the northern side of Fremantle’s Victoria Quay. The Goldsbrough Mort woolstores was one of the largest warehouses in the state, purpose-built to receive, grade and store wool for auction and export.
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Later Expansions
Over the following decades, the Elders and Goldsbrough Mort woolstores grew into a sprawling hub of wool handling. Goldsbrough Mort expanded its Fremantle woolstore in stages, including significant additions in 1936–1938 and 1950–1956, to increase storage capacity and accommodate modern bale-handling facilities.
The architectural firm Hobbs, Winning & Leighton (successors to the original architects) oversaw these expansions, blending new sections with the original structure’s brick-and-concrete industrial style. By the 1950s the combined complex (south and north woolstores) encompassed several acres and hundreds of thousands of square feet of floor space, including one of the largest single wool display floors in Australia for showcasing bales to buyers. The woolstores thrived through wool industry booms, like the post-WWII period and the Korean War wool boom, when Australian wool was in such high demand worldwide.
December 2021
Elder Smith & Co. and Goldsbrough Mort remained rivals until 1963, when a major merger unified them as Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort (later simply known as Elders). This corporate merger effectively placed both Fremantle woolstore complexes under one ownership.
A steel and concrete flyover bridge was constructed in 1968–69 to link the southern and northern woolstores across Goldsbrough Street at the second, third, and fourth-floor levels.
At their height, the Elders woolstores handled a vast volume of wool from WA’s agricultural regions. The site functioned as a critical node in the wool supply chain. Wool would arrive by rail or truck, be stored and displayed in Fremantle, then hauled a short distance to the adjacent port for shipment. Over the decades of operation (c.1917–1982), the Fremantle woolstores processed nearly 9.7 million bales of wool, underscoring their enormous throughput and importance. The wool industry was central to Fremantle’s economy and identity throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century and the big woolstores along Elder Place and Queen Victoria Street became familiar landmarks for generations.
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