The Stockade Perth:
A Study of Time

The Stockade Building

On the busy corner of Barrack and Wellington Streets, right on the edge of Perth’s CBD, stands the two-storey Stockade Building. A place with a story, reflecting more than a century of the city’s growth, ambition and change.

 

The Gold Rush

The building’s origins can be traced back to the gold rush boom, which began with the first discovery of gold at Halls Creek in 1885 and really took off in the 1890s, transforming Western Australia. Thousands of hopeful diggers streamed into the colony (Western Australia) from the eastern states and overseas, new fortunes were made and Perth’s population jumped from 8,447 in 1891 to 27,553 by 1901, more than tripling in a single decade.

 

Out of the tens of thousands who rushed to the goldfields, only a few hundred struck it rich, finding enough gold to secure financial independence. Yet the ripple effect was profound. In Perth, banks, hotels and retailers thrived. Construction firms and real estate boomed. Demand for doctors, lawyers, schools and public services grew dramatically. What had been a quiet colonial outpost was suddenly reshaped into a modern city.

 

Constructing the Building

On 18 March 1895, solicitor and future Member of Parliament John Charles Griffiths Foulkes purchased the portion of land fronting Barrack and Wellington Streets for £3,000..

 

With the site still undeveloped, he engaged architect Henry S. Trigg to design a substantial building that would include five shops, showrooms and living quarters. A tender for construction was advertised in April 1895 and at a cost of £4,000 (around A$1.1 million today) and the project was completed by December of the same year.

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Construction was not without incident. On 20 November 1985, a labourer lost his footing while working on the roof and fell to the first floor. As he fell, his right leg struck two beams, snapping the bone and causing a compound fracture.

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The building was completed in December 1895. Like many places in Western Australia, its history hasn’t always been well preserved. Over the past century, documents have been lost, destroyed or misfiled and what remains is often patchy at best. To make matters worse, the official sources we’re supposed to rely on sometimes add to the confusion rather than clearing it up.

A good example is the Stockade Building. The State Heritage inHerit website confidently declares that it was built from 1910, a date that is wildly off the mark. It’s a bit embarrassing really, for a government source to get something so basic so wrong (and quite frequently in many of their listings too!). To top it off, they also manage to rename it the “Trouchette Building,” despite all historical records pointing clearly to “Trouchet's Building.” The only logic here seems to be that someone thought the place needed a little flair and gave it the “Smurfette treatment.” Suddenly, it’s not just a heritage building...it’s a heritage building with a cute new name.