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Fremantle Amherst Block
The warehouse that was once located at 30-32 Amherst Street in Fremantle was owned by Antonio & Basilio Paino. The City of Fremantle’s Knutsford Street East Local Structure Plan, dated 25 April 2006, lists the current site use as being that of furniture manufacturing, automotive repair and truck/machine storage, although part of the site or warehouse at the time was leased to a third party.
Neither properties appear to have ever been listed on any property listing websites and both were demolished at the same time in mid-2014.
The business name for Antonio & Basilio Paino was first registered on 08 July 1982 as Paino Bros and cancelled on 14 August 2006.
Urban Archaeology are listed on many junk index websites as still residing at 30 Amherst Street today. ASIC online holds three cancelled registrations for that business name, with an original registration date being that of 07 May 2002.
The Australian Business Register lists the company name as registered in Queensland with an entity name of The Trustee for Enright Health Trust. Trading names include Urban Archaeology and Jeweller to the Lost, which either sounds like a magic-potion type health cure cult, an Indiana Jones jewellery type retailer or finding something lost in the new. Interestingly, their first date for a business/company registration is 07 May 2003, a year after the WA registration so it could be assumed that it is the same business.
The ACT business name has since been cancelled, as well as five other Urban Archaeology registrations and a further current name is registered as The Urban Archaeologist.
Aside from an array of journal articles by the university educated, the first Google listing for Urban Archaeology is for a website based in Canberra with a second name of Canberra Antiques Centre.
A search of The Urban Archaeologist is limited to journal articles and books with nothing else.
Jeweller to the Lost appears to have hit the target with a Brisbane-based website of a nice-looking couple, both in the “successful partnership” of a design and jewerelly business.
A further interesting find is that the name associated with the Western Australia business is neither that of the QLD couple’s but that could be a reason of many. Furthermore, a junk listing website states the Fremantle address’ industry as ‘Salvage Yards, Demolition Yards &/or Second Hand Building Materials,’ something certainly more credible and typical for the area the warehouse was located in, rather than artistic designs and jewellery so… enough said.
Fremantle Knutsford Block
TBC
July 2022
August 2023
Fremantle Knutsford Oil Block
It’s the usual crap when you try and find history on some places where it’s almost non-existent and funny enough, if it involves the Government, especially like the Commonwealth Government or Department of Defence, wasted hours go by with fruitless results to show for it.
So the Knutsford Block on the corner of Amherst Street in Fremantle, once contained four petroleum distillate fuel oil storage tanks with a capacity of 48,400kl. They were built in 1947 or earlier and were linked to the fuel storage tanks in Bracks Street, North Fremantle, via an inter-connected pipeline. The Knutsford Block appears to have been known as the Knutsford Street Distillate Storage Facility, although a few other brief one-liner sources refer to it as a Depot, in lieu of a Facility. This being said due to results of one source most likely being found with a preferential term over the other.
The State Government had been proposing the idea for fuel storage tanks to be built in North Fremantle between 1937 and 1939 and it appears that they may have started with four in that location too. It’s hard to tell how many, by 1947, were solely for the use of the Commonwealth Government but it appears at one point (later in time at least), they may have had as many as nine tanks.
It’s hard to say whether or not this had been the case for decades or just from the mid-90s, it appears that the tanks were being leased by Caltex from the Commonwealth Government. Specifically, the Royal Australian Navy, who were responsible for the tanks although they certainly didn’t appear to be so forthcoming with responsibility when the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) were requesting to address levels of contamination from the site that had exceeded the EPA’s current risk criterion.
As a result, the EPA intended to resolve the risk issue after consultation with the City of Fremantle and Department of Mines, seemingly with or without the Navy’s participation.
Perhaps this is a further reason why very limited information is available on this site, since it was cleared in 2005. Whatever contamination has existed throughout these years (oils, heavy metals and chemicals, as well as its extent), whether or not remediation had taken place (or perhaps the intention was to wait for nature to take its course and rid of most of the contamination through to the groundwater and then worry about it then), it’s difficult to tell.
