The Coogee Hotel is a historic former hotel and orphanage located in Coogee, south of Fremantle in the City of Cockburn. After the Second World War, it was used as an orphanage by the Anglican Diocese of Perth. The building still stands on Cockburn Road, and is heritage listed by the State Government of Western Australia. In 2020, it is being redeveloped as a restaurant.
Origins
In 1898, Walter Powell, a Fremantle clerk and merchant, was granted a publican's license to trade in liquor at a hotel opposite Coogee Beach. Powell had applied for this license and been rejected at least twice before, on the grounds that there was no need for another hotel in the area. There was already a small building on the site, an area known as Four-mile Well, with two bedrooms and two sitting rooms, owned by Powell's wife Letitia. The land was purchased in 1890, and definitely occupied by 1898. An earlier proposal had been to operate under the name The Traveller's Rest, but the name finally decided on was the Coogee Hotel, also called Powell's Coogee Hotel.
As soon as his license was granted, Powell commissioned extensions to be made in stone. The hotel would have twelve rooms altogether, including the public bar and three rooms for rent, as well as space for the family to live.
Sports and racing
Powell's early years were focused on sports in the area. He encouraged local clubs to meet in the hotel or to modify their routes in order to pass by. He offered prizes to be given by the clubs in their competitions, and once awarded a prize to the first participant in a marathon race to pass the hotel. Cycling, cricket, hunting and shooting clubs all used the hotel as a base or a rest point in the first decade of the twentieth century.
He developed an unregistered racecourse on the land to the rear of the hotel, and held the first race on Easter Saturday, 1899. Four races were run: maiden pony race, handicap pony race, Galloway Handicap, and Coogee Stakes Handicap. Powell donated all the prizes himself. The racecourse was shaped like a tennis racket, with the handle being the home strait, and the races were treated as a day out for many local families who came to picnic on the hill above the hotel.
The racecourse was in operation for less than five years, run by Powell between 1899 and 1900, and by a local racing syndicate from 1903 to 1904.
Boom years
In the early years of the twentieth century, Powell advertised his hotel and the Coogee area extensively in Western Australian newspapers, calling Coogee 'The garden of the West'. Locals knew it as a 'honeymoon hotel', with pleasant gardens and easy access to the beach. Powell actively sought new business, catering for large parties and picnics, like the Railway Institute employees' annual picnic, held in the grounds of the hotel for the first time in 1909. Picnics such as these, and parties like the race and sports meetings, could regularly bring crowds of over two hundred people into the hotel's vicinity.
Regular patrons of the hotel were local meat workers, lime kiln operators, market gardeners, and labourers. They often got the hotel into trouble with the law, stealing from other patrons and causing fights. But Powell himself was brought up in front of a court more than once, for Sunday trading and trading outside of proscribed hours, for dirty premises and allowing drunkenness, and once for watering down his whisky. The hotel was an established social meeting point for the market gardening and factory district, until Powell's death in 1923.
Post office and store
In the mid-1920s, a small limestone building was erected on the hotel grounds, just to the north of the hotel itself. This was originally run as a store, serving the surrounding area with smallgoods and groceries. It was built by a Mr. Burnett, whose daughter Ruby married Powell's son, Frank, and whose family initially ran the store. It was taken over by Jock McKinnon, who married Powell's daughter Lottie. There was a post office and store located less than a mile to the south of the hotel, run by Powell's sister Blanche and brother Fred. Upon their retirement in 1927, the post office was relocated to the store on the hotel land. On her death in 1951, Lottie McKinnon was known as the postmistress at Coogee.