Making my way up a creaky, carpeted staircase, I step into what feels like a different world – a building I’ve passed hundreds of times, yet never set foot in. I am standing on the first level of Fremantle’s former P&O hotel, and am immediately taken aback by its weathered, almost cinematic beauty: tall stained glass windows, dark timber mouldings and an iron-framed balcony peering over High Street like some forgotten lookout.
First built about 1870 and renovated during the gold-rush era, for almost a century this building was a magnet for wharfies and crewmen, with its 31 rooms and a raucous sailors’ bar known as the Cockpit. But despite being in the centre of Fremantle’s busiest street, this historical relic has largely remained empty and off limits for decades.
Left: Sculptural artist Abdul Rahman Abdullah’s work, In the name, draws on his childhood when the scarcity of halal meat brought animal slaughter and butchery into his family’s suburban backyard. Right: A chandelier forms part of his work Wednesday’s Child
But on 29 and 30 November, the public are invited inside for Room Service, a maze of performances and installations that forms part of the Fremantle Biennale. For the past three weeks, more than 40 musicians, poets, painters and multimedia artists have occupied the upper floor, creating varied works in response to its chequered history.
“I don’t think people realise how much latent creative output becomes possible when property owners have the will and vision to back a simple idea,” says musician Danielle Caruana AKA Mama Kin, who co-curated Room Service with Tom Mùller. “It activates our greatest asset of all, which is our ideas.”
It was in the P&O hotel’s ground floor rooms that a group of local artists, including Caruana, meeting weekly under the name Culture Club, first began to wonder why a site of such character and centrality remained mostly inaccessible. They found themselves circling the same question: what could this place become if artists were allowed in?
Nic Brundson has created an installation that brings together a custom-made scent, hand-crafted furniture, and naturally died textiles to evoke precolonial Fremantle
So when the building’s current owners, Nic Trimboli and Adrian Fini – behind Fremantle hospitality ventures such as Little Creatures and Bread in Common – offered the venue for use as part of the biennale, Caruana and her collaborators leapt at the opportunity. Trimboli and Fini plan to revive the P&O as a hotel, but for now its upstairs rooms belong to the artists.
When I visit, composer Iain Grandage and cellist and vocalist Mel Robinson are setting up for a cello duet in one of the hotel’s bathrooms. Drawn to the building’s maritime past and the crew who lodged here – “often completely alone”, as Grandage says – the duo created a new interpretation of the 19th-century sailor song Little Fish.
“If you strip it away, you get a gut-wrenching kind of loneliness,” Robinson says. “A sailor sings a love song to a fish.” A pre-recorded soundtrack of waves and water sounds will play alongside their live performance, forming what Robinson calls “an oceanic kind of sound installation”.
Musician and former Perth festival artistic director Iain Grandage and his partner Mel Robinson
Further up the corridor, Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar artist Zali Morgan has lined a small room with recycled brown paper, awash with watercolours. Her starting point was the building’s location: a few minutes’ walk from the Round House, a former colonial prison where many Aboriginal men were held before being sent to a labour camp on Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) in the 19th century.
Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar Artist Zali Morgan’s painting of the nearby Round House responds to ‘the heaviness of the site’. It was the Swan River Colony’s first prison, where Aboriginal prisoners were kept before being sent to Rottnest Island for forced labour
“I couldn’t really make work without addressing that history of the site, and the colonial legacy that Fremantle is built on,” Morgan says. Her “gestural watercolour marks” respond, as she puts it, to “the heaviness of the site”, turning the room into a quiet, hand-painted reckoning with place.
Another room is filled with a chorus of animated faces drawn from the hotel’s past: sailors, nurses, bellboys and a beloved 19th-century landlady. The work, by Ellen Broadhurst, features rotoscoped faces which she projected over a large papier-mache head. “This is the ghost of everyone who’s ever been in this room,” she says. “They’re all kind of in hell and heaven, in purgatory and in this room at once.”
Ellen Broadhurst with her work, The Golem of Room 15
Artist Guy Louden has turned his room into a playable climate dystopia: Wet End, a jetski game set in a future Fremantle swallowed by rising seas. The game is deliberately “trashy, oversaturated … over-juiced and turbo,” he says. In it, a dolphin declares “we’re totally fucked” and a sea god replies “capitalism is cancer”. Wet End’s upbeat development-speak, borrowed from property boosterism, reflects what Louden calls our “split vision” – knowing catastrophe is coming while still pursuing growth. “It’s about complicity,” he says. “You’re not outside the problem, you’re racing in it.”
Architect Nic Brunsdon has taken a different approach, stripping the room back to imagine what stood here long before the hotel – the trees, soil and coastal ecology that once shaped this part of Fremantle. Working with a natural-dye researcher, a scent artist, a sculptor and a furniture maker, he has created a quiet, sensory refuge of marri timber, hand-carved sandstone, bush aromas and vast rust-coloured curtains. The idea, he says, was to build “a meditative little pause space” that transports visitors to an imagined pre-colonial landscape.
Nic Brunsdon built a ‘meditative little pause space’ involving sculpture and scent to evoke precolonial Fremantle
As we loop back around to the beginning, Caruana shows me the bathroom studio where she will be presenting a sound-led installation made with film-maker Luna Laure. The shower stall will be darkened, with a holographic figure flickering inside it, accompanied by a looping soundtrack Caruana composed around the ritual of release. “It’s this idea of like, rinse, reflect, repeat,” she says.
Later, as we make our way down the staircase, Caruana reflects on what Room Service is really revealing. “Empty spaces are a vacuum,” she says. “They create these kind of gaps in continuity. They create gaps in an experience of connectivity.”
She hopes more property owners recognise the opportunity in inviting artists and creators into these gaps. “There’s an abundance of people … being like, can we use your space?” And the shift, she adds, is remarkably simple. “It doesn’t take much to say yes.”
Room Service takes place 29-30 November at P&O hotel, 25 High Street, Fremantle, as part of the Fremantle Biennale
