While convicts did not arrive until 1850, the first permanent building in the Swan River colony was a jail, the Round House. The Round House was designed in 1830 by Henry Willey Revely, the colony’s chief civil engineer, and completed under contract by Richard Lewis in January 1831. Its design may have been inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the ‘Panopticon’ in which all prisoners could be observed at all times from a central point. The Round House was built with eight cells, toilets, a well, and a two-storey section for the entrance and warder’s residence, as well as a bakehouse and laundry near the entrance. In 1835 a courthouse was built beside the Round House.
The only known public execution to take place beside the Round House was of John Galvin, a boy who had been sent to Australia from the Parkhurt Reformatory on the Isle of Wight. He was hung on the 24th of February 1844 after confessing to murdering his employer’s son near Dandalup. The stocks, on which Gavin was hung, remained near the Round House until 1849 as a stark reminder of the importance attached to the maintenance of social order. Aborigines and white prisoners alike were imprisoned in the Round House in small cramped conditions, with as many as forty-three prisoners at one time. Daily rations were one and a half pounds of bread with a half a pound of salt meat; but this was only for those who served hard labour. The early construction of the Round House in arguably the most prominent location in Fremantle speaks to the desire of colonial elites to perpetuate a rigid social order, as well as, a desire for strict law and order only further fuelled by the early colonists’ real and imagined insecurity following arrival. Today, the Round House is probably the oldest existing building in Western Australia and is an important tourism site.
