Making my way up a creaky, carpeted staircase, I step into what feels like a different world \u2013 a building I\u2019ve passed hundreds of times, yet never set foot in. I am standing on the first level of Fremantle\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 bar known as the Cockpit. But despite being in the centre of Fremantle\u2019s busiest street, this historical relic has largely remained empty and off limits for decades.<\/p>\n
Left: Sculptural artist Abdul Rahman Abdullah\u2019s work, In the name, draws on his childhood when the scarcity of halal meat brought animal slaughter and butchery into his family\u2019s suburban backyard. Right: A chandelier forms part of his work Wednesday\u2019s Child<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think people realise how much latent creative output becomes possible when property owners have the will and vision to back a simple idea,\u201d says musician Danielle Caruana AKA Mama Kin, who co-curated Room Service with Tom M\u00f9ller. \u201cIt activates our greatest asset of all, which is our ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was in the P&O hotel\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
Nic Brundson has created an installation that brings together a custom-made scent, hand-crafted furniture, and naturally died textiles to evoke precolonial Fremantle<\/p>\n
So when the building\u2019s current owners, Nic Trimboli and Adrian Fini \u2013 behind Fremantle hospitality ventures such as Little Creatures and Bread in Common \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
When I visit, composer Iain Grandage and cellist and vocalist Mel Robinson are setting up for a cello duet in one of the hotel\u2019s bathrooms. Drawn to the building\u2019s maritime past and the crew who lodged here \u2013 \u201coften completely alone\u201d, as Grandage says \u2013 the duo created a new interpretation of the 19th-century sailor song Little Fish. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you strip it away, you get a gut-wrenching kind of loneliness,\u201d Robinson says. \u201cA sailor sings a love song to a fish.\u201d A pre-recorded soundtrack of waves and water sounds will play alongside their live performance, forming what Robinson calls \u201can oceanic kind of sound installation\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s location: a few minutes\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
Whadjuk Balladong and Wilman Noongar Artist Zali Morgan\u2019s painting of the nearby Round House responds to \u2018the heaviness of the site\u2019. It was the Swan River Colony\u2019s first prison, where Aboriginal prisoners were kept before being sent to Rottnest Island for forced labour<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t really make work without addressing that history of the site, and the colonial legacy that Fremantle is built on,\u201d Morgan says. Her \u201cgestural watercolour marks\u201d respond, as she puts it, to \u201cthe heaviness of the site\u201d, turning the room into a quiet, hand-painted reckoning with place.<\/p>\n
Another room is filled with a chorus of animated faces drawn from the hotel\u2019s 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. \u201cThis is the ghost of everyone who\u2019s ever been in this room,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re all kind of in hell and heaven, in purgatory and in this room at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201ctrashy, oversaturated \u2026 over-juiced and turbo,\u201d he says. In it, a dolphin declares \u201cwe\u2019re totally fucked\u201d and a sea god replies \u201ccapitalism is cancer\u201d. Wet End\u2019s upbeat development-speak, borrowed from property boosterism, reflects what Louden calls our \u201csplit vision\u201d \u2013 knowing catastrophe is coming while still pursuing growth. \u201cIt\u2019s about complicity,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re not outside the problem, you\u2019re racing in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Architect Nic Brunsdon has taken a different approach, stripping the room back to imagine what stood here long before the hotel \u2013 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 \u201ca meditative little pause space\u201d that transports visitors to an imagined pre-colonial landscape.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt\u2019s this idea of like, rinse, reflect, repeat,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Later, as we make our way down the staircase, Caruana reflects on what Room Service is really revealing. \u201cEmpty spaces are a vacuum,\u201d she says. \u201cThey create these kind of gaps in continuity. They create gaps in an experience of connectivity.\u201d <\/p>\n
She hopes more property owners recognise the opportunity in inviting artists and creators into these gaps. \u201cThere\u2019s an abundance of people \u2026 being like, can we use your space?\u201d And the shift, she adds, is remarkably simple. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t take much to say yes.\u201d<\/p>\n