Northam
An interesting and important early wheatbelt settlement.

"Hay Stooks" in a field between Northam & York These are the first part in the process of making chaff

Northam is located 150 m above sea level and 98 km east of Perth on the Great Eastern Highway and, like York, is one of the earliest settlements in the Central Wheatbelt area.
The town, with its beautiful setting and its population of nearly 7000, is remarkably attractive although it has a reputation for fiercely hot summers. As early as the 1850s the Anglican archdeacon of Western Australia was writing about how he 'rode to Northam in the evening through an atmosphere which felt like that at the mouth of an oven. Horses sweating copiously even at walking pace.'

The area around Northam was first explored in 1830 when a party of colonists led by Ensign Robert Dale travelled across the mountains from Perth and discovered the rich and beautiful Avon Valley.
The townsite, on the banks of the Avon, was surveyed in 1830 and the town was gazetted in 1833.
It was named by Governor Stirling, probably after a village of the same name in Devon, England. At the time its importance was based on its proximity to the river and its location as a crossing point. Almost immediately it became a point of departure for explorers and settlers who were interested in the lands which lay to the east.

This initial importance declined somewhat with the growing importance of other towns such as York and Beverley but, with the arrival of the railway, Northam became the major departure point for the fossickers and miners who headed east towards the goldfields.

In the twentieth century the town has had more than its fair share of scandals.
In 1915 Captain Hugo Throssell, the first Australian to be awarded the Victoria Cross, arrived home to a hero's welcome only to inform the adoring locals that he had become a deeply committed socialist.
In her novel Child of the Hurricane his wife, Katherine Susannah Prichard, describes the scene:
'On that dark night, speaking in the street to the crowd which had assembled, [he] described with deep feeling the horror and misery of war, and his sorrow that so many fine men (some of whom had been boys with him in Northam) wouldnot be coming home to their wives and families. It was a dramatic moment when he announced that as a result of the suffering he had seen, 'the war has made me a socialist'.'

Another of Northam's scandals occurred in 1933 when the town's entire Aboriginal population 'were rounded up by police and dumped in the Moore River Settlement. The Northam Shire Council said they had scabies and were a health risk.' The quotation comes from Jack Davis' play Kullark which dramatises this appallingly racist act.

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Tourist Information
Northam Tourist Bureau
138 Fitzgerald St
Northam WA 6401
Telephone: (08) 9622 2100
Facsimile: (08) 9622 5490