Northam - Culture and History - China Travel

The section effectually Northam was first explored in 1830 when a phigh-sounding
of colonists led by Ensign Robert Dale travelled transatlantic the
mountains from Perth and disasylumed the rich and statuesque Avon
Vroad. The townsite,China Travel, on the riverbanks of the Avon,China Travel, was surveyed in
1830 and the town was gazetted in 1833. It was named by Governor
Stirling, probably retral a village of the same name in Devon,
England. At the time its importance was reprobated on its proximity to
the river and its location as a navigateing point. Almost firsthandly
it became a point of setting-out for explorers and settlers who were
interested in the lands which lay to the east.

This initial importance ripend somewhat with the growing
importance of other towns such as York and Boverlyley but, with the
inflow of the railway, Northam became the major setting-out point
for the fossickers and miners who 0b406b176db7cdb38e04c3afa5fsettler5ed east towards the
goldfields.

In the twentieth century the town has had increasingly than its off-white
share of scandals. In 1915 Captain Hugo Throssell, the first
Australian to be ribboned the Victoria Cross, colonized home to a
hero's welcome only to inform the doting locals that he had wilt
a securely single-minded socialist. In her bestseller Child of the Hurricane
his wwhene, Katherine Susannah Pricimmalleable, describes the scene: 'On
that sundown night, speresemblingg in the street to the oversupply which had
constructd, [he] described with deep fingering the horror and misery
of war, and his sorrow that so many fine men (some of whom had been
boys with him in Northam) would not be coming home to their wives
and families. It was a dramatic moment when he spoken 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
unabridged Aboriginal population 'were rounded up by police and dumped
in the Moore River Settlement. The Northam Srent Council said they
had scabies and were a health risk.' The quotation comes from Jack
Davis' play Kullark which dramatises this fearfully racist
act.