Perth City Council Minutes 1858-1875

This article assumes you know what the Perth City Council is, what Minutes of a Council Meeting are, and why these records dating from 1858-1975 might be useful for a historian to be able to easily refer to.

These are complete text transcriptions of the meetings held by the Perth City Council from the time when Perth was declared a City, up until the beginning of the year 1876 and the first meeting of a new City council elected in December of the preceding year. Sourced from photographs taken of first three original minute books held by the State Record Office of WA in Perth, WA, these transcriptions were made for personal research purposes for two main reasons: 1) the photos I took of the sources way back when, varied in quality from excellent to blurry mess, 2) the hands of the handwritten minutes varied in legibility from superlative to effectively unreadable. I figured if I was going to have to spend time deciphering these documents, I might as well write them down as I was going along. Its taken about five years.

These files are presented as is — solely as a guide to what is in the actual source documents. There is no guarantee whatsoever that my translations are accurate, particularly in relation to names, numbers or spellings as interpreted or typed by me. No liability will be accepted for any damage caused by any one stupid enough not to cross reference these transcriptions with the originals held in the Archive.

The reference numbers for the originals in the SRO are:

item 1
1858-12-10 – 1863-01-05 (Accumulation)
Reference code: AU WA S287- cons2826 001
item 2
1863-01-16 – 1870-05-27 (Accumulation)
Reference code: AU WA S287- cons2826 002
item 3
1870-07-01 – 1878-08-02 (Accumulation)
Reference code: AU WA S287- cons2826 003

The final part of item three has not been transcribed as it was outside the range of my interest area, which can probably be guessed at from the date of entries that I have transcribed. The pages of the minute books were not numbered, so I have invented my own numbering scheme: e.g.: 1/200 is the 200th page in volume 1.

Addendum

Since this was posted in 2021, the SRO have digitized the full collection of Perth City Council Minutes and these are now freely accessible for download through their web portal linked to the reference numbers above.

The page numbers in the new PDFs are quite different to the system I devised, as there are roughly two pages from the original manuscripts on each individual page in the new PDFs. To convert between the two systems, multiply their page number by two, but expect to have to scroll between 4 or five pages forward or back depending on how many loose or blank pages from the original books have been included in the copying process.

I will rework my transcriptions at some stage so their numberings conform with the new standard. When I do, this page will be updated.