Cantonment Hill, Fremantle
hill in Fremantle, Western Australia

Cantonment Hill is a small rise overlooking the port city of Fremantle, Western Australia. Since the early 1900s the hill and the surrounding 4-hectare (9.9-acre) precinct has been mainly used for military purposes with extensive buildings now present. It has been under the control of the Department of Defence.
The area is known by the indigenous Whadjuk people as Dwerda Weelardinup, meaning 'place of the dingo spirit' and the peak is also referred to as Walyarup, meaning 'sea eagle nest'.
Site
The Cantonment Hill site consists of a number of properties, lots 600, 601, 604 are owned by the Commonwealth Government (lot 601 is the site of Army Museum of Western Australia), lot 603 is privately owned. Lot 602 which consists of two parts totalling 1.4675 hectares (3.626 acres), lot 50 is between these two parts and covers an area of 0.8432 hectares (2.084 acres). The approximately 4 hectares (9.9 acres) site is bounded by Canning Highway, Queen Victoria Street, Burt Street and Tuckfield Street. There are a number of buildings within the site besides those of the Army museum: the heritage listed former defence housing on Queen Victoria Street, the heritage listed Naval Store (1935) on the Corner of Queen Victoria Street and Canning Highway, and a signal station built for the Fremantle Harbour Trust in 1956.
In the mid-1990s a group of local residents formed the Cantonment Hill Residents Action Group for the return of site to the City of Fremantle as per the original gift of 1892. In this lot 50 was set aside as a Bush Forever site previously identified in 1981 by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The public source identifies “Cantonment Hill, Fremantle” as hill in Fremantle, Western Australia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cantonment, Hill and Fremantle.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5034007. Authority coordinates are -32.044, 115.755. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1956, 1892 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cantonment Hill, Fremantle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.