‘Warrakilla’, ‘Westover’, and ‘St Agnes’
David Goyder was the son of Frances nee Smith and South Australia’s Surveyor General George Woodroffe Goyder, and born in North Adelaide in 1862. He was schooled at St Peter’s College, after which he spent several years working on large pastoral properties in South Australia. At 21, in 1883, he joined the accounts staff of Elder, Smith and Co Ltd, and was a sub-accountant by 1894, passing his accountancy exams in 1896.
In Adelaide in 1889 he had married Margaret Hemming, and their first son, Barr, was born in June 1891. Their second son, Bruce (Old Scotch Collegian 1907-1911), was born in August 1897.
Two months later, with Bruce just a babe in arms, the Goyders came to Goldfields of Western Australia. A few weeks later they came back down to Perth and leased a home in Irvine Street, Peppermint Grove. In Fremantle, in January 1898, David established his accounting practise in Cliff Street. In March he entered into a High Street partnership with Harold Smith and Reginald Wadham (later Smith & Goyder).
He wasted no time settling into WA, and bought land at 39 Irvine Street, Peppermint Grove, and, in late 1897, contracted local architect J J Talbot Hobbs to design a home for him. Having designed the home, Hobbs called for tenders for the building of David’s limestone villa, with weatherboard stabling and tennis court, in February 1899.
Once complete, David named the home ‘Warrakilla’, after the Goyder family home in South Australia (itself named for the gold mine of the same name in the Onkaparinga), and the family moved in, in 1900.
Barr attended school just a few doors down at Miss Annie’s at 29 Irvine Street, which opened in 1900, and likely finished his schooling in Adelaide. In time, Bruce also went to Miss Annie’s, and on to Scotch College. (It is mistakenly recorded there, that one of David and Margaret’s sons was killed in Damascus, Palestine, during WWI, but neither of David’s sons served. Instead, the WWI fatality was David’s nephew Alan; the son of David’s younger brother, Alexander.)
In 1918 David and Margaret sold their home to Thomas Field, an Elder Shenton & Co manager, which became Elder Smith & Co around this time. Aside from his managing of businesses, Thomas also had strong pastoral interests. Since around 1909, he had been in partnership with Sam Phillips, one of WA’s earliest cattle kings, in H Watson, Williams & Co, of Cranbrook.
Thomas also knew David, as aside from both working in the pastoral industry, both their families were from the same Adelaide suburb of Walkerville.
Thomas, who was not married, immediately renamed the home ‘Westover’, after his family home in Adelaide, and lived there with his widowed mother Elizabeth, and his older sister, Margaret, a nurse.
In 1929, with his sister then married, Thomas and his mother returned to Adelaide and the home was rented by Dr Arthur and Mrs Violet Lyster, whose daughter Honor Lyster (1932) came to PLC in 1930. Dr Lyster took patients daily in his consulting rooms at the house, between 9-10am. In August 1932 the Lysters moved to England, leaving the home empty once more.
Around this time, at the height of the Great Depression, the home was briefly divided into two apartments. In 1933 the front was rented by James Harris and, in the rear was recently-widowed Mrs Lena Kerr, whose husband, Dr Charles Kerr, had been the doctor at Fremantle Gaol. Lena’s daughter Dr Edith Hill (Kerr 1930) had completed her education at PLC and was one of the first Old Girls to enrol in Medicine at Melbourne University, where she was then in her second year.
in 1936, the house was bought by Alexander Pearson, whose daughters Helen Bean (Pearson 1946), Meg Parker (Pearson 1948) and Janet Larard (Pearson 1953) all came through PLC.
After the war the home changed hands and tenants a few times until the late 1950s when it was bought by Irish architect Lex Hill and his wife Barbara who, with Lex’s parents Alfred and Kathleen, ran the Shiralee, a thriving basement café in Howard Street, Perth. They moved in to Irvine Street with Lex’s parents, and raised their eventual brood of four children. The Hills lived there until the early 1990s and, during this time, the home was named St Agnes.
The current owner has owned this beautiful home since 1998. They soon built the wall and carport, and restored the verandah and some stonework, which had been damaged from being closed in and used for years as a home hairdressing salon. In 2002 larger renovations began, which involved changing the (Wunderlich, Midland) tiled roof to iron, keeping seven rooms of the original house, and the cellar, to which they added a living room at the rear, a bathroom, poolroom and deck, as well as an upstairs main suite and attic.
The owners have no plans in their foreseeable future to part with their comfortable home, and remain committed to maintaining its history and charm for many years to come.
By Shannon Shannon Lovelady, PLC Archivist, Writer, and Historian