Calista history: a settler ship, a 1950s new town and the maternity hospital

Calista is named after one of the first ships to bring settlers to the Swan River Colony. The suburb itself was built in the 1950s as part of the new town for Kwinana’s refinery workers.

How Calista got its name

Landgate records that the Calista arrived on 5 August 1829 with 73 passengers under Captain S Hawkins, among them Lionel and William Samson. The City of Kwinana names Calista, Parmelia and Medina among the neighbourhoods named after ships that brought early immigrants, with streets and reserves named after their crews and passengers. Calista was approved as a locality name on 4 March 1953.

Before the suburb

The area is part of the traditional lands of the Nyoongar people. The City of Kwinana names nearby Sloan’s Reserve, Chalk Hill and The Spectacles as important places for camping, hunting and gathering.

Tasker’s Cottage, at 2 Summerton Road within the Kwinana Golf Course, dates from the 1850s. The land was granted to Marshall MacDermott in 1842, and the stone cottage dates from about 1856. The Smirk family rented it and extended it around 1870, James Stokes added three rooms around 1910 and ran a dairy, and Frederick Tasker farmed there from 1924. The land was resumed in 1953, and after the Kwinana District Club opened in 1959 the cottage served as its clubhouse and later as the greenkeeper’s house.

How it grew

In the early 1950s the State Government agreed with the oil company now known as BP to build a refinery at Kwinana. Margaret Feilman planned a new town for about 25,000 people, with public facilities within walking distance of houses. Medina was built first, from 1952, and Calista and Parmelia followed.

The new population needed services quickly. In January 1955 the superintendent of Fremantle Hospital said Fremantle could not meet the needs of the 10,000 people now living around Rockingham and Kwinana. A ten bed maternity hospital was built on Kenton Way and opened in December 1955, and its first baby was born five days later.

Places that tell the story

The former Kwinana Maternity Hospital at 35 Kenton Way is a single storey, L-shaped weatherboard building with a verandah along its west side, and its former nurses’ quarters stand just to the south. Since 2004 it has been used by Communicare. Tasker’s Cottage is on the City of Kwinana Heritage List at the highest grade and is classified by the National Trust.

Calista today

Calista Oval is now the site of the Kwinana Adventure Park, one of the City of Kwinana’s main recreation areas, and Calista Primary School runs a Child and Parent Centre with Ngala on Harlow Road.

More about Calista

For what Calista is like to live in now, read our Calista suburb profile. If you own a property in Calista and are thinking about selling, start with buyers for your property.

Sources

• Landgate: Perth and surrounds suburb names (archived 2022)
• City of Kwinana: History and heritage
• Freotopia: Ships arriving in 1829
• inHerit: Tasker’s Cottage
• inHerit: Kwinana Maternity Hospital
• inHerit: Medina Townsite
• National Trust of Australia: Margaret Feilman 1921 to 2013

Top image: Kwinana Adventure Park at Calista Oval, September 2019. Photo: Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Dates and names are drawn from the sources above. Where sources differ, we have said so or given an approximate date.

By Key Performance Real Estate, 338 Beaufort Street, Perth