Embleton history: a settler’s name and a State Housing suburb built in four years

Embleton carries the name of a settler who came to the Swan River Colony in 1829, but the suburb itself was built in about four years in the early 1960s.

How Embleton got its name

Landgate records that the name honours an early settler, George Embleton, who arrived in the colony in 1829 as a servant of Dr John Watley, who settled in the Bayswater district and died in 1830. The City of Bayswater’s thematic history spells the family Whatley: it says the Embletons were servants of John and Anne Whatley, who took up Swan Location T, the land between today’s Slade Street and Tonkin Highway. After John Whatley’s death Anne and the children left the colony, but the Embletons stayed on and did well as hotel keepers. Rica Erickson’s dictionary of early Western Australians lists George Embleton arriving on the Atwick on 19 October 1829 and running the Commercial Hotel in 1844.

Before the suburb

The City’s thematic history places the district within the Whadjuk dialect groups of the Noongar peoples. Embleton itself was largely undeveloped until the late 1950s.

How it grew

The State heritage record for the Embleton Precinct says the suburb appeared very quickly between 1959 and 1963 and was in effect a public housing precinct, so its single-storey brick and tile houses share a uniform style. The City’s local history says this large new area of State housing in the newly formed suburb of Embleton fuelled Bayswater’s growth. Broun Avenue was built in the early 1960s to serve the new population, and Embleton Primary School was built in 1961. The school once had more than 900 students.

Places that tell the story

A 1998 heritage identification singled out McKenzie Way, Tassell Street and part of Broun Avenue as good examples of the original State Housing. Embleton Primary School on Priestley Street tells the later story too: its enrolment fell as the area aged, and its upper buildings now house staff of the School of Special Educational Needs: Sensory.

Embleton today

Many of the former State Housing homes have been sold into private ownership, and the heritage record notes it is unclear how many original houses remain. The biggest recent change is Morley Station, opened beside Embleton on 8 December 2024 in the Tonkin Highway median under the Broun Avenue bridge.

More about Embleton

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

Sources

• Landgate: Perth and surrounds suburb names (archived 2022)
• City of Bayswater: Local Heritage Survey Thematic History and Framework (2020)
• City of Bayswater: Local history
• inHerit: Embleton Precinct
• Freotopia: George Embleton (from Erickson, Dictionary of Western Australians)
• Embleton Primary School: our history
• METRONET: Morley-Ellenbrook Line stations

Top image: Embleton Primary School, built in 1961 for the new State Housing suburb, photographed in 2021. Photo: Steelkamp, 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