, the division's namesake The division was created at Federation in 1900 and was one of the
original 65 divisions contested at the
first federal election. It is named for the city of
Fremantle, which in turn is named for Captain
Charles Fremantle, captain of
HMS Challenger, who took formal possession of the west coast of
New Holland in the name of His Majesty the King. This action cleared the way for the arrival of
Captain James Stirling and the first party of
Swan River Colony settlers a few weeks later. As originally drawn, the Division of Fremantle included nearly all of Perth's south-of-the-river suburbs, plus the western suburbs south from Mt Claremont and Nedlands. On these boundaries, the seat frequently changed hands between the
Australian Labor Party and the conservative parties for the first three decades of its existence. However, Labor has held the seat without interruption since
1934, and for all but one term since
1928. The 1949 expansion of Parliament made Fremantle even safer for Labor by shifting most of its northern portion to the newly created
Division of Curtin. Since then, it has usually been one of the safest Labor seats in Australia. It was nearly lost in the landslides of
1975 and
1977, but since the 1980
redistribution when the suburbs of Mosman Park, Peppermint Grove and Cottesloe were transferred to the Division of Curtin, the
Liberals have only twice garnered 45 percent of the two-party vote, in
1996 and
2013. Since
World War II, Fremantle has been held by a succession of senior Labor figures. The seat's best-known member was
John Curtin, who was
Prime Minister from 1941 to 1945. Other high-profile members were
Kim Beazley Sr., a minister in the
Whitlam government;
John Dawkins, a minister in the
Hawke and
Keating governments; and
Carmen Lawrence, who served as the
Premier of Western Australia from 1990 to 1993 and who subsequently served as a minister in the Keating government. Lawrence retired at the
2007 election. She was succeeded by
Melissa Parke, a former
United Nations lawyer and a minister in the second
Rudd government. In the 2021 redistribution, the electoral boundaries of Fremantle were left unchanged. Consequently, the 2016 boundaries continued to apply as of the
2022 election. ==Location==