Innaloo Train Station
Innaloo, Perth,
Western Australia
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
Innaloo is a suburb of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, and it is located 9 km from Perth's central business district. Its Local Government Area is the City of Stirling.
Innaloo is a more established residential suburb that is also home to the Westfield Innaloo and Westfield Innaloo Megacentre shopping centres, and is adjacent to Perth's largest cinema complex, the 18-cinema
Greater Union Megaplex.
The suburb was originally named "Njookenbooroo", a local Noongar Aboriginal name for a nearby swamp. This name was too difficult to pronounce or spell, and in 1927, the local progress association asked welfare
worker and anthropologist Daisy Bates to compile a list of words and names. The name of an Aboriginal woman from Dongara was chosen for the area. It is much beloved of comedians making fun of place names,
along with the suburb of Upper Swan. However, all attempts at changing the name from Innaloo have so far failed.
Land near Innaloo was first granted to Thomas Mews in 1831. In 1898, Town Properties of WA subdivided the lands around Njookenbooroo Swamp for sale as market gardens and drained the swamp into Herdsman
Lake over the following years, digging channels through the area to facilitate agriculture. They offered rent-free lease of the lots with an option to later purchase at £100 per hectare if the occupants cleared them and
brought them into production. The area between Hertha Road, Oswald Street and King Edward Road and Herdsman Lake was gazetted as the Njookenbooroo Drainage District, and by 1912, local market gardeners
were turning off 25 tonnes of produce each week, even considering the vagaries of the weather and occasional pests. The Njookenbooroo School on Odin Road (then called Government Road), linked to the city by a
plank road, was built in 1915. Although subdivision for southern Innaloo was approved in 1916, by the 1920s only ten houses had been built, with the majority of the land used for grazing. Residential development
accelerated during World War II, and in the 1950s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) built a drive-in cinema in nearby Liege Street.
Development of the suburb was essentially complete by 1970, and its status increased due to its proximity to Scarborough Beach, and the light industrial and commercial centre of Osborne Park, the building of the
Nookenburra Hotel (1962) and shopping centre (1967) and the nearby civic centre in Hertha Road (1966). The Mitchell Freeway was extended to Hutton Street in 1981 and to Karrinyup Road in 1984, and the shopping
centre also hosted the region's main bus station until the construction of Stirling bus/train interchange about a kilometre away in 1992. In 1999, Ellen Stirling Boulevard, named after the wife of the first governor of
Western Australia, was constructed on land purchased from the last market gardeners in the area to replace the increasingly hazardous Oswald Street as the main through link between the freeway and the shopping
areas.
Innaloo contains the Westfield Innaloo shopping centre. Next to Westfield Innaloo on Ellen Stirling Boulevard is the Westfield Innaloo Megacentre (acquired from Centro in August 2006), which contains 20 stores and a
Supa IGA (formerly Action). Across Scarborough Beach Road is the Greater Union Megaplex. The northern part of the suburb also contains a small local shopping area in Morris Place. Opposite the Megacenter, an IKEA
is being constructed, replacing the smaller store a kilometer away in the adjoining suburb of Osbourne Park.
Innaloo's southern border with Woodlands hosts Perth's largest cinema complex, the 18-cinema Greater Union Megaplex Innaloo, which contains Perth's only Gold Class cinemas, as well as an arcade with numerous
restaurants and dining speciality outlets, including Sizzler, Han's Cafe and Retro Betty's, and a game centre (centred on Timezone). It started off life as an MGM drive-in in the 1950s, then was rebuilt by Greater Union in
1990 with 8 screens, then expanded to a Megaplex - the first in Western Australia - in 1996.