Perth's history runs from 50,000 years of Whadjuk Noongar occupation to a reluctant convict colony founded in 1829 and the 1890s gold rush that paid for its sandstone. Three days of prisons, lighthouses, barracks and shipwrecks along the Indian Ocean.
Perth's museum reopened in 2020 after a $400m rebuild around the 1908 Jubilee Building. The Aboriginal gallery was co-curated with WA language groups and covers 50,000+ years of occupation, plus Aboriginal-language name Boola Bardip: 'many stories'.
Australia's only convict-built town hall, raised by convict labour in Jacobean style with a clock tower. Look for the arrow-slit windows and hangman's-rope motifs in the brickwork — convict masons' quiet protest, embedded in the facade on Barrack Street.
Opened as a branch of Britain's Royal Mint to process Kalgoorlie gold, still operating on the same Hay Street site. Hourly gold pour in the 1899 melting house, and the world's largest coin — one tonne of gold — sits in the vault.
The 1854 Gothic Revival boys' school on St Georges Terrace is one of the colony's oldest surviving public buildings. Walk west to the Barracks Archway, the sole 1863 fragment of the Pensioner Guard barracks, spared from 1966 demolition after public protest.
Built by convicts 1852–1859 and inscribed on UNESCO's Australian Convict Sites list in 2010. The Tunnels Tour descends 20 m below the limestone into the 1890s water-supply tunnels, part on foot, part by boat with hard hat and headlamp.
Housed in the 1852 convict-built Commissariat store on Cliff Street. Holds the reconstructed stern timbers of the Batavia, wrecked in 1629 off the Abrolhos, and the stone portico she carried as cargo — plus the mutiny and massacre that followed.
Western Australia's oldest surviving public building, finished in 1831 as a twelve-sided gaol two years after the colony began. Whalers' Tunnel cuts beneath it to Bathers Beach, and the time-ball and cannon still fire at 1pm daily.
The 1929 obelisk on Mount Eliza commemorates WA's war dead, with the Flame of Remembrance and the Pool of Reflection below. The Court of Contemplation sits above the Swan, and the ANZAC dawn service here draws over 40,000 people each 25 April.
Between 1838 and 1931 around 3,700 Aboriginal men and boys were imprisoned on Wadjemup; at least 370 died here. The Quod octagonal prison and the burial ground beside it are now a declared Aboriginal site, with a truth-telling walking tour from the settlement.
Surveyed in 1829 as one of WA's three original colonial townsites at the Swan and Helena junction. Stirling Square, the 1837 courthouse, the Rose & Crown of 1841 — claimed as WA's oldest hotel — and Taylor's Cottage from 1861 all stand within a few blocks.
Houghton was planted in 1836, making it WA's oldest operating winery; Sandalford followed in 1840 on a land grant to John Septimus Roe, the colony's first Surveyor-General. The Swan Valley is Australia's second-oldest wine region after the Hunter.
Opened 1904 and once WA's largest industrial site, employing 3,000 men building and repairing the state's locomotives until closure in 1994. The heritage-listed block sheds and foundry survive, with guided tours run by former workshop tradesmen.