Best 21 Real Estate Agents In Mindarie [2024]

Mindarie Suburb Overview

Mindarie is an outer coastal suburb of Perth, Western Australia. It is located 36 kilometres north of Perth’s central business district, via Marmion Avenue, and forms part of the City of Wanneroo local government area.

After being briefly used for its limestone deposits in the early 20th century, the suburb was formally established in 1988 with the construction of the Mindarie Marina and hotel, one of the largest man-made marina resorts in the state. Several shops, restaurants and schools are now dispersed throughout the rest of the area, which is primarily residential in character. A number of large bushland reserves and parks preserve Mindarie’s previously natural state, such as its large coastal dunes.

Mindarie was used as one of the filming locations for the children’s science fiction television series Stormworld.

Mindarie is formally bounded by Quinns Road, Marmion Avenue and the Indian Ocean. The suburbs of Clarkson and Merriwa lie to the east, and Quinns Rocks lies to the north. South of Mindarie is the uninhabited locality of Tamala Park.

Large swathes of natural bushland and coastline are preserved in various parks throughout the suburb, including Claytons Beach, Rosslare Park, Kinsale Park and the North and South Mindarie Foreshores. The foreshore reserves contain large Quindalup dunes and various examples of Swan Coastal Plain vegetation. The South Mindarie Foreshore was subject to coastal rehabilitation works in 2011 to protect the dunes and vegetation growing there.

Mindarie was named after Lake Mindarie in nearby Carabooda. The name is a Noongar word meaning either “the place near which is held a ceremony” or “green water”, first recorded by Alexander Forrest in 1874. A town also named Mindarie, in the Murray Mallee region of South Australia, claims origin from a Dieri word meaning “festival to invoke peace”.

The area was initially gazetted as “Clarkson” by the Shire of Wanneroo in 1979, with the name Mindarie being allocated to the adjacent locality directly east. The two names were transposed in 1985 at the request of Smith Corporation, the developers of the Mindarie marina.

The Mooro group of Noongar were said to be familiar with Mindarie, including Waukolup Hill in neighbouring Tamala Park, but no Mooro settlements were ever formally established in the area. After John Butler’s initial expedition to Wanneroo in 1835, the first permanent European settler was sheep-farmer Bernard Clarkson, who first acquired a pastoral lease in 1888 of 13,000 acres in the areas comprising modern-day Mindarie, Clarkson, Quinns Rocks and Merriwa. The leases were known as the Mindarie Pastoral Company, and the lands were primarily used for sheep-herding by subsequent generations of the Clarkson family.

Another early settler, Henry Cooper and his brothers, built two lime kilns at Mindarie in 1932 after the closure of their quarries in Wembley. The Cooper family produced and sold treated limestone in Perth and Fremantle as the Quinns Rocks Lime Stone Company, and were some of the first permanent residents of the nearby Quinns Rocks townsite. The kilns provided work for up to thirty-two labourers, who settled in Mindarie in makeshift jarrah shacks, and are commonly held as a symbol of the diversification of industry brought on by the Great Depression at the time. The Coopers ceased lime-burning operations in 1948 after exhausting good quality limestone supplies in the area.

The kilns underwent restoration in 2001 and are preserved today in the Coopers Park bushland reserve in Mindarie. They are regarded as sites of architectural interest, due to their skilled, vernacular design and their coastal location minutes away from the Indian Ocean, unusual for lime-burning operations in the Wanneroo area.

After the closure of the lime kilns, John Clarkson sold the Mindarie Pastoral Company leases in 1952, and the area remained unpopulated and unused until 1981, when Smith Corporation purchased 316 hectares of land there for $5.5 million. In July 1984, the company announced plans to develop the land into “Mindarie Keys”, a $28 million marina and resort complex designed by James Christou & Partners, to be ready in time for the 1987 America’s Cup in Fremantle. In the same year, plans were also proposed for a refuse disposal plant in the area to handle landfill waste from the Shire of Wanneroo, the City of Stirling and the City of Perth local areas. Both developments caused controversy with existing residents in nearby Quinns Rocks, who formed the Quinns Rocks Environment Group in June 1985 to bring together a formal opposition against the proposals. In 1988, Tamala Park was gazzetted from land formerly part of southern Mindarie, and was set aside for refuse disposal, as well as public open space.

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