arthur river kitchen

After dropping junior at school the car is packed and I am heading down to the 'Rainbow Coast' to spend a long weekend with a friend who is enjoying a' tree and sea change' to 'Cosy Corner', a few kms out of Denmark.

Travelling the Albany Highway, this road was built by convicts in the 1850s, and along the way, little settlements sprung up to support the pastoralists and farmers settling the country.
Linking the then Swan River Settlement (now Perth) and King George's Sound (now Albany), mail was carried by foot!!! ( and not surprisingly lost sometimes) and as the colony grew contractors were expected to deliver mail within 72 hours. Pretty remarkable in this day and age.
Arthur River was built as a staging post, being half way at the '125 mile peg' to Albany, and Mary Ann Spratt was first appointed as postmistress in 1866 to assist that expectation.
The Arthur River Inn was built, and then dismantled to rebuild the Hall, but the kitchen remains today and is one of the oldest buildings still standing in the state.
Built seperate to the Inn to reduce the catastrophic results of incidental fires spreading to the Inn, it is perhaps a little ironic that the kitchen still stands and the bricks of the old Inn are now in the much more sedate Hall.