The name of this site comes from the peninsula, and the peninsula's name has a better story than most.
1829: a name from Kent
According to the Burswood Park Board, the 30-year-old settler Henry Camfield arrived at the Swan River colony in 1829 with two indentured servants and their families. He was granted 1,000 acres of mudflat wetlands and named the land "Burrswood", after his family home in Kent — a home, the park board notes, he never saw again. The early years were hard: houses of wattle and daub, and crops of cabbage, wheat, corn, swede and potatoes that failed for several years running.
Boats travelling between Fremantle and Guildford had their own problem with the place: the mudflats off the western edge of the peninsula were so shallow that even flat-bottomed boats had to be dragged across. In 1831 a canal was cut to shorten the trip.
1893: the extra R goes missing
Here Wikipedia, a secondary source, adds a lovely detail. The railway station was meant to open in 1893 as "Burrswood", but the painters of the station sign misspelt it — and "Burswood" stuck. The station was renamed Rivervale in 1923, following the suburb, which had changed its name in 1921 — partly, Wikipedia says, because people had come to associate Burswood with sewage processing.
Golf, horses and a smell
The park board's history fills in the rest. Western Australia's first golf course opened on the peninsula in 1895. Four years later a racecourse, now Belmont Park, held its first meeting on 9 December 1899, with the Burswood Cup as the main event — and golfers, the park board says, had to pause to let the horses pass. Between 1906 and 1922, land was taken for filtration beds for sewage from Claisebrook; complaints closed them in 1934, and the negative association led a developer to rename a housing estate from Riversdale to Rivervale.
From 1921 a cement works used shells dredged from the Swan River as a source of lime, and the area was used for waste disposal until domestic rubbish stopped being dumped in 1972.
1985: the casino
In 1985 the Western Australian Government granted a casino licence to a joint venture between Dallas Dempster and Malaysia's Genting group. The park board records that Burswood Casino, now Crown Perth, opened in December 1985 after significant site remediation, with a resort completed on the 100-hectare site two years later. Wikipedia gives the opening date as 30 December 1985 and says that, at the time, it was the largest casino in Australia. The Burswood Park Board itself was set up in 1986 to turn the surroundings into parkland.
From Burswood to Crown, and the tower
Wikipedia traces the later names — Burswood Island Casino, then Burswood Island Complex, then Burswood Entertainment Complex — until Crown announced a rebrand to Crown Perth in December 2011. In 2012 the existing hotels became Crown Metropol and Crown Promenade, and a new luxury hotel was announced. That hotel, Crown Towers, opened in December 2016.
So when you stand at the Crown Towers entrance, you are on reclaimed mudflat named for a house in Kent, a few hundred metres from where the golfers waited for the horses. I find that a more interesting thing to know than any marble specification.
The Burswood Park Board's history page tells the full story; Wikipedia's Crown Perth article covers the complex.Official site: crownperth.com.au ↗