South Perth

Distinguished and Famous people from South Perth

🌼 May Gibbs

May Gibbs moved to South Perth with her family at twelve, long before Snugglepot and Cuddlepie became household names. Her father Herbert was also an artist, and the family’s work recorded local landscapes as well as imaginative subjects. The city preserves paintings and sketches by both of them, many produced during their South Perth years. Bushland and the river foreshore formed part of the world she observed before her later career in Sydney. The collection gives the gumnut babies a less familiar family background: drawing and looking closely were already everyday occupations in the Gibbs household.

🦁 Ernest Albert Le Souef

Ernest Albert Le Souef helped establish Perth Zoo on its South Perth site, where construction began in 1897 and the gates opened the following year. A veterinarian from a zoological family, he undertook work ranging from design and road construction to collecting animals. With gardener Henry Steedman, he also developed grounds on sandy soil, supported by an artesian water supply and large quantities of manure. The gardens were an essential part of making the site work, not an afterthought between cages. His contribution combined animal knowledge with the everyday infrastructure needed to turn an ambitious proposal into a public institution.

📖 Vicki Hobbs

Vicki Hobbs attended South Perth High School, later known as Raith Girls’ Grammar School. A bright pupil, she nevertheless felt the social distance between her shopkeeping family and some classmates’ university-connected households. Nursing eventually offered a different professional world. After hospital and wartime service she became an educator, and retirement opened a further career as a historian of Western Australian nursing. Interviews, private papers and photographs formed part of the record she preserved. South Perth’s connection is her schooling, including a remembered glimpse of the class distinctions she encountered while growing up.