page_title: Fremantle
section_title: Demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Fremantle / Demographics
caption_attribution_description: St Patrick's Church, Fremantle
context_page_description: Fremantle is a port city in Western Australia, located at the mouth of the Swan River in the metropolitan area of Perth, the state capital. Fremantle Harbour serves as the port of Perth. In 2016, Fremantle had a population of approximately 29,000. The Western Australian vernacular diminutive for Fremantle is Freo.
  Prior to British settlement, the indigenous Noongar people inhabited the area for millennia, and knew it by the name of Walyalup. Visited by Dutch explorers in the 1600s, Fremantle was the first area settled by the Swan River colonists in 1829, and is named after Captain Charles Fremantle, an English naval officer who claimed the west coast of New Holland as British territory. The settlement struggled in its first decades, and in 1850, with the advent of penal transportation to the colony, Fremantle became Australia's primary destination for convicts. The convict-built Fremantle Prison operated long after transportation ended in 1868, and is now a World Heritage Site.
context_section_description: In the 2016 Australian census conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Fremantle had a population of 28,893 people. 61% of the population was born in Australia, compared with the national average of 67%. Indigenous Australians make up 1.6% of the population, and the largest overseas-born groups come from England (8.8%), Italy (3.1%), New Zealand (2.4%), Scotland (1.1%) and Ireland (1.0%). After English, the most common language spoken at home is Italian (4.5%), followed by French (1.0%), Portuguese (0.9%), German (0.9%) and Spanish (0.8%).
  In 2016, Fremantle had an unemployment rate of 7.4%. The city has an above-average proportion of rented dwellings (33.5%, vs 30.9% nationally). 42% of the population had no religion, 23% of the population was Catholic, 10% Anglican and 1.6% Buddhist.
caption: St Patrick's Basilica
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