Gooseberry Hill, Western Australia
Gooseberry Hill is a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, located within the City of Kalamunda. It is the site of Gooseberry Hill National Park.
It is located at the highest point south of the departure of the Helena River from the Darling Scarp on to the Swan Coastal Plain. It is often associated with the railway formation of the Kalamunda Zig Zag, and the northern most high feature of Statham's Quarry which lie on the north west of the locality within national park land.
In 1861, Benjamin Robins purchased of land in the area. In 1878 surveyor Henry Samuel Ranford recorded the name of the eponymous hill as "Gooseberry Hill" ; that name, derived from the presence of cape gooseberries in the area, referred to the Kalamunda area generally in the late 19th century. The townsite was officially gazetted on 8 June 1959.
Gooseberry Hill was the location of a war-time tragedy when a United States Navy C-47 Skytrain plane crashed in heavy fog on 19 April 1945 after taking off from Guildford Airport. All of the ten US servicemen and three US Red Cross women on board were killed. The plane crashed between Gooseberry Hill Road and Lansdown Road, from the end of the take-off runway, having travelled in an almost straight course to the point of impact.
The suburb contains two schools, Gooseberry Hill Primary School, a government school established in 1972, and Mary's Mount Primary School, a Catholic school established in 1921.
