Willagee, Western Australia

Willagee is a suburb of Perth, Western Australia 15km south-southwest of the Perth central business district. It is within the local government area of City of Melville, and the electoral district of Willagee, which takes its name from the suburb.HistoryWillagee is named after Willagee Swamp, the Noongar name of a now-reclaimed feature in the area. The suburb originally comprised a housing estate known as "Willagee Park", created by the State Housing Commission. Willagee was brought into existence "primarily to provide accommodation for employees in the new industrial area being developed by the Fremantle City Council." Surveying and clearing of the land had commenced in December 1950, with a number of "first-class roads" constructed by the Melville Roads Board in 1951. A number of dwellings were prefabricated homes imported from Austria. The suburb is now characterised by demountable, wooden cottages with stilts(spears), although it is in the midst of a sweeping redevelopment plan, which is supposed to improve the quality of the housing.A house located at 3 Moorhouse Street gained some notoriety in the 1980s as the location of a series of murders by David and Catherine Birnie, which were sometimes called the "Moorhouse murders".