Innaloo

Innaloo is a suburb of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, 9 km (5.6 mi) from Perth's central business district in the local government area of the City of Stirling.

Innaloo is a suburb of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, 9 km (5.6 mi) from Perth's central business district in the local government area of the City of Stirling.

Innaloo is an established residential suburb that is home to the Westfield Innaloo and Westfield Innaloo Megacentre shopping centres, and is adjacent to Perth's largest cinema complex, the 18-cinema Event Cinemas.

Land near Innaloo was first granted to Thomas Mews in 1831. In 1898, Town Properties of WA subdivided the lands around Njookenbooroo Swamp for sale as market gardens, and drained the swamp into Herdsman Lake over the following years, digging channels through the area to facilitate agriculture. They offered rent-free lease of the lots, with an option to later purchase at £100 per hectare if the occupants cleared them and brought them into production. The area between Hertha Road, Oswald Street and King Edward Road and Herdsman Lake was gazetted as the Njookenbooroo Drainage District, and by 1912, local market gardeners were turning off 25 tonnes of produce each week.The Njookenbooroo School on Odin Road (then called Government Road), linked to the city by a plank road, was built in 1915. Although subdivision for southern Innaloo was approved in 1916, by the 1920s only ten houses had been built, with the majority of the land used for grazing. Residential development accelerated during World War II, and in the 1950s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) built a drive-in cinema in nearby Liege Street.

Development of the suburb was essentially complete by 1970, and its status increased due to its proximity to Scarborough Beach and the light industrial and commercial centre of Osborne Park, the building of the Nookenburra Hotel (1962) and shopping centre (1967) and the nearby civic centre in Hertha Road (1966).

Innaloo is also the home for the first Hungry Jack's in Australia since 1971.

The Mitchell Freeway was extended to Hutton Street in 1981 and to Karrinyup Road in 1984. The shopping centre also hosted the region's main bus station until the construction of Stirling bus/train interchange about a kilometre away in 1992. In 1999, Ellen Stirling Boulevard, named after the wife of the first governor of Western Australia, was constructed on land purchased from the last market gardeners in the area to replace the increasingly hazardous Oswald Street as the main through link between the freeway and the shopping areas.