This is Henry Street in Fremantle and the alleyway used to lead to the stables behind William Dalgety Moore’s warehouses.

On ships bound for Britain, the United States, Australia’s east coast, Java, Cape Town, Japan and India went merchandise from these buildings. On ships coming back came tins, sacks, crates and packets of spices, rice, alcohol, medicines, materials, tools and equipment. The goods went on the shelves of the storefronts on High Street after a short stint, piled high in the warehouses.

Then the matrons and maids would come into town — to High Street, in their gowns and boots, taking care to watch where they stepped. The more shrewd knew Moore was a wholesaler and would scour the newspapers for the adverts that promoted the warehouse sales of excess stock at wholesale prices. They would then flock to the warehouse on Henry Street.

Now it still stores items from around the world. On the walls hang the artistic works of both local and international artists. One part of it is set aside for a counselling centre where counsellors provide treatment based on ideas and theories created by minds from all corners of the globe.

Down in the alleyway is the cafe. Walk through it and past the tables and chairs made in China or Taiwan and out to the back, and you find a courtyard. A courtyard surrounded by the back of the buildings on the allotments of land behind and on both sides of this one and by the little smaller ancillary buildings still dating from the 1880s.

It’s a little oasis where the sun shines down and plays off the brick and stonework walls. Here, cafe patrons can hide from the worst of the Fremantle Doctor when it blows. The alleyways in Fremantle are often like this, acting like little gateways to the other worlds. You never know what you find when you walk through them.

Further up Henry Street is another alleyway. Walk through it and you come to a courtyard, part of which has been transformed into a garden complete with ferns and fountains of running water. It sits at the entrance to the headquarters of a company providing massage therapy and behind the property of a Dutch couple who own it and have managed to create it on two levels out of what used to be a warehouse basement. It is a little piece of green in the midst of brick and stone and dusty sand and concrete.

On Philimore Street, you can walk through a particular alleyway and be transported back in time. More or less, it is as it was back when the buildings were built and the alleyways created. On either side of the narrow fences you can see the backs of the Notre Dame University’s College of Arts and Science’s building or the side of the Fremantle Hotel building.

Between the two fences, right where you stand you can see under two centimetres of dust and dirt, pieces of blue and white china and bits of green glass. Standing in the middle of the alleyway you can look at the building and watch as you see the men walk out of the back door, pause for a smoke and toss their garbage out. The broken plates and the empty bottles. You can see where the horses were tethered and the goods brought in. It’s not that hard to imagine what life must have been like when you have the landscape around you.

As you stand behind the building, you can hear the hustle and bustle that would have been the norm on both Philimore and High Street. High Street in front bustling with the sound of people shopping and conducting trade and Philimore Street, full of the sounds of the ships pulling up at the docks, full of steam, blowing their horns, lots of shouting as people get off and others lift goods off the decks.

The trains and trams moving up and down as they carry goods and people back and forth. Switch your eyes, ears and mind back to the present day and you hear a few seagulls and cars and the rest is silence. The docks are not empty but they are not busy either. Things have changed and even if you were to head to North Fremantle where the business of the docks is carried out, what you would hear is the sound of machinery and transport. But for a while in this alleyway, behind this building, you can imagine what it must have been like a century ago.

We are back in Henry Street, walking down the alleyway with the cafe, the one that draughthorses must have plodded down. I sit here in the courtyard with my friends, eating salmon from the Atlantic and drinking chocolate that could have by now come from Spain, South America, Africa or anywhere else really. We attempt to puzzle our way through life as we sit here, talking, eating and drinking.

Somewhere else, a bit far off but not too far, those matrons and maids would have shopped till they dropped, gone home and invited each other around for afternoon teas. As they sat there gossiping, exchanging news, admiring and envying house, social status and clothes and quite possibly complaining about their husbands and how they never stop working, they would have puzzled their way through life as much as we do now.

Life goes on. We aim to gain control of our environment all the while forgetting that nature controls us. Those ladies puzzled their way through life till they got to the end. We all know what the end is for us. But while we cease to exist, the buildings and their alleyways do not.

Perhaps even after I die, this warehouse will still stand, especially if the heritage laws, listings and regulations do not change. Perhaps the cafe will get handed down, generation after generation and will somehow still be here. Perhaps someone else will stand in the alleyways and see gardens in the courtyards and be able to imagine not just the hustle and bustle of the 1880s but also the ideas in a writer’s head in the 2010s.

In the meantime, the alleyways are here. The cafe is still here and if you are ever in Perth, catch the train down to Fremantle and walk over to Henry Street. Come have a coffee in the cafe called Moore’s and Moore’s and puzzle your way through your life here. You might find some answers.