Book Now Published, AJ Baker & Sons: A Century of Business

Early in 2019 Peter and Mike Baker engaged the services of family friend Shannon Lovelady; Author & Historian at the Museum of Perth to catalogue and write the history of AJ Baker & Sons to launch in time for our 100 year celebration night in 2020… unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Despite everything going on in the world around us the book continued via zoom meetings, cloud drives and many emails! Research into the history started in the Baker archives where the team discovered some amazing catalogues, articles, photos, ledgers and journaling by Albert John Baker (Bert) dating back to 1920.

Bert was a true business owner and marketer of his time writing his own advertising in The West Australian newspaper. Shannon and her team painstakingly scanned and catalogued the most important sections of the archives to ensure a digital copy will be available.

The book took shape with a lot of fact checking, a family tree and business tree being built, a few trips to outback pubs and delving into the history of many Western Australian businesses the Baker brand has been involved with since being established in 1920.

The book AJ Baker & Sons: A Century of Business came to life to coincide with the first refrigeration sale on 21 November 2021 (page 12 in the book) and was presented to a few members of the Baker family at The Meat & Wine Co, formally the old Palace Hotel (page 20 in the book), as featured in the book.

The publication contains photos, advertising and excerpts from journals and the complete 100 year history of AJ Baker & Sons, our history in the industry of commercial refrigeration in Australia from our early days establishing our market in Perth, Western Australia.

Many of the family members helped identify their relatives in some of the images and at the very last minute, on the day of submitting the book to print, the family dog was identified! The final review team felt the book was now complete and ready to go.

We hope you enjoy!

Copies will also be made available at each of our five branches around Australia, keep an eye out.

In the meantime the Museum of Perth have a page dedicated to the book that you can view here.

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