History
The school was first opened in 1882 on High St in the port town of Fremantle under the name Fremantle Catholic Boys' School in a building still standing on school grounds, Edmund Hall. The building was designed by a former Fenian convict, an architect by profession who drew up the plans for the new school and built using stone mined on the site. The new school began with an enrollment of thirty primary-aged boys under the management of Mr Otto De Grancy.
A change in the colony's Education Act in 1895 meant that all financial support for church-based schools was withdrawn. The recently arrived religious order of Christian Brothers was invited to take over the running of the parish school, and to establish a high school for the education of boys in the Fremantle area. In January 1901, the first group of brothers took charge of what was then known as St. Patrick's Boys' School. Thirty boys were enrolled but this number soon grew to ninety within four weeks. Soon afterwards, the High School opened with an enrollment of twenty-nine which soon rose to fifty-seven by the end of the year.
From 1901 to 1913, Christian Brothers' College Fremantle was one of the half-a-dozen schools in Western Australia preparing students for public examinations of the The University of Adelaide. Unil the University of Western Australia opened in 1914 with two brother and two former CBC students among the first graduates. In the last twenty years the school has become staffed by predominantly by lay teachers, with 2002 seeing the appointment of the schools' first lay Principal, Mr David McFadden. The years that followed saw CBC Fremantle undergo radical changes including the addition of a world-class gymnasium, new science labs, manual arts area, the renovation of the library, Year 12 common room and the addition of the new language buildings.
In October 2007, Edmund Rice Education Australia (EREA) took responsibility for the governance of CBC Fremantle along with forty other Edmund Rice schools, including Aquinas College and Trinity College
Read more about this topic: CBC Fremantle
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