Location and Demographics
Marist Brothers Rosalie is located in the area known as Rosalie, which is a small locality within Paddington, an inner western suburb of the city of Brisbane. The ground in that locality is full of slopes and hills with the high points being held by the Catholic Church or the State government.
Marist College Rosalie is geographically placed at the centre of the suburbs of Paddington, Milton, Bardon, Red Hill and Petrie Terrace. These suburbs were traditionally working class mainly made of old Anglo-Irish Catholic Australians, indigenous aboriginal people and new waves of Catholics migrants. The first Catholic migrants were the Irish, then the Italians, Croatians and Polish came in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s and then more recently smaller groups of Islander, South American and South East Asian families.
The high proportion of Catholics in the area during those years is attested to by the fact that there are seven Catholic churches, four primary Catholic schools (one defunct), two girls high schools, and various halls and refectories all within a five mile (8 km) radius of Marist Brothers Rosalie.
These “new” communities were both fortified and nurtured by the local churches and their schools and many families made financial sacrifices to support these institutions.
Today the sons of immigrant families are a continuing presence at Marist College Rosalie, reflecting the multicultural population of Brisbane and the mix of Australian-Irish, Anglo-Irish, European, Asian and Latin at the school reflects the Catholic Church in a microcosm.
Traditionally the school drew from this local population for its students, however, since the 1960s and especially since the gentrification of the Paddington area in the 1980s and 1990s with young professionals, the school has drawn mainly from Catholic families on the western train line, and to a lesser extent from the northern suburbs of Kelvin Grove, Ashgrove, The Gap, Herston, Normanby and Windsor.
The suburbs traversed by the western line run from the now gentrified formerly working class inner west, through the middle class western suburbs to the now largely working class outer western suburbs.
This western train line runs from central Brisbane to the city of Ipswich some 35 kilometres away, through the adjoining suburb of Milton which links and binds the western suburbs of Brisbane. The train line passes through the suburbs of Milton, Auchenflower, Toowong, Taringa, Indooroopilly, Chelmer, Graceville, Sherwood, Corinda, Oxley, Darra, Wacol and onto Ipswich.
The train line at Indooroopilly also links with buses from the non-train accessible western suburbs of Kenmore, Chapel Hill, Pinjarra Hills, Pullevale, Brookfield, Mt Ommaney, Jindalee, and Riverhills who also access the major Western Freeway for motorcars which exits onto Milton Road at Toowong before passing through Milton onto the city heart.
Accordingly Marist Brothers Rosalie is well positioned to attract students from the western suburbs and is in fact the only Catholic high school for boys in the western suburbs of Brisbane between the city of Brisbane and the city of Ipswich. The only other non-State run high schools in the western suburbs that take boys are Brisbane Boys College (Protestant) and St Peter’s (co-ed Lutheran).
Today the western “train line” students make up some 70% of the schools population. Recent State Government demographics (2007) however suggest that although the local children attending Rosalie dropped off as the area went through a process of gentrification, and became an area for young people and singles, the area now is once again becoming a family area as those “young people and singles” marry and have children. Accordingly those demographics have indicated that there is a mini "baby boom" locally, which the school can draw from.
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