Mount Claremont campus anniversary

Opening Day: May 1986

On the morning of Monday, 12 May 1986, more than 1,200 students, having said goodbye to four school communities scattered across three campuses in Claremont, arrived at what was still partially a building site. The gymnasium was still under construction, there was no grass to be seen, and desks had just been unpacked.

Staff had experienced the campus in detail just three days earlier, from above, as if peering over the edge of something vast and not yet theirs.

And yet, within hours, something shifted. Students moved through the new buildings with wide eyes – taking it all in, finding their lockers, working out where everything was. As Sr Denise Desmarchelier, Principal of John XXIII College from 1979 to 1987, later recalled:

That pride had been a long time coming. And it had been earned across nearly a decade of effort grounded in a set of values that were never incidental to the design. They were the design.

Four campuses, one College

John XXIII College was founded in 1977 from the amalgamation of two historic Perth schools – Loreto Convent school for girls, established by the Loreto Sisters in 1897, and St Louis School for boys, opened by the Jesuit Fathers in 1938.

The College that emerged brought together four separate school communities across Claremont: Loreto, St Louis, Campion (originally part of St Louis) and Koolyangarra (originally part of Loreto). By any practical measure, the arrangement was unsustainable.

The timetable had to account for ten-minute walks between campuses. The Junior Secondary at St Louis and the Senior School at Loreto had begun to calcify into permanently separate identities, with younger and older year groups rarely encountering each other.

The schools also carried their own cultures into the merger, and some staff had never worked under a female principal. When Sr Denise arrived in the College’s third year of life, she was acutely conscious that the sense of separateness had not faded.

The Ignatian tradition – shared by both Loreto and Jesuit, grounded in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius – offered a common language. Rather than emphasising which founder each part of the school claimed, Sr Denise stressed the spirituality they shared: the examen, discernment, the Principle and Foundation, and the magis: not the pursuit of the highest score, but the pursuit of one’s best self.

Architect Keith Lodge had worked with the Catholic Education Office of Victoria, upgrading and modernising Catholic primary schools across the state. Due to his expertise in reconfiguring found space, he was engaged directly by John XXIII College to assess whether consolidating on the existing sites was viable.

His verdict was unambiguous: refurbishment would never produce a satisfactory outcome. The College needed to build anew.

One day a week for five years

When the College Council negotiated the purchase of a 24.6-hectare site – formerly Graylands Hospital land and an adjacent tip, earmarked for redevelopment by the State Government – the real work began.

Planning commenced in 1981, and Sr Denise dedicated the equivalent of one full day each week for five years to the design of the new campus. She consulted at every stage with campus heads and staff, as well as architect Tony Brand, Bursar Bob Niven, and Chair of the Planning Committee, Michael King. Every decision was filtered through a question she returned to repeatedly: for whom are we building?

It shaped not only the floor plans but the philosophy beneath them. The staffroom was to be the heart of the school – open to teaching, administrative, cleaning and grounds staff alike. The dignity of every person’s work was equal. How students left a classroom for the cleaner, she told them, was an act of respect. How they left the playground reflected how they regarded the people who maintained it.

Keith Lodge had introduced a way of thinking that translated this ethos into spatial terms. Rather than asking faculties to compete over existing rooms, he asked them to draw circles – not floor plans, but spatial relationships. What did a maths faculty actually need to function well? What needed to be adjacent to what?

This principle became the foundation of a planning document Sr Denise called the ‘organigram’ – essentially a visual map of relationships rather than just floor plans – a model of relationships and adjacencies that guided every decision about the new campus. It was then refined through her sustained collaboration with Tony Brand, the architect selected after a careful shortlisting process.

Tony Brand, of the firm Brand, Deykin and Hay, was not a current or former parent and had no prior connection to the College. That was part of his appeal. Where some architects on the shortlist had produced schools that bore their fingerprints too clearly – the same solutions applied to different problems – Brand brought genuine curiosity. He asked great questions, did his research, and listened carefully to the education brief.

He was also a town planner, and that broader perspective shaped the campus in ways that went beyond individual buildings. As Sr Denise recalls, his guiding insight was that any building is a variation of squares and rectangles – it is the spaces between that define a place. Every enclosed courtyard at John XXIII has a vista beyond it. Every walkway leads somewhere worth going.

Bob Niven recalls: ‘Tony was the perfect architect for the job. He asked lots of questions, did his homework and research. He had a good understanding of what we wanted and he was thinking strategically of the future. The school will still be here in 100 years.’

The buildings were constructed by Clough Engineering Group. The decision to use sandstone besser blocks – which had just become commercially available – and Spanish-inspired terracotta tiles gave the campus its warm, Mediterranean character.

The colonnades, championed by Chairman of Council Terry O’Connor against competing budget priorities, were an act of faith in the long view. They were designed wide enough that grounds and maintenance staff could trolley along them freely – a practical specification that ensured the colonnades worked as well for the grounds crew as they did for everyone else.

Sr Denise reviewed the detailed plans on weekends. Which way did the doors open? Where were the power points and light switches? Did the classroom lighting run vertically or horizontally down the room? These details earned mild criticism from some Council members – and they are precisely the kind of details that determine whether a building works for the people inside it.

The soul of the site

If any single space captures the animating vision of the campus, it is the Chapel. For Sr Denise, its placement was never a design decision – it was a statement of belief. The Chapel was to be the soul of the site, visible from everywhere, the focal point around which every other decision arranged itself. As Tony Brand designed the administration precinct, he created an open sightline from the entrance straight through to the Chapel. You could not arrive at John XXIII College without being oriented toward it.

Before handing over the keys to incoming principal Dr Tony Baker, Sr Denise spent several retreat days in the Chapel – a quiet farewell to the space she had spent years helping to create. The ceiling is a construction of floating elements – jarrah trusses bearing the structural load, with everything else suspended in apparent weightlessness. Tony Brand received an architectural award for his use of timber. In his own words, included in the award citation:

The brief had been precise: the Chapel must accommodate one person or 400 people, and each must feel equally at one with the space. The columns do not enclose – they suggest separation, creating intimate side chapels within a unified whole, so that an individual, a small group, or a full Mass inhabit the same room differently but equally well.

For Sr Denise, the Chapel was the physical expression of the Mary Ward values that underpinned Loreto education – freedom, justice, sincerity, felicity, and verity. In Mary Ward’s own words, it embodies ‘freedom from all that would make one adhere to earthly things, an apt disposition for all good works and the freedom to refer all to God.’

The brief for the rest of the campus reflected the same values. The library was designed to span primary and secondary precincts – a deliberate act of community across year levels, and a practical expression of the belief that curiosity belongs to every stage of learning.

Careers, counsellor and chaplain were placed adjacent to each other near the staffroom, so that any student walking that way could be perceived as browsing careers material without having to declare that they were seeking something else. Accessibility and dignity were built into the floor plan.

The House names carried the old campuses forward. Koolyangarra – the Noongar word for ‘meeting place of happy children’ – gave the primary campus not just a name but a theology: the Trinity as a model of relationship, three persons in community, the meeting place as sacred. The Trinity, conceived by Sr Peg Flynn and placed originally atop the Koolyangarra building, eventually found its home against the trees of the new campus – Creator God, through the crucified Son, sending forth the Spirit.

The move

The relocation took place mid-term, in May 1986. It was a necessary choice: the construction company needed the old Loreto and St Louis sites released for redevelopment, and a mid-term relocation was planned to minimise disruption to students. In the end, the College lost only one student attendance day – a feat of planning that Sr Denise attributed entirely to Bob Niven.

The Friday before classes began, staff experienced the campus in detail and collected their keys. Each staff member held a key that opened only the areas relevant to their role – the staffroom universally, plus whatever faculty spaces they needed. Sr Denise and Bob Niven held the only master keys.

On the Saturday, 500 parents arrived for a working bee that Sr Denise had organised in careful detail: each parent had pre-nominated their arrival time and what they were bringing – vacuum cleaners from home, buckets and cloths, gardening equipment, dusters. Group leaders directed them systematically through buildings in sequence, so that nothing was left undone and no one felt purposeless. As Sr Denise said: ‘The school did not have to provide any equipment, and everything was accomplished.’

For Annabel O’Connor – wife of Terry O’Connor, and the parent who led the gardening effort that day – the working bee gave parents an ownership of the campus that a formal opening never could. They had cleaned it, planted in it, stood inside it on a Saturday morning and made it ready. The community that formed around those early shared efforts proved to be one of the most enduring legacies of the move.

Annabel O’Connor: ‘It really developed relationships within the College community, and many of these relationships are still evident today – decades-long friendships. The community amongst the parents was strong from the very beginning.’

That community deepened quickly. Parents organised themselves into working groups that continued well beyond the working bee: a gardening group that met regularly, working alongside College gardener Phil O’Neill and the grounds and maintenance team to develop the landscaping in the early days; a sewing group run by parent Jenny Keenan that costumed many theatre productions over the years; and an informal cooking group led by parent Corrine ‘Soosie’ Thompson.

Plants had been chosen in consultation with Tony Brand, who advised on species that would complement the architecture and suit the sandy Perth soil. Some families donated trees; others bought them through an informal fundraising arrangement – plane trees, Chinese elms – quietly investing in a landscape that would take years to establish but that was already, in intention, someone’s gift.

On Monday, year groups were staggered through the day so that staff could help students find their way. Tuesday, classes began. The library, which had been closed at the old site for a full month prior to the move, was completely operational from the first day. Science teachers had been asked to front-load all laboratory work before the move, accepting that the new labs would be unavailable for the opening weeks on site.

The early weeks brought the inevitable adjustments.

Staff who had occupied four compact, familiar staffrooms suddenly found themselves in one large one, alongside colleagues they barely knew. The chalk was in the wrong place. Sr Denise recalled her experience of the Grand Canyon – the overwhelming scale of it that makes you reach for something small and familiar, like a sparrow, to ground yourself. The chalk was the sparrow on the thorn bush. The complaints were not really about chalk. They were about belonging. And belonging, in the end, came quickly.

What the campus made possible

The Years 1 to 12 library became one of the campus’s most-loved spaces. Year 1 students arrived holding hands, in pairs, causing Years 11 and 12 students to stop and watch. Reluctant secondary readers discovered Asterix. English students in Year 11 were assigned to write stories for primary-aged readers – and were thereby given permission to read fairy tales themselves. Outstanding primary readers finally had access to shelves other than the ones they had outgrown.

The campus also made possible something the multicampus arrangement never could: a genuine sense of one united school. Staff and students who had existed in separate departments, separate buildings, and separate cultures found themselves sharing a staffroom, a library, a Chapel, and a playground.

The pride that emerged in those first weeks was not manufactured. It arose from the place itself – from the dignity built into its design, the relationships its spaces encouraged, and the sense that this campus had been made for them.

The campus also extended the College’s reach in ways that mattered beyond its own community. John XXIII was a reception school for non-English-speaking students, and the new campus made that welcome more generous. Timorese, Vietnamese, and Polish students found in the College a place that saw their dignity and asked something of them in return. The campus, with its open design, accessible grounds, and lack of perimeter fencing, was itself a statement about the kind of community the College intended to be.

Tony Brand was invited to speak with staff about the design decisions – the Mediterranean monastic reference, the colonnades, the vistas. He sent them outside for forty minutes with a single instruction: find your God space. Find somewhere on this campus that is yours, that you can return to when the day has been hard. It was an invitation that expressed something Sr Denise had believed from the beginning – that a school which asks its students to attend to their interior life must first create the conditions in which interior life is possible.

The Heritage Council of WA has since recognised the campus as a significant example of late 20th-century school architecture – a place where quadrangle-based college design was executed with genuine care for the human experience of moving through it.

Passing on the keys

In 1988, when Sr Denise handed the keys to incoming principal Dr Tony Baker, she was completing the first chapter of a much longer story. The foundation she had laid – both philosophical and physical – would prove strong enough to support all that would follow.

What Sr Denise handed over was a worked-out answer to a question about what Catholic education, in the Ignatian tradition, ought to look like when given a blank site and the freedom to start afresh. Every adjacency, every sightline, every key that opened only what its holder needed – all of it expressed a set of convictions about how people flourish and what they owe each other. It was a framework designed to be inhabited, enriched, and built upon.

And that is exactly what has happened. The gymnasium that was still under construction on opening day is long finished. The labyrinth that now exists was not in any of Sr Denise’s plans. Technology has arrived, areas have been renewed, enrolments have grown. Each principal and each community has brought something of their own to a site whose original vision was generous enough to embrace all that would come.

Forty years on

In 2026, John XXIII College marks forty years on the Mount Claremont campus. The site that was once a hospital, a tip, and a source of community anxiety is now, simply, home.

The green grass that took years to establish, the colonnades that had to be argued for, the Chapel that had to be built before anything else could be fully understood – they are all so familiar now that it takes some effort to remember they were once choices.

Our motto Seek Justice is not just a slogan. It is a description of a way of being in relationship: with oneself, with others, with the world, and with God. It was written into the staffroom policy, the library design, the placement of the chaplain’s office, the key system, and the welcome extended to families navigating a new country. Justice, as Sr Denise understands it, is never legalistic – it is a matter of being in right relationship.

A person who is not in right relationship with themselves cannot fully be in right relationship with God, or with the people they encounter, or with the environment they inhabit.

That understanding is embedded in our campus’s very structure: in the internal garden that gives a vista to the person answering the telephone, who does not need to be accessible to anyone but still deserves to see the sky; in the corner of the grounds where weekend visitors from the nearby hospital sat companionably in a sheltered peaceful corner.

The campus was never fenced. It was never meant to be.

The students who arrive at John XXIII College in 2026 inherit all of that. They walk the colonnades and the expansive green lawns. They reflect in a Chapel that someone spent three days in, alone, so that she could hand it over in freedom. They find their own God spaces, whether or not they use that language for what they are doing. They are, whether they know it or not, living inside someone’s very long answer to a very simple question.

‘To hope is to wait actively.’

The College that was built in 1986 was an act of hope – active, detailed, collaborative, and faith-filled. What the next forty years makes of it is the task now given to the students, staff, and families who call it home.

The foundation is sound. The spaces are generous. The question that built it remains as good a guide as any for what comes next.

For whom are we building?

For them. And in 2026, as we mark forty years on this campus, the answer remains the same: for every student who walks through our gates, seeking justice, finding community, and discovering their own God space in the colonnades and courtyards that have quietly shaped generations.