The University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA) is a national Roman Catholic private university with campuses in and in Western Australia and Sydney in New South Wales. The university also has eight clinical schools as part of its school of medicine located across Sydney and Melbourne and also in regional New South Wales and Victoria.
Until 2021, Notre Dame was not part of the Western Australia Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC) nor the New South Wales Universities Admissions Centre, and students applied directly to the university through its admissions process. In July 2021, Notre Dame partnered with TISC to take applications for undergraduate courses in Western Australia through TISC.
The university crest is an open Bible. The waves below the open Bible represent the Fremantle area, where the university was founded, and Australia, a nation surrounded by water.
In the 2019 Student Experience Survey, the University of Notre Dame Australia recorded the second highest student satisfaction rating out of all Australian universities, and the highest student satisfaction rating out of all Western Australian based universities, with an overall satisfaction rating of 88.
History
In 1945, Father Patrick Duffy, an American navy chaplain, met Cardinal Norman Thomas Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, to discuss the possibility of the University of Notre Dame and the Congregation of Holy Cross being involved in the establishment of the first private Catholic university in Australia.
At the time, there were roughly 1.5 million Catholics living in Australia and an established network of Catholic primary and secondary schools. Cardinal Gilroy believed that there was a strong appetite for a Catholic university and that it would enable the education of an "elite Catholic laity that had been the glory of the church in the United States".
The project was pursued for a number of years and property was purchased in Sydney on behalf of Holy Cross in 1948, but ultimately the charter to establish the university was never acquired and the endeavour was abandoned in 1953.
In the mid-1980s, concerns were raised that state universities were not able to properly train lay teachers to work in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Western Australia. The idea of a private Catholic university again surfaced, this time on the opposite side of the Australian continent.
Peter Tannock, who headed the Catholic Education Office of Western Australia, discussed these concerns with William Foley, Archbishop of Perth. They enlisted the help of Denis Horgan, a local Catholic businessman and founder of Leeuwin Estate, who they hoped would provide financial assistance in establishing the university.
Horgan was supportive of the idea, as long as the institution would provide more than teacher education. A small planning committee with Tannock, Horgan, Foley and Michael Quinlan, a Catholic physician, was established and developed the plan for a Catholic university with a number of sites in Western Australia that would provide medical and nursing education among other fields.
The university was created through the University of Notre Dame Australia Act 1989 in the Parliament of Western Australia. The act was given assent on 9 January 1990, the university was inaugurated on 2 July 1991 and classes commenced in February 1992. The first college, the College of Education, had 35 postgraduate students in its first year and the University of Notre Dame (US) sent 25 study abroad students to spend a semester at the Fremantle campus.
The Broome campus, originally known as the Kimberley Centre, was opened in 1994 in service of the church and Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region. In 2006, the Sydney campus was formally opened with an initial enrollment of 450 students.
Campuses
Notre Dame has campuses located in Fremantle and Broome in Western Australia. The university's Sydney campus is spread across two sitesone based in Broadway and the other in adjacent to St Vincent's Hospital.
The Fremantle campus is located in the historic West End of the city, a designated heritage precinct famous for its late Georgian and Victorian-style architecture. The university has rejuvenated much of the West End and has worked to restore the traditional architecture of the precinct, occupying 50 properties since its establishment in 1992 and restoring many buildings. Due to the presence of Notre Dame, Fremantle is seeking to be referred to as a "university town", much like older university towns in Europe and to be the only one of its kind in Australia.