Our Beginnings
Three Irish brothers, Br Dunstan Drumm, Br Leopold Loughran and Br Jerome Foley, arrived in Melbourne on the 4th February 1912 after a long sea voyage that had taken them from a bleak northern winter into a hot Australian summer. Having settled into ‘Coldblo’, a house owned by St Joseph’s Parish, they began teaching 54 boys the very next day in the parish hall. These early days, and indeed the early years, would provide an exciting challenge for our three pioneers in establishing De La Salle College in Malvern.
A momentous year in the history of the College was 1929 when the size and public profile of De La Salle grew dramatically with the move from the first school building in Stanhope Street West to the new Tower Building, erected on the site of our present Tiverton Campus. This same year also saw the return to the College of Br Jerome Foley for a seventeen-year appointment as Headmaster. Dr Eric D’Arcy, retired Archbishop of Hobart and Oxford educated academic, spoke of his old De La Salle teacher, “ Br Jerome, one of many great leaders De La Salle has seen, had the difficult task of steering the College through the hard years of the Great Depression and the Second World War and was loved and respected by generations of De La Salle Collegians".
In 1953 a second property, ‘Kinnoull’, was purchased in nearby Northbrooke Avenue and since then each decade until the end of the century has seen further expansion and growth. Today the College comprises some 1250 students and 150 staff divided between Tiverton campus on High Street and Kinnoull, our senior campus.
The growth and development of the College and the many students who have passed through its gates are a fine tribute to those three Irish brothers.