John Curtin College of the Arts

John Curtin College of the Arts, originally John Curtin High School, is an independent, public co-educational, partially selective high school, located in East Street, , a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. The school provides a general and specialist education to students from the greater Fremantle area, and intake for gifted and talented arts and soccer programmes from across Western Australia. Currently, John Curtin College of the Arts has gifted and talented programmes in the following disciplines: visual arts, media arts (television and film studies), music, contemporary dance, ballet, drama (acting studies) and musical theatre. As of Semester 1, 2022 the school had 1,817 students. School historical context The school was named to commemorate John Curtin, the late local federal MP and 14th Prime Minister of Australia. It was built at an estimated cost of £430,000 to amalgamate the overcrowded Fremantle Boys' and Princess May Girls' schools, the two state secondary schools serving the Fremantle area. The foundation stone was laid on 29 October 1954 by Premier Hawke. Jack Howieson, principal of Fremantle Boys', was appointed the initial principal. In February 1956, classes began in the first stage of the new school, while work continued on the construction of second and third stages with completion in 1958. During the first decade of the school's operation a number of annexes were dotted around Fremantle and included Princess May Annexe (Princess May Girls' School (fmr)), Finnerty Street Annexe (Fremantle Arts Centre), Fremantle Boys' Annexe (Film and Television Institute), the North Fremantle Annexe (North Fremantle Primary School (fmr)) and the East Street Trades Centre (Manual Arts Building). John Curtin has elements of an earlier education building campaign on the site, a two-storey brick Manual Trades Block that was constructed circa 1943 after an existing Fremantle Technical School manual arts building in South Terrace was taken over for defence purposes in 1941 and in view of the then proposals for the erection of a new Fremantle Technical High School.