Curtin University is an Australian public research university based in Bentley, Perth, Western Australia. It is named after John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia from 1941 to 1945, and is Western Australia’s largest university, with 58,607 students in 2022. WAIT was established in 1966.
When the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) began teaching students in 1967, it drew on a rich history of technical education in Western Australia to offer industry-focused higher education courses to a booming post-war population.
The key organizational milestones in our subsequent journey to becoming the state’s largest and most multicultural university are highlighted below.
The major infrastructure was completed in 1966 for the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) at Bentley, on Noongar land that is the site of the former Collier Pine Plantation. The WAIT Act receives assent in December, with a mandate for the new institution to provide practically focused higher education courses relevant to the needs of industry.
The establishment of WAIT effectively splits the Perth Technical College in two, with those courses not transferring to WAIT remaining in the reduced-sized technical college, later to become Central TAFE.
