Sacred Heart College

Our story

Sacred Heart College was opened in 1897 by South Australia’s first Marist Brothers, as Sacred Heart High School and a Catholic boys’ primary school in Port Adelaide. Its first principal, Brother Stephen Debourg, chose the name. Growing numbers took the school to Semaphore in 1902, when it became Sacred Heart College, then to Largs Bay, where it took its first boarders, and in 1914 to Somerton Park, after the Brothers bought Paringa Hall. The Memorial Chapel, honouring old scholars who died in the First World War, was blessed in 1924, and the ‘Intercol’ rivalry with Rostrevor began in 1923.

Girls first enrolled in 1977, when Sacred Heart became a co-educational senior college. It merged with its middle school (formerly St Joseph’s) in 2015 and with Marymount College in 2018, and in 2019 the Champagnat campus for Years 7 to 9 opened at Mitchell Park while the senior campus at Somerton Park became the Marcellin campus. Today it is a co-educational Catholic college in the Marist tradition for Years 7 to 12, with boarding, and it marked 125 years in 2022.