Connolly has the highest proportion of England born residents of any suburb in Perth. More than one in four people living here was born in England, against a Perth average of eight per cent.
It was built in the late 1980s as a golf course estate around Joondalup Resort, it is small, and it is quiet. Those three facts explain almost everything about it, including the parts you might not want.
The One Thing People Get Wrong
Connolly is not a family suburb in the way Butler or Baldivis are, and the numbers say so plainly.
The median age here is 47. In Jindalee, twenty minutes up the coast, it is 36. Connolly is an established suburb where a lot of people arrived in the nineties, raised their children and stayed, and it has one primary school and no high school of its own.
British families read “highest British population in Perth” and picture playgrounds full of children with familiar accents. What is actually here is a settled, older, comfortable suburb where a lot of your neighbours came out the same way you are about to, twenty or thirty years earlier.
That may be exactly what you want. It is a very different thing from what the headline figure suggests.
Schools
Connolly Primary School on Fairway Circle, opened in 1991, is the school in the suburb. It is an Independent Public School, which in Western Australia means it has more control over its own staffing and budget than a standard public school, and it is not the same thing as a private school. There are no fees.
There is no secondary school in Connolly. Older children travel, most often to schools in the surrounding Joondalup suburbs, so if you have teenagers the question is which high school they can get into rather than what is in Connolly itself. Ask in the group before you commit to a street.
The Australian school year starts in late January and finishes in December. It does not run September to July. If you are arriving mid year your children will be joining part way through, and if you are timing your move around schooling you are aiming at January rather than September.
What It Is Actually Like
Small. Three and a half thousand people, which is about a tenth of Baldivis. Housing is mostly late eighties and nineties, detached, on established blocks with grown gardens rather than new turf.
Joondalup Resort and its golf course sit in the middle of it, which is why the streets curve the way they do and why a lot of houses back onto fairways. Joondalup itself is next door for shopping, the hospital, the train and Edith Cowan University, so you get a quiet suburb with a proper town centre a few minutes away.
The beach is about ten minutes west by car.
Being Honest About Connolly
It is quiet to the point of being sleepy, it is small, and the housing is thirty years old. If you are arriving with young children and want a street full of them, there are better answers up the coast.
It is also expensive relative to the newer northern suburbs, because established beats new in this part of Perth and a golf course estate near Joondalup was never going to be cheap.
What you get for that is a settled suburb, big trees, a good primary school and a very high chance that the family next door also came from England.
The Questions We Cannot Answer Here
Mortgages, visas, insurance and shipping come up constantly, and we are not licensed to advise on any of them. What we can do is point you at the firms in our directory who are, and who deal with British and Irish arrivals every week.
Ask Somebody Who Lives There
40,000+ British and Irish people in Perth are in our community, across the group, page and Instagram, and a good number of them live in Connolly. If you want to know whether it suits your family, ask them. It is free to join, and somebody will answer within the hour, usually several somebodies with strong opinions.