Moving to Port Kennedy: What British Families Should Know

There is no port. There is no harbour and no marina either.

The name comes from a feature in Warnbro Sound that the Surveyor General John Septimus Roe named in 1859 after Governor Sir Arthur Edward Kennedy. The suburb itself was called Becher when it was named in 1974, after Becher Point inside its boundaries, and only became Port Kennedy on 1 June 1990.

So people searching from the UK picture a harbour town with boats and a front, and arrive in a nineties and two thousands residential suburb behind a dune coast. If you want the boat ramps and the foreshore, that is Rockingham, eight kilometres north.

The Mandurah line runs along the eastern edge of the suburb and does not stop in it. The nearest stations are Warnbro to the north and Lakelands to the south, and four bus routes, the 560, 561, 563 and 574, connect the suburb to them.

That makes the commute a drive or a bus to a car park, then a train, which is the same arrangement as Secret Harbour next door rather than the walk to the platform you get in Warnbro.

Drive it on a weekday morning before you commit. The difference between living near a station and near a bus to a station is a daily one.

Built on Becher Point, which is a series of old dune ridges, so the suburb runs in long parallel streets with wetlands in the hollows between them. Some of those wetlands went into the golf course and the rest are protected in Port Kennedy Scientific Park, part of Rockingham Lakes Regional Park.

That matters for a practical reason nobody mentions in a listing: a good deal of the land inside the suburb boundary is conservation reserve rather than houses or beach access, so check what is actually behind and in front of an address rather than assuming coast.

The median age is 36 and households average 2.8 people. Nearly ninety four per cent of homes are separate houses and close to four in five have four bedrooms or more, which is a particular kind of suburb: family sized houses, bought by families.

Port Kennedy Primary School opened in 1996, and there is also Endeavour Schools, which includes an education support centre, and St Bernadette's Catholic Primary School.

Secondary is outside the suburb, and several of the bus routes run to Comet Bay College.

Confirm catchments with the Department of Education for the specific address you are considering.

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.

No station, like most of this coast, and about fifty kilometres from the city. Every trip to Perth starts with a drive, and that cost is paid every working day rather than once.

One in eight residents was born in England, well above the Greater Perth figure of around eight per cent, and above Warnbro next door at 11.5% and Baldivis inland at 10.5%. It is Secret Harbour on the other side that has the concentration, at 17.7%, so if a dense British community is the point, that is the stronger bet.

What Port Kennedy has instead is space, four bedroom houses, bush and wetland inside the suburb, and prices that reflect being a little further out than Rockingham. Whether that is the right trade depends entirely on how often you need to be in the city.