Background
Clara Frayne was born to a wealthy businessman Robert Frayne, and his wife, Bridget, in Dublin, Ireland.
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Ursula Frayne
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Career
She entered Baggot street with Catharine McAuely the then recently formed Institute of Mercy in Dublin in 1834 and took Ursula in place of her baptismal name. She was appointed Mother Superior in 1842, taking charge of the Institute"s first foreign mission foundation in Newfoundland. In 1845 she left for Perth, Western Australia in response to a request for religious sisters to staff a newly constructed school commissioned by the recently consecrated Bishop John Brady.
Frayne arrived with some companions on 8 January 1846.
Concerned for the conditions under which the sisters were working the Dublin mother-house sent money for return fares. Mother Ursula refused to abandon the mission.
She realized that the sisters would have to generate income. In 1849 Ursula opened the first secondary school in Western Australia.
lieutenant was a ‘select’ fee-paying school for the education of an almost exclusively non-Catholic clientele.
lieutenant generated much needed funds and brought the mission financial stability. Using this model Frayne commissioned other schools by establishing almost simultaneously a ‘select’ fee-paying school together with an infants school and a primary school, usually on the same site and often within the same building. After enduring a dispute with Bishop John Brady, Frayne responded to a request from the Irish-born Bishop Goold for a Victorian foundation in Melbourne.
Bishop Francis Murphy of Adelaide also put a similar request to her but Frayne had already committed to Bishop Goold.
Six weeks after her arrival in Melbourne Frayne had raised loans to pay off the mortgages on her convent in Nicholson Street, Fitzroy. Speedy development followed and considerable construction of buildings for social and educational work was undertaken, peaking in the erection of the first wing of the present ‘Academy’ for £6000 in 1870.
She also founded the Street Vincent de Paul’s Orphanage in South Melbourne. Frayne"s first Victorian foundation was in Kilmore, Victoria in 1875.
Mother Ursula died in Nicholson Street, Fitzroy on 9 June 1885, aged 68.
A Gothic chapel to her memory was built by her successor in the convent grounds. She is commemorated in the name of the Ursula Frayne Catholic College, Perth, Western Australiaand also in the dementia ward of Mercy Place, Albury. Renamed in 2014 to commemorate "Ursula Frayne".
