Class of 1940

Pat Prendiville was the patriarch of one of the great pioneering families of West Australia. He provided the foundation of values on which the Prendiville business empire has been built. He was also one of the few students to experience Christian Brothers’ education at both “The Terrace” and what was then the new Aquinas College campus.

The Prendiville gene pool is synonymous with good all-around sporting ability and Pat features heavily in the old victory photos of the First Eleven and the First Eighteen as well as swimming, hockey and golf, his life-long passion. He boarded at the school from 1936 until 1940 when he left as Prefect.

Originally from Castleisland, County Kerry, Pat’s father Pat Garrett Prendiville was one of a family of fourteen! Following in the tradition of the day Pat went on to have eleven children having married Paddy Malloch in 1953. In 1965 Pat bought and ran the iconic Balladonia Roadside hotel on the Eyre Highway. When his eldest son Peter was 12 in 1966 he remembers going to the sheep station for holidays there: “We’d be up at 4 am and sweep the driveway and be driving tankers and dozers from an early age. We rode horses and mustered sheep it was a great upbringing”. Paddy made sure dinner was on the table for a family of eleven nightly, plus hangers-on.

Swimming training began at 5 am and after a full day’s schooling at Aquinas there would be cricket or tennis training.

He built up quite an empire as a publican eventually owning roadhouses, a sheep station, and fuel service stations including some well-loved historic sites, such as the Cocklebiddy Roadhouse on the Nullabor and later the Windsor in Perth.

Pat was a very keen golfer who regularly won awards such as the Mt Lawley Cup. He also has a hole dedicated to him in the “the World’s Longest Golf course” which reaches across the Nullarbor. His hole is called Skylab after the satellite which was the first US space station to fall to earth in July 1979. A space scientific research station, it fascinated the world in the daily news of the late 1970s as everyone wondered where it would land. It came crashing down in pieces scattered around the Balladonia Roadhouse, causing the US President Jimmy Carter to phone the Balladonia to apologise for any inconvenience.

Pat was endowed with a great sense of service and regularly sent one of his numerous family to look after someone less well off than his own clan. After a lifetime of success in business very sadly he passed away at the respectable age of 96 in 2019. Those who remember him well say of him that he was a principled, quiet man who led by example and who possessed a strong faith. He was loved by a great many and commanded the respect of all who knew him.