History

Achieve Australia was originally two separate non-profit organisations, Achieve Foundation and The Crowle Foundation, which merged on 1 January 2009. Both organisations had supported people with disability across Sydney for decades and had been incorporated as branches of the Challenge Foundation in the 1950s.

Over the years, people with disability and their families have been provided with support by Achieve Australia to live and work in the community in a range of ways that meet the individuals’ needs. Wherever people have been living and working, the focus has been to build each individual’s personal self-esteem, sense of value as a community member and achieving self-reliance.

Crowle Home

The Crowle Home site at Ryde is located on part of an original 30 acre Crown Grant to Richard Cheers, known as The Eastern Farms site on the Parramatta River adjoining the Field of Mars.  The grant was made on 2 September 1792 by Governor Phillip.

In 1901, Lots 10 and 11 of the Blanch Estate were subsequently purchased by George Australia Denning, a retired civil servant, who built a substantial single storey house named Tellaraga.  The house is substantially now, as it was then.

Following his death in 1943, the land passed by inheritance to his wife, Julia Margaret Denning and sold soon after to Reverend John Hope and William Alfred Leopold Crowle.

The Crowle Home was established at Meadowbank in 1952 by the Sub-Normal Children’s Welfare Association later to be known as The Crowle Foundation.