On 14 March 1855, a 'large concourse of people' gathered to watch the Mayor of Geelong, William Hingston Baylie, lay the foundation stone of the Geelong Orphan Asylum. Although the mood was distinctly celebratory, one of the many speakers struck a sour note. The Marshal, Mr Wright, lamented the complete absence of clergymen on such a Christian occasion.¹ Two days later the Geelong Advertiser published a speedy response to this accusation from Father Patrick Dunne, Catholic Pastor at Geelong. Father Dunne explained that no Catholic clergy had attended the stone-laying ceremony for the orphanage

... not because they were not invited to take part in any religious ceremony ... but because we consider that there is not sufficient guarantee that the faith of poor Catholic Orphan Children will be respected, or that they will be educated in this institution in the religion of their sainted forefathers.²

Father Dunne acknowledged that there were many worthy citizens on the orphanage committee, but pointed out that 'there is no Catholic amongst them, and no one but a Catholic can conscientiously guarantee to us the education of Catholic children in their own religion'.³

Almost two years to the day after Father Dunne's letter was published, the foundation stone for St Augustine's Catholic Orphanage was laid at Newtown, Geelong. Like the Catholic orphanage established earlier in Melbourne, St Augustine's was a product of the fear expressed by Father Dunne that Protestant-run orphanages would proselytise Catholic children away from their faith. Given that Father Dunne, and most of his brother priests in Victoria, had recently arrived from Ireland, where generations of Catholics had struggled to practise their faith under official oppression, this was possibly not an unreasonable fear. Furthermore, the new colony to which they had come was also showing serious signs of sectarianism.⁴ Public debates, played out in the colony's newspapers, went so far as to argue the merits of allowing Irish Catholic immigrant girls into the colony, with Catholicism depicted as a religion 'unfavourable to the development of liberty, of safety, of public happiness or progress'.⁵ Victoria's first Catholic Bishop, James Alipius Goold, publicly voiced his concern over the correct religious education for Catholic children when he argued in 1855 that 'every religious body should have children under their own guardianship'.⁶ As Victoria's Parliament began to debate the merits of State aid for religious education in the 1850s, Goold anxiously set about trying to encourage Irish Religious to migrate to the colony and establish Catholic schools and charitable institutions. The desire to educate Victorian Catholic children in their own religion meant that, despite all the other demands on the resources of the Catholic church in Victoria, four Catholic orphanages had been established in the colony by the early 1860s, compared with three Protestant orphanages in the same period. It also contributed to the Catholic institutions' divergence from trends in both government welfare policy and the administration of charity in the second half of the nineteenth century and coloured the experience of substitute care for generations of Victorian Catholic children.

Gold-rush turmoil in Victoria had exacerbated the perception amongst many concerned citizens that Melbourne was in need of an orphan asylum. In the 1840s, church-based charitable groups (both Protestant and Catholic) had made some efforts to accommodate orphaned or abandoned children in the Port Phillip District. The Anglican St James' Visiting Society had established a shelter for children in 1849 and was soon joined by other Protestant charities to form the committee of what became known as the Melbourne Orphan Asylum.⁷ A Catholic lay organisation, the Friendly Brothers, also offered aid to orphans, as well as other destitute individuals, in both Geelong and Melbourne. A few months before Victoria officially achieved separation from New South Wales, the government reserved ten acres of land at Emerald Hill for an orphan asylum. The discovery of gold in Victoria in the same year, however, left the building of the asylum in limbo until late November 1854, when the land was handed over to the committee of the Melbourne Orphan Asylum. By then, immigration, dislocation, death and desertion had greatly added to the number of apparently 'orphaned' children in the new colony and the asylum was sorely needed. Not long after the Melbourne Orphan Asylum was granted its site, the Catholic Vicar-General sought land for a Roman Catholic orphanage in the neighbourhood of Melbourne. Two acres were granted, not far from the Protestant Orphanage in Emerald Hill, and the foundation stone for St Vincent de Paul's Orphanage was laid on 8 October 1855.

The driving force behind the establishment of this orphanage was Father Gerald Ward, who had arrived in the colony with Father Dunne in 1850. Early in 1854, Ward had established Victoria's first branch of the St Vincent de Paul Society, a lay charitable organisation. Soon after, he had become aware of the case of five Collingwood children whose parents had drunk themselves to death. The court had appointed a Presbyterian minister as guardian to the parentless children. But when it became apparent that they had been baptised as Catholics, Father Ward lost no time in successfully applying for guardianship, although the two youngest children, both girls, were eventually allowed by the Supreme Court to remain with a neighbour who had cared for them since their parents' deaths. The three eldest children, all boys, however, were placed with a 'respectable' Catholic woman in Prahran, until they were moved, along with four other children, to the new St Vincent de Paul's Orphanage early in 1857. In August of the same year, the first twelve children moved into St Augustine's Orphanage.