Edith Cowan University (ECU) is a public research university in Western Australia. It is named in honour of the first woman to be elected to an Australian parliament, Edith Cowan, and is the only Australian university named after a woman. It is the second-largest university in the state with over 30,000 students in 2023. Gaining university status in 1991, it was formed from an amalgamation of tertiary colleges with a history dating back to 1902 when the Claremont Teachers College was established, making it the modern descendant of the first tertiary institution in Western Australia.

Western Australia is a state of Australia occupying the western third of the land area of Australia, excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. With a total land area of 2,527,013 square kilometres (975,685 sq mi), Western Australia is Australia's largest state as well as the second-largest subdivision of any country on Earth, surpassed only by the Sakha Republic in eastern Russia. As of 2021, the state has 2.76 million inhabitants—11 percent of the national total. The vast majority live in the south-west corner; 79 percent of the population lives in the Perth area, leaving the remainder of the state sparsely populated.