The university's main campus is in Crawley, a suburb in the City of Perth local government area.

[13] Two members of the UWA faculty, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, won Nobel Prizes as a result of research at the university.

[15] The founding chancellor, John Winthrop Hackett, died in 1916, and bequeathed property which, after being carefully managed for ten years, yielded £A 425,000,[citation needed] equivalent to A$38.2 million in 2022, to the university, a far larger sum than expected.

During UWA's first decade there was controversy about whether the policy of free education was compatible with high expenditure on professorial chairs and faculties.

[19] The university introduced the Doctorate of Philosophy degree in 1946 and made its first award in October 1950 to Warwick Bottomley for his research of the chemistry of native plants in Western Australia.

UWA is one of the largest landowners in Perth as a result of government and private bequests, and is constantly expanding its infrastructure.

[21][22] The 65-hectare (160-acre) Crawley campus sits at the Swan River, about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) west of the Perth central business district.

Many of the buildings are coastal limestone and Donnybrook sandstone, including the large, iconic Winthrop Hall,[23] with its Romanesque Revival architecture.

[24] This open-air venue was built to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th anniversary, at the time the only replica in the world of the original Elizabethan Fortune Theatre, and used for 1964 Perth Festival performances.

[27] The venue is also home to a family of peafowl donated to the university by the Perth Zoo in 1975 after a gift by Laurence Brodie-Hall.

Other performance venues include the Octagon and Dolphin Theatres and Somerville Auditorium, the Winthrop Hall, Sunken Garden, Undercroft and Tropical Grove, which play host to a range of theatre and musical performances, including during the Perth Festival.

[31] The Berndt Museum of Anthropology, in the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (formerly on the ground floor of the Social Sciences Building), contains one of the most significant collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material in the world.

The university established a UWA Albany Centre in 1999 to meet rural education needs.

In 2005, Curtin University of Technology joined UWA in Albany to provide additional course offerings to the local rural community.

UWA Albany offers postgraduate coursework and research programs through the Institute for Regional Development and the Centre of Excellence in Natural Resource Management.

The UWA Rural Clinical School provides year-long rural placements for third-year medical students in Albany, Derby, Broome, Port Hedland, Karratha, Geraldton, Bunbury, Narrogin, Esperance, and Kalgoorlie; Western Australia.

The university has also developed a relationship with Australian Doctors for Africa with whom it sends academic staff to conduct medical student teaching in Somalia, Madagascar, and Ethiopia.

CIBER conducts basic scientific research into honeybee reproduction, immunity and ecology and aligns its work with the needs of industrial and governmental partners.

UWA's student body is generally dominated by school-leavers from within Western Australia, mostly from the Perth metropolitan area.

[51] UWA drove Australia's bid to be the site of the Square Kilometre Array, a very large internationally funded radio astronomy installation capable of seeing the early stages of the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.

[73] The Australian Government's QILT[b] conducts national surveys documenting the student life cycle from enrolment through to employment.

[74] These surveys place more emphasis on criteria such as student experience, graduate outcomes and employer satisfaction[74] than perceived reputation, research output and citation counts.

[80] UWA has had a publishing arm since 1935, when the university was the sole tertiary campus in Western Australia.

[82] Its stated aim was "to provide a space in which new and challenging critical material from a range of disciplinary perspectives and addressing a range of feminist topics and issues is brought together to discuss and contest contemporary and historical issues involving women and feminisms".

Premiers of Western Australia have included graduates Alan Carpenter, Colin Barnett, Geoff Gallop, Richard Court and Carmen Lawrence.

The former Chief Justice of the Australian High Court, Robert French is also a graduate of the UWA Law School.

The former CEO of Ansett Airlines and British Airways, Sir Rod Eddington, is a graduate of the UWA School of Engineering.

Graduates with outstanding sporting achievements include former Kookaburras (hockey) captain and Hockeyroos coach Ric Charlesworth.

British-born Australian comedian Tim Minchin also attended The University of Western Australia.

Current staff of note include clinical psychologist David Indermaur (also a graduate of the university), 2009 Western Australian Scientist of the year Cheryl Praeger, former Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett and former Labor federal minister Stephen Smith.