“When the First Fleet was sent to New South Wales in 1787, Richard Johnson of the Church of England was licensed as chaplain to the fleet and the settlement. In 1825, Thomas Scott was appointed Archdeacon of Australia under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Calcutta. William Grant Broughton, who succeeded Scott in 1829, was consecrated the first (and only) “Bishop of Australia” in 1836.In early Colonial times, the Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, a chaplain, was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving “public morality” in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education. Samuel Marsden (1765–1838) had magisterial duties, and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the “flogging parson” for the severity of his punishments. Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland,so the authorities were suspicious of Roman Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement and Roman Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans.
The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the reformist attorney-general John Plunkett,
the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.
A mission to the Aborigines was established in the Wellington Valley in New South Wales by the Church Missionary Society in 1832,
but it ended in failure and indigenous people in the 19th century demonstrated a reluctance to convert to the religion of the colonists who were seizing their lands.
In 1842, the Diocese of Tasmania was created. In 1847, the rest of the Diocese of Australia was divided into the four separate dioceses of Sydney, Adelaide, Newcastle and Melbourne. Over the following 80 years, the number of dioceses increased to 25″.

St. Paul’s Cathedral

St Paul’s Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
It is the cathedral church of the Diocese of Melbourne and the seat of the Archbishop of Melbourne who is also the metropolitical archbishop of the Province of Victoria and,since 28 June 2014, the present seat of the Primate of Australia.
The cathedral was built in stages and is one of the City of Melbourne’s major landmarks.
St Paul’s Cathedral is in a prominent location at the centre of Melbourne, on the eastern corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Street.
It is situated diagonally opposite Flinders Street Station, which was the hub of 19th-century Melbourne and remains an important transport centre.
Immediately to the south of the cathedral, across Flinders Street, is the new public heart of Melbourne, Federation Square.
Continuing south down Swanston Street is Princes Bridge which crosses the Yarra River, leading to St Kilda Road.

Thus the cathedral has a commanding view of the southern approaches to the city. The location for the cathedral marks the place of the first Christian service held in Melbourne in 1835.
Previous buildings on this site include a corn market and St Paul’s Parish Church.
St Paul’s Cathedral is built on the site where the first public Christian service in Melbourne was conducted in 1835.
The area of the current site became a corn market until 1848, when it was made available for the construction of St Paul’s Parish Church, a bluestone church.

 

 

The Church of St Paul the Apostle, consecrated in 1852, remained in use as a parish church until its demolition in 1885 to make way for the current cathedral.
A distinguished English architect, William Butterfield, designed the cathedral, in the architectural style of Gothic transitional.
The foundation stone was laid in 1880 and, on 22 January 1891, the cathedral was consecrated by the Right Reverend  Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne,in the presence of John, Earl of Hopetoun (later Marquess of Linlithgow), Governor of Victoria. St Paul’s replaced St James Old Cathedral which then stood on the corner of William Street and Collins Street – later moved to a site near the Flagstaff Gardens. To fit the block, the cathedral edifice is orientated NNW. The erection of the spires began in 1926 to the design of John Barr of Sydney superseding Butterfield’s original design.

The 1960s saw extensive work completed to the exterior of the cathedral and the T.C. Lewis organ was restored in 1989 by a major National Trust appeal. Major restoration works were completed in 2009 with significant repairs to the spires,the building of the Moorhouse Tower Lantern and the new processional doors.
Although there was no established church in colonial Victoria, most of the dominion’s establishment were Anglicans and the Church of England (as it was then) was given the best site in Melbourne for its cathedral. At the time of its construction, St Paul’s was the tallest building in central Melbourne and dominated the city’s skyline.
The growth of multi-storey buildings in central Melbourne during the 20th century robbed St Paul’s of its commanding position and restricted views from many angles.
The construction of Federation Square, which involved the demolition of a pair of adjacent high-rise buildings, the Gas and Fuel Buildings, has improved the cathedral’s visibility from the south.

Scot’s church

The Scots’ Church is a Presbyterian church in Melbourne, Australia.
It was the first Presbyterian Church to be built in the Port Phillip District (now the state of Victoria) and is located on Collins Street.
It is a congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Australia and has been described as “an icon for well over a hundred years”.

The Reverend James Forbes was recruited to come to Australia as a Presbyterian minister by the Reverend John Dunmore Lang, arriving in Melbourne from Sydney via boat on 20 January 1838.
He found that a retired Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend` James Clow, had arrived on 25 December 1837 and had commenced an afternoon service from 2 pm and 4 pm according to Presbyterian forms of the AMP centre.  Clow had been a Church of Scotland chaplain in Bombay, India but had retired and was of independent means.

He had intended to settle in South Australia but when he stopped on route in Hobart the positive reports about Port Phillip led him to visit the Port Phillip District in October 1837 and then settle permanently.

 

 

 

 

Photos supplied courtesy of Natalie Lim