St Michael’s Church – Vaucluse – New South Wales

 

St Michael’s Church - Vaucluse 

Up on Vaucluse Road, corner of Gilliver Avenue, St Michael’s sits like a sandstone punctuation mark in the eastern-suburbs skyline — tower and spire catching the light when you come over from Rose Bay. Edmund Blacket designed the original Gothic chapel; the foundation stone went down on 29 October 1875 and the little church opened on 17 February 1877. It was a small local building for a still-thin Vaucluse congregation, not the full silhouette you see from the street today.

As the eastern suburbs filled in, the fabric grew in stages. Cyril Blacket — Edmund’s son — worked on early-twentieth-century extensions that added transept, choir and sanctuary space. Then, in the late 1920s–1930s, Professor Leslie Wilkinson finished the west end, baptistery, tower and spire, and designed the parish hall (opened 1929). Wilkinson’s sensitive completion of Blacket’s core won the Sulman Medal for architecture. St Michaels became a full parish in 1913 and remains a landmark of the South Head Anglican parish.

So the familiar towered outline is largely Wilkinson’s finishing campaign on Blacket’s sandstone heart — associated with Blacket, yes, but completed as the skyline piece you recognise today.