Sacred Heart Monastery – 1 Roma Avenue – Kensington – NSW

From half of Kensington you can still pick the tower on the sandhill — Sacred Heart Monastery at 1 Roma Avenue, a Pyrmont-sandstone Gothic pile that has been watching the eastern suburbs since the 1890s. The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart bought adjoining ground here in the mid-1880s for a training house; Sheerin & Hennessy designed the monastery, Dugald McIntyre built it in 1895, and the monastery and convent opened in 1897.

For its first decade the monastery doubled as the local Catholic church (1897–1907) until a school-church went up outside the walls. Cloisters came on about 1921; the attached Bishop Verjus Memorial Chapel was designed by Arthur S. King and built by P.D. Ryan in 1923 — that is the Randwick plaque’s account, and the one to trust over garbled “Hely” attributions. On the Register of the National Estate the group is still praised for its massing and for sitting like a medieval hill town on the Botany sand beds.

Fix the spelling while you are here: monastery, not “monastary,” and 1895, not 1995. The landmark on Roma Avenue is Victorian/Federation Gothic mission architecture — still a working religious precinct, not a museum piece.

Sacred Heart Monastery - 1 Roma Avenue - Kensington - New South Wales 

 

Designed by Sheerin Hennessy and built by Dugald McIntyre in 1895, Chapel attached to Monastery designed by Arthur S. King and built by P.D. Ryan in 1923

In 1885 it was decided that the training house for missionaries was required in Sydney. As a result of this decision the priests and sisters were joining properties on the sandhills at Kensington.
Built of Pyrmont sandstone, monastery and convent opened June 1897.
The Roma Avenue church for local Catholics from 1897 to 1907 until a school church was built outside the Roma Avenue precinct

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.

Richmond Church and Rectory

If you drive out to the Hawkesbury and come into Richmond along Windsor Street, St Peter’s sits on the rise above Pugh’s Lagoon as if Macquarie had planted it there — which, in a way, he did. This is one of his five Macquarie Towns. On the Hawkesbury tours of 1810–11 he chose an elevated bank for church, schoolhouse and burial ground; on 10 January 1811 the site was marked out with strong posts. An early schoolhouse-chapel served the town until a purpose-built church was needed.

The present Colonial Georgian church was designed by Francis Clarke and built by James Atkinson between the later 1830s and 1841. Bishop William Grant Broughton consecrated it on 15 July 1841. The picturesque rectory, also by Clarke, was completed in 1847. Edmund Blacket later altered the church — porch 1850, chancel mid-1850s — and remodelled the rectory in 1863. The group — church, rectory, school hall, cemetery and stables — sits in a park-like setting overlooking the lowlands and is listed on the NSW State Heritage Register.

Photographs here show the Richmond church and rectory group in the Hawkesbury landscape. This is St Peter’s, Richmond (Hawkesbury), NSW — not St Luke’s, Richmond, Tasmania.