Sacred Heart Monastery – 1 Roma Avenue – Kensington – NSW

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

 

Designed by Sheeren Hennessy and build McDonald's McIntyre in 1995, Chapel attached to Monastery designed by Hely and King and built by PG 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 open June 1897.
The Mona Street church for local Catholics from 1897 to 1907 went to school church was still outside the Mona Street

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.