Freemasons in Australia – From the 1803 Raid and the Soldiers' Lodges to the United Grand Lodge and the Sydney Masonic Centre – 1797 to Today

Walk up Castlereagh Street towards Goulburn Street and you can't miss it. A great grey concrete wedge leans out over the footpath, with an office tower sitting on top. That's the Sydney Masonic Centre, headquarters of the Freemasons of New South Wales and the ACT. Most people who walk past have no idea that the story of the men who meet inside goes back to the first years of the colony. It started with sailors, soldiers and convicts meeting in secret, and grew into a brotherhood that at one time took in prime ministers, a Test cricket legend and the man who flew the Pacific. Here's the story of Freemasonry in Australia, from Sergeant Whittle's front room to the present day.

The Sydney Masonic Centre on the corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn Streets, 2022. Image: Shkuru Afshar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Masons in the First Years

Freemasonry came out on the ships. The SA & NT Freemasons Historical Society, in its chronology of the early years, reckons Joseph Banks was probably the first Freemason to set foot on the continent, in 1770. It also says the First Fleet "probably contained some Freemasons". Nobody can name them for certain. What we do know is that the Mason's square and compasses turned up early. The emancipist James Larra built a pub called the Freemason's Arms at Parramatta in 1797.

That same year, on 6 July 1797, three privates of the New South Wales Corps, George Kerr, Peter Farrell and George Black, asked the Grand Lodge of Ireland for a warrant to hold a lodge in the Corps. Dublin put off a decision and nothing more was heard of it. Out on Norfolk Island, men calling themselves the Lodge of St John No. 1 bought half an acre of land in April 1800. They were meeting without any warrant at all. The Freemasons of NSW and the ACT say no trace of that lodge appears in the records of the English, Irish or Scottish Grand Lodges, so it was most likely irregular.

The first Masonic certificate known to have been issued in Australia dates from September 1802. It came out of a meeting held on board the French exploring ship Le Naturaliste, at anchor in Sydney Harbour. George Bridges Bellasis took part. He was in charge of the guns at Dawes Point and had been transported for killing a man in a duel in Bombay. So did Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp of the NSW Corps, and his certificate is now in the Mitchell Library.

The Night the Governor Raided the Lodge, 1803

The story every Australian Mason knows is the raid of May 1803. The man behind it was Sir Henry Browne Hayes, an Irish knight transported for abducting a Quaker heiress in Cork. Hayes claimed he held a warrant to run a lodge. Governor Philip Gidley King said no.

Sir Henry Browne Hayes, in a portrait miniature attributed to Adam Buck, about 1824. Image: Adam Buck, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

According to the SA & NT Freemasons Historical Society, Hayes wrote to the Colonial Secretary in London on 6 May complaining that he had been forbidden to hold a lodge. On 14 May 1803 a meeting went ahead anyway, attended by sailors, a few settlers and Hayes himself. The Freemasons of NSW and the ACT say it was held in Sergeant Whittle's house and broken up by a party carrying the Governor's warrant "to arrest the whole assembly". On 22 May the Sydney Gazette published an order banning Masonic meetings without the Governor's express permission. Federation University's study of goldfields Freemasonry says Hayes was sentenced to hard labour in Van Diemen's Land. King wasn't sorry. He reported in August 1804 that "every soldier and other person would have been made a Freemason, had not the most decided means been taken to prevent it".

A hundred years later the Masons wore it as a badge of honour. At a special Grand Lodge meeting in Sydney Town Hall in 1903, Grand Master J. C. Remington called the meeting at Whittle's house the "Dawn of Freemasonry in Australia".

The Soldiers' Lodge: Social and Military Virtues No. 227

Freemasonry in the colony really took off with the regiments. Many British regiments carried a "travelling warrant" from one of the Grand Lodges, so the lodge marched wherever the regiment went. Governor Lachlan Macquarie was a Mason himself, initiated at Bombay in 1793 according to the SA & NT society. He was far friendlier to the Craft than King.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie, a Mason since 1793. Portrait by Arthur Levett Jackson, 1874. Image: Arthur Levett Jackson (1834-1888), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The 46th Regiment of Foot carried Lodge No. 227 of the Irish Constitution, the Lodge of Social and Military Virtues, with a warrant dated 4 March 1752. The SA & NT chronology says the regiment arrived in February 1814. Others give 1816 for the lodge's first work in Sydney. Both are right in a way: 1814 is when the regiment landed, and 1816 is when the lodge first did its work in public.

That big public outing came on 2 November 1816. Lodge 227 laid the foundation stone of Captain John Piper's grand house at Eliza Point, now Point Piper, with full Masonic ceremony. The brethren met in a glade, marched to the site, scattered corn and poured wine and oil. The Master struck the stone three times with his mallet, and £6 14s was laid on it for the poor. There weren't enough aprons and sashes in the colony, and the story goes that Francis Greenway, the convict architect, painted the aprons himself. The thirty-two brethren included the Lieutenant-Governor, Colonel Molle, and the judge Jeffrey Hart Bent. The explorer John Oxley and the merchant Alexander Riley were there too. Afterwards they went home by boat, saluted by seven guns from the ship Wellesley.

John Oxley, about 1810. The explorer and Surveyor General was among the brethren at Piper's stone-laying in 1816. Image: unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Lodge 227 kept to itself and didn't take in civilians. When the 46th left in 1817 the lodge went with it, and it went on travelling with the regiment. Since 1874, according to the SA & NT society, it has been the Lodge of Antiquity No. 1 under the Grand Lodge of Quebec, in Montreal. Just about the oldest lodge ever to work in Australia ended up in Canada.

The First Australian Lodges

The 48th Regiment replaced the 46th in August 1817. It brought Irish Lodge No. 218, and this one let local men join. By 1820 half of its twenty-eight new members were Sydney civilians. Eight of them petitioned Dublin for a lodge of their own. On 6 January 1820 the Grand Lodge of Ireland issued Warrant No. 260 for the Australian Social Lodge, the first lodge with a permanent home in Australia.

The warrant reached Port Jackson on 5 August 1820. Sources differ on when the lodge first met. The SA & NT chronology says 12 August 1820, with Matthew Bacon installed as the first Master. The Freemasons of NSW and the ACT give 30 August for "the first regular meeting". The lodge is still going. It became Australian Social Mother Lodge in 1878 and Lodge Antiquity in 1920. Today it meets in the Sydney Masonic Centre as Lodge Antiquity No. 1, which the Grand Lodge calls "undoubtedly the oldest of the Australian lodges".

In 1822 Lodge 260 won two big changes from Dublin. First, a ruling that a man freed by pardon or by serving his sentence, "possessing a good character", could be made a Mason. In a colony full of ex-convicts that mattered a great deal. Second, the right to grant dispensations for new lodges in NSW and Van Diemen's Land. The Leinster Marine Lodge of Australia followed in 1824. The English came in 1828 with the Lodge of Australia No. 820, which first met in April 1829 under John Stephen junior.

From Sydney it spread. The Freemasons of NSW and the ACT list the first lodges in the other colonies as Tasmania 1828, South Australia 1834, Victoria 1840, Western Australia 1842 and Queensland 1859. A couple of those dates need explaining. South Australia's first lodge, the South Australian Lodge of Friendship, was set up in London in 1834, before the colony even existed, and first met in Adelaide in March 1838. In Western Australia, the SA & NT chronology has the first meeting of the Lodge of St John in Perth on 4 April 1843. In 1840 a Mason called George Brunswick Smythe rode more than 1,000 kilometres overland from Sydney to deliver the dispensation for Melbourne's Lodge of Australia Felix. In the same year the Maitland Lodge of Unity became the first country lodge in Australia.

The Maitland Lodge of Unity's hall in Victoria Street, Maitland. The lodge dates from 1840 and was Australia's first country lodge. Image: Bidgee, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Three Constitutions and a Lot of Arguments

For most of the 1800s Australian Masons answered to three masters. Lodges held warrants from England, Ireland or Scotland, and each "constitution" had its own Provincial Grand Lodge, rituals, regalia and dues. Melbourne's Australasian Kilwinning Lodge got the first Scottish warrant in Australia in 1844. In Adelaide, the Scottish brethren simply held a lodge without permission, claiming Scottish law let any five Masons do so. Then they patched things up the following week.

By the 1870s plenty of colonial Masons were fed up. The Freemasons of NSW and the ACT put it down to "the tyranny of distance" and "the amount of money being sent away from the Colony". On 3 December 1877 a breakaway Grand Lodge of New South Wales was formed. The Grand Lodge's own history says it was set up by three Irish and five Scottish lodges. The NSW Grand Lodge centenary history, published on Linford Research, says it was "mainly by the Irish Lodges". Its first Grand Master was James Squire Farnell, who was Premier of New South Wales at the time. The home Grand Lodges refused to recognise it and banned their members from visiting its lodges, though many American Grand Lodges recognised it.

James Squire Farnell, Premier of NSW and first Grand Master of the breakaway Grand Lodge of New South Wales in 1877. Image: Freeman Brothers Studio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The United Grand Lodge, 1888

The quarrel was sorted out in the colony's centenary year. With the help of the Earl of Carnarvon, Pro Grand Master of England, who was visiting Sydney, the three bodies agreed to merge. The Governor, Lord Carrington, agreed to be Grand Master. The dates vary depending on which step you count. The Articles of Union were agreed on 1 June 1888 and took effect on 24 June. The Grand Lodge's About Us page says the "United Grand Lodge of New South Wales" was declared constituted on 16 August 1888. Carrington was elected in August and installed in September. The centenary history says the new body started with 176 lodges and about 7,600 members. The old Australian Social Lodge was given the number 0, the mother lodge's place in the Scottish tradition.

Lord Carrington, Governor of NSW and first Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of NSW, 1888. Image: State Records NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

The other colonies did the same thing at their own pace. South Australia went first, forming its own Grand Lodge in 1884. Victoria's United Grand Lodge followed in 1889, Tasmania in 1890 and Western Australia in 1900. Queensland held out longest, until its United Grand Lodge was formed in 1921. Even now there's no single national Grand Lodge. Each state runs its own show, and the ACT comes under New South Wales.

Freemasons Hall on North Terrace, Adelaide. South Australia formed the first Australian Grand Lodge in 1884. Image: Rexness, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The Masonic Memorial Temple in Brisbane. Queensland was the last state to unite, in 1921. Image: Chris Olszewski, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable Australian Masons

The lodges' own lists of famous members are long. The Grand Lodge of Tasmania and Lodge Devotion No. 723 both count ten Australian prime ministers who were Masons. They are Edmund Barton, George Reid, Joseph Cook, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Earle Page, Robert Menzies, Arthur Fadden, John McEwen, John Gorton and William McMahon. Barton, our first PM, was initiated into the Australian Lodge of Harmony in Sydney on 13 March 1878. One small catch: the two lists give different years for Menzies's initiation into Austral Temple Lodge in Melbourne. Lodge Devotion says 10 March 1920 and the Tasmanian list says 10 March 1910. Menzies was born in 1894, so 1910 would make him fifteen, and 1920 is almost certainly right.

Sir Edmund Barton, first Prime Minister of Australia, initiated in Sydney in 1878. Portrait by Swiss Studios, 1902. Image: Swiss Studios, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Then there are the sporting and household names. Don Bradman was initiated into Lodge Tarbolton No. 12 in Sydney on 26 November 1929. Charles Kingsford Smith joined Gascoyne Lodge in Brisbane in 1925, and his apron is still carried in the Anzac Day memorial service at the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Temple. Bert Oldfield, the wicketkeeper, was a Mason, and so was the cyclist Hubert Opperman. Weary Dunlop and the actors Chips Rafferty and Bud Tingwell all appear on the lists, along with Graham Kennedy. So does Cecil Gregory, who started Gregory's street directory, and Mervyn Richardson, who invented the Victa mower. Lodge Devotion even claims Adolphus Appleroth, the man behind the "I like Aeroplane Jelly" jingle.

Don Bradman with his bat in 1932, photographed by Sam Hood. He was initiated in Lodge Tarbolton, Sydney, in 1929. Image: Sam Hood, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, about 1930. His Masonic apron is carried every Anzac Day in Brisbane. Image: State Library of Queensland, Australia, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

For a Sydney local, my favourite is Mei Quong Tart, the much-loved tea-room owner. Lodge Devotion lists him as the first Chinese man initiated in Australia.

Mei Quong Tart, about 1900, photographed by Tesla Studios, Sydney. Image: Tesla Studios, Sydney, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Halls and Temples

For their first sixty years the Sydney lodges met mostly in pubs, which is why so many old hotels were called the Freemasons' Arms or the Freemasons' Tavern. Purpose-built halls came later. In Sydney the big one was the Masonic Hall at 279–281 Castlereagh Street, designed by Backhouse & Lough and consecrated in January 1884, according to the City of Sydney's heritage inventory. That same block is still Masonic land today.

All over the state, towns put up their own halls, often with columns, a pediment and the square and compasses over the door. A lot of them still stand, in Goulburn, Yass, Braidwood and Bathurst among other places. Some were very grand inside. The hall at Petersham, in Sydney's inner west, has an Egyptian-style lodge room.

The Masonic Hall at Goulburn, 2013. Image: Mattinbgn, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

The Masonic Hall at Yass, 2013. Image: Mattinbgn, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Braidwood's Masonic Hall, 2020. Image: Nick-D, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Carrington House, the Masonic Hall at Bathurst, named after the first Grand Master. Image: Geez-oz, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Egyptian room in the Freemasons' Hall at Petersham, 2014. Image: Chelm261, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The Masonic lodge at Mount Perry in Queensland, a heritage-listed country lodge, 2009. Image: Queensland Heritage Branch staff, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

The Masonic Hall at Albany, Western Australia. Image: Hughesdarren, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

In Sydney, the old 1884 hall was eventually replaced by the Sydney Masonic Centre. It was planned after the Second World War as a memorial temple, and the foundation stone was laid in 1976. It was officially opened on 10 March 1979. It's a landmark of Sydney brutalism, designed by Joseland & Gilling. I've told the whole story of the building in my post on the Sydney Masonic Centre, 279 Castlereagh Street.

The Goulburn Street entrance of the Sydney Masonic Centre, 2022. Image: Shkuru Afshar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Boom, Decline and Today

The great years came after the Second World War, when returned servicemen joined in their thousands and new lodges opened almost every month. How big it got depends on how you count. The NSW Grand Lodge's own records gave 130,585 members in 832 lodges in 1954, and a figure of 135,126 in 1959 is often quoted. The centenary history on Linford Research warns that those totals add up the members of every lodge. Many men belonged to two or more lodges, so the real number of Masons was smaller. It says the true peak isn't known and gives an estimate of its own. By 2002 the recorded figure was down to 19,682.

The reasons are the same ones that hit service clubs, churches and the RSL. People have less spare time, there's television and now the internet, and the old idea of joining what your father joined has faded. In 2017 the Grand Lodge's Freemason magazine put the loss at around a thousand members a year. Many country halls have closed and been sold. Some are now houses, shops or galleries. The building at Young, for example, is now a former Masonic hall.

The former Masonic Hall at Young, 2021. Like many country halls, it no longer belongs to the lodges. Image: Oronsay, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Freemasons haven't gone away, though. These days they're much more open about who they are. The Sydney Masonic Centre is a busy conference and events venue, the lodges advertise for members online, and there are open days. In a recent Grand Master's address, the Grand Lodge said about two-thirds of new candidates now come from people who simply find them and apply, not through family or friends. Lodge Antiquity No. 1, which grew out of those eight Sydney civilians in 1820, still meets in the city. It's a direct link back to the soldiers of the 46th and 48th, and to Sergeant Whittle's front room.

References

• SA & NT Freemasons Historical Society, "Some events in the early history of Freemasonry in Australia and the SW Pacific to 1848" (2013).
• Freemasons NSW & ACT, "The Oldest Lodge" (from Freemason, Summer 2011), "About Us", and "The Grand Master's Investiture and Proclamation Address".
• United Grand Lodge of NSW & ACT centenary history, "The Beginning of the Second Century", vols 6–7, via Linford Research.
• Freemason magazine, vol. 49 no. 4, December 2017.
• Federation University, "Goldfields Freemasonry: Decoding the Past".
• Grand Lodge of Tasmania, "Famous Masons"; Lodge Devotion No. 723, "Famous Australian Freemasons".
• City of Sydney heritage inventory, Sydney Masonic Centre (via my earlier post).