Drive past Windsor into the quiet of the Hawkesbury and you reach a stone box that still stops people mid-sentence: Ebenezer Church on Coromandel Road — Australia’s oldest surviving church building still in use, begun as a nonconformist / Presbyterian chapel in 1809 and now Uniting. Four thick walls, a gable roof, windows punched in the long sides, doors later blocked and a porch added: nothing showy, everything stubborn. Heritage NSW calls it the first Presbyterian church in the colony and ranks the churchyard among the nations most important pioneer cemeteries.

Free settlers from the Coromandel had been worshipping here under Pastor James Mein since about 1803, sometimes in the open under the tree that still stands near the building. They covenanted in 1806, raised the chapel-school in 1809, and ran a school from 1810. Funeral boats once muffled their oars up the river to this bank — the live post’s cortege image is not romance; the river really was the road. Dr John McGarvie, brought out by John Dunmore Lang, became the first ordained minister here in 1826.

This is not Macquarie Street Gothic and not a CBD plaque site. It is Hawkesbury vernacular faith — Scottish simplicity on a Cumberland Plain ridge — and it is still a working congregation with Coromandel descendants in the pews.

 Uniting Church - Presbyterian - Ebenezer - New South Wales

The quiet Hawkesbury River, North of Windsor, was hardly disturbed as a funeral cortege, in boats, proceede with muffled oars to the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church on the river bank. 


The Chapel is an elementary structure, with four thick stone walls and a gable roof. On the two long sides there are four windows, and two former central doors have been blocked up to provide an entrance at one end. 
Nevertheless, the simple chapel  survives today as the oldest standing church in Australia dating back to its completion in 1809