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.