St Matthew’s Church, Windsor – Francis Greenway

St Matthew’s Anglican Church on Moses Street, Windsor, is one of Francis Greenway’s finest surviving works — spare Georgian brick, a clean tower, and that quiet authority you only get when a colonial building has been loved carefully for two centuries. Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered a church for the Hawkesbury township he renamed Windsor in 1810. Greenway’s church rose between 1817 and 1822; the Reverend Samuel Marsden consecrated it on 8 December 1822. Macquarie had to re-lay the foundation stone after the first ceremonial coin was stolen overnight — a story locals still tell with a half-smile.

Convict labour built the church under colonial direction; William Cox is associated with related precinct works. The adjoining rectory and stables (mid-1820s) complete a landmark group above the Hawkesbury floodplain — Heritage NSW lists church, rectory, stables and cemetery together. The south porch, shown on early plans, was added later (1857). The graveyard holds burials connected with early Hawkesbury families and, by local tradition, some First Fleet associations.

Greenway’s massing remains remarkably intact and is often cited among the most beautiful early colonial buildings in the country. The photographs here show the church, precinct and floodplain setting that still make Windsor worth the drive.

St Matthew’s Church, Windsor — historic view of the Georgian brick church.

Fitzroy Bridge Windsor

Drive out to Windsor and the concrete high-level span over South Creek looks like any modern creek crossing — until you realise this is about the fifth go at getting people from McGraths Hill into town without swimming. European settlers needed a reliable crossing here from the earliest Hawkesbury farms. Andrew Thompson built a floating bridge about 1802 and collected tolls; John Howe’s log bridge (Howe’s Bridge) followed about 1813. A wooden arch named for Governor Sir Charles FitzRoy replaced earlier structures in the mid-nineteenth century — local histories commonly date that span to 1848.

Then came iron. D. & W. Robertson supplied the ironwork and G. H. Royce is associated with construction of the 1879–1881 Fitzroy Bridge, opened to traffic in early March 1881. The present reinforced-concrete high-level bridge is mid-1970s (opened 1974/1975 in Hawkesbury accounts). Tucked beside the crossing is the 1835 Toll House — one of only two intact toll houses left in New South Wales — rebuilt after the 1864 flood and restored externally in the 1990s.

Historic photographs here likely show an earlier Fitzroy span (timber or iron), not the modern concrete bridge. Caption by era if the date is known; otherwise say “historic view.”

Fitzroy Bridge crosses South Creek at Windsor in the Hawkesbury district of New South Wales. The bridge was built in the nineteenth century for the Windsor Road Trust, improving a vital route between Windsor and surrounding settlements. Its history reflects the engineering and transport needs of the early colonial road network.