Cathedrals in Australia - St Saviour's Cathedral, Goulburn Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia
By Team MavEtJu on 05-Oct-17. Waypoint GA10836

It was not until 1871 that cathedral plans came to be actively considered. Three years later, on 15 January 1874, the foundation stone of the cathedral church was laid. The Cathedral Church of Saint Saviour was designed by the then noted Colonial ecclesiastical architect, Edmund Thomas Blacket. Blacket had already had some involvement with the church site at Goulburn. In 1843 he had designed a pulpit for James Hume's original brick church which was approved by Bishop Broughton and then installed.

Since Blacket's cathedral was to take ten years to construct, Blacket was also asked to design a smaller pro-cathedral and parish Sunday school. This building was completed in 1874 and still stands within the cathedral precinct, to the west of the cathedral itself. The first Anglican church, St Saviour's, was completed in 1839 and this later became the pro-cathedral. The first resident Anglican priest of that church was William Sowerby, who had been trained at St Bees Theological College in Cumberland, England, and moved to Australia in 1836 to answer the call for more clergy. Sowerby later became the first Dean of St Saviour's.

The Blacket cathedral was one of the architect's greatest works. It was really the only cathedral he designed unencumbered by distance, financial stringency and unsympathetic clients. It was a favourite building and Blacket spent much of the last nine years of his life working on it. Blacket gave to the cathedral a crucifix which he had carved in his youth; a controversial gift which the authorities hid away for many years. The cathedral is unmistakably a Blacket church, on a grand scale, with nave, aisles, transepts, chancel, porches and tower. It has large and elaborate stone traceried windows and an interior with a heavily carved hammer beam roof, clustered columns and foliage capitals, elaborately moulded arcades and chancel arch and the use of figurative roundels in the nave, transepts and chancel. The tower and spire, however, were never completed. The cathedral cost 20,000 pounds at the time of its completion in 1884.

Many attempts were made subsequent to Blacket's death in 1883 and the completion of the cathedral proper one year later, to complete the cathedral's tower and spire but all these attempts were to no avail. In 1909, Edmund's son Cyril prepared documents for the completion of the tower and spire. A commemorative stone was even laid within the tower base to signal recommencement of the tower building but nothing more was done. In the 1920s, a Melbourne architect, Louis A. Williams, was asked to advise the diocese on the state of the tower footings. He reported that "...as a result of my examination of the structure and [Blacket] drawings, I can assure you that the present tower stump and footings are of ample strength to bear the proposed superstructure."[citation needed] Still no further work was undertaken.

Some ten years later, Williams and a Sydney architect, Sir Charles Rosenthal, produced a joint scheme for the new cathedral tower and spire. Again, however, no work issued from all this activity. Perhaps this inactivity resulted from particularly pessimistic analyses of the tower foundations to carry the weight of the building. The stringencies imposed by World War Il also dampened enthusiasm and restricted available monies. It was not until 1984 and the introduction of the Australian Bicentennial commemorative program that funds became available for the completion of the tower and spire. A grant of $1,000,000 was announced in that year by the Premier of New South Wales and the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn agreed to provide additional funds.

For more information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Denomination: Anglican
Founded: 1874

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