The roots of St John’s
Church can be traced back to Australia ’s first Catholic bishop, John Bede
Polding OSB (1794–1877) who visited Van Diemen’s Land in 1835 en route to
taking up his posting in Sydney .
Of the three designs considered, that chosen was by architect Henry Edmund
Goodridge (c.1800–63).
The design used at Richmond
would appear to be one of a small portfolio that Polding obtained from
Goodridge prior to sailing for Australia
on 26 March 1835. All of these designs were for small rectangular Gothic boxes
with Early English detail and pinnacled buttresses at the corners.
In fact, as
early as 1825 the Richmond
district had the largest Catholic population outside Hobart and Launceston. On
23 August 1835 Polding celebrated Mass in the homestead of John Cassidy’s
property Woodburn, a little to the north-east of Richmond village. One of a handful of
Catholics in Van Diemen’s Land of that period to become large landholders,
Cassidy had acquired Woodburn on the banks of the Coal River Coal
River Hobart
Town for Sydney on 5 September 1835.
On 21 September a
meeting was held to pursue the raising of money to build the church, local
residents subscribing some £700 within
weeks. The Colonial government promised a further £500. The successful
tenderer, as announced in the Colonial Times, for 22 March 1836, was a Mr.
Buscombe. St John’s
the Evangelist’s Church was opened on 31 December 1837. The first pastor, Fr
James Ambrose Cotham OSB, who had accompanied Polding out from England
in 1835, preached at the Mass which was celebrated by Fr James Watkins. Watkins
was at that time temporarily in charge of Richmond
while Fr Cotham resided in Launceston. A ‘sumptuous repast’ at John Cassidy’s
residence completed the ceremonies.
By 1858, Goodridge’s Gothic St John’s, Richmond , must have
seemed decidedly unfashionable to its pastor Fr William Dunne. Dunne had just
erected the charming St Patrick’s, Colebrook, from Pugin’s second church model,
so the as-yet unused third model would have presented a potentially useful
source of components to convert the existing building into one that was more appropriate,
with a chancel, a sacristy, a tower and a spire. The model used for extensions
to St John’s , Richmond , was, like the other two, a
scholarly and completely convincing, yet totally original, version of a small
English medieval village church.
The problem in using Pugin’s model three designs for the
extensions was that it was for a church substantially larger than St John’s . The Hobart architect
Frederick Thomas (1817–1885), who had been given custody of the models by
Bishop Willson and had drawn up plans from them, was charged with adapting parts
of the model. Thomas had been sentenced to transportation to New South Wales in 1834 for swindling. He
was further sentenced in 1842 to fifteen years in a penal settlement for
stealing and arrived in Hobart
Town
While still on probation he was assigned as an unqualified draftsman and clerk
to the Public Works Department on 1 July 1847, and then was later promoted to
Senior Draftsman and Clerk of Works.
By 1880 the spire was reported to have developed a dangerous
lean. It was a wooden structure of indeterminate cladding. Whether it fell down
or was dismantled is not known, but it was replaced in 1893 by a much shorter
spire. Designed by Alexander North, the spire had bands of darker imbricate
slate and four small gabled openings in the spire as part of its
design. It was an intelligent match for the proportions of the Thomas tower
below.
In time, the spire had seriously deteriorated and it was replaced in
1972 by a copper-clad version of the original model three spires, designed by Hobart architect Rod
Cooper but reduced in size to better match the tower height. It is capped by
the North cross. In 1928–29 there was a major renovation of the building. Although
much of this concerned the furnishings, works were carried out on the
structure, including repair and re-pointing of the stonework, installation of a
wooden ceiling replacing the plaster one, remediation of the chancel floor and
the cutting of a door in the west wall of the sacristy replacing the original
two windows.
Main Information & Text Source –
"Richmond
Essay" by Brian Andrews – Pugin Foundation Website
