Percy from the Pews
IT IS disappointing to report at this time when religious joy and goodwill should prevail that yet another Hobart Anglican church will soon close.
Following quickly on the decision to axe Holy Trinity and its North Hobart neighbour St Margaret’s as places of worship comes the news that in neighbouring New Town parish St Bede’s had its final service yesterday, although the exact date of this small church’s actual deconsecration has still to be advised.
The Anglican Diocese’s rationalisation of churches and a dwindling congregation have sounded the death knell for Cressy Street’s St Bede’s.
As a way seen for survival, its parish is being amalgamated with Moonah. The older, bigger and more historically significant St John’s Church is retained in New Town. It means one church will be lost from Moonah as well, understood to be St Mary’s in Springfield Avenue, while St Anne’s, in Ashbolt Crescent, Lutana, will be spared.
Like the major new building planned for Sandy Bay’s BayWest, arising from the takeover of Holy Trinity parish, the northern suburban moves seem not to have twitched the journalistic antenna at our daily newspaper.
This is despite warning bells being sounded last August. With the threat to Holy Trinity’s future very much in the news then, a letter to the Mercury said that another important church – St John’s – was on the list of heritage churches facing imminent closure. The writer said the building was “an intrinsic part of a largely unrecognised site of national heritage significance”.
As somebody with a keen eye on the threat to our historically valuable buildings, Leo Schofield (in his My Tasmania column in the Mercury of October 13) highlighted the importance of the St John’s precinct, with the John Lee Archer-designed St John’s Church (built in the mid-1830s and thus of even greater antiquity than Holy Trinity) its centrepiece.
Its setting, at the end of a still graceful tree-lined avenue, provides us with another impressive landscape deserving of retention, as does the nearby hilltop Holy Trinity.
So here again we find the interest in such issues being taken up not by the newspaper scribes but by concerned citizens.
St John’s future now seems resolved, for the time being, but there is no salvation for St Bede’s. No venerable Bede’s, as it were – it will be sold (and I understand there will be a rectory in the disposal of church property as well).
The historical footnote here is found in Dorothea I. Henslowe’s Heritage of Anglican Churches in Tasmania. She recorded that the building was earlier in Lenah Valley (once known as Kangaroo Valley) but was moved to Cressy Street in 1934, and dedicated as the Cressy Street Mission Hall before becoming St Bede’s.
Another case of religious building longevity being put to the wall.
