150 Years on Pyrmont Peninsula

The Catholic Community of Saint Bede 1867–2017

Colin Fowler

• Publisher: ATF Press Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925486889
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture

St Bede's Catholic Church in Pyrmont Street is the oldest, continuously functioning church on the Pyrmont peninsula. The Sydney Morning Herald article on the laying of the foundation stone (7/2/1867) stated that, when completed, the new church would be "a very neat and elegant structure".The building was ready for blessing and opening seven months later. Much of the work had been done by stonemason members of the new parish, continuing to labour after long hours in the local quarries. The work of many hands is evident in the different chisel patterns in the sandstone. Some of the stone was quarried on site, as can be seen in the cliff face at the rear of the church. At that time, and for many years after, there was an uninterrupted view from the church to the waters of Darling Harbour.The church building continues to contribute to the dynamic quality of the worshipping community. Its simplicity and elegance attract the deep affection of those who gather there each week. That affection has been expressed in recent years by the installation of new stained-glass windows in memory of the parish pioneers, and of the many nuns and priests and parishioners who have served the community since 1867.The parish celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2017. Restoration of the sandstone church has been completed as a sesquicentenary project, and this book was commissioned by the Parish Council to record the history of the parish. It is hoped that the whole local community will join in celebrating the Catholic community's 150 years on Pyrmont Peninsula.

Chapter 1

A New Name for an Ancient Peninsula

The first reference to the naming of the peninsula between Cockle Bay and Blackwattle Swamp, projecting into Johnston’s Bay within Sydney’s Port Jackson, was found in an 1806 edition of the first and, until 1824, the only newspaper in the colony of New South Wales, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The Gazette had been established in 1803 by Governor Philip Gidley King as the official organ of the administration of the penal colony. In addition to publishing official decrees this weekly journal also contained items of interest and assistance to the local readership including shipping news, advertising and announcements. One historian has described its contents as ranging from ‘fulsome flattery of Government officials’ to ‘inane twaddle on other matters’.¹

An item that appeared in the Gazette on Sunday 21 December 1806 could be said to be firmly in the category of ‘inane twaddle’, but it has significance in the history of Pyrmont:

On Thursday a select party of Ladies and Gentlemen, twenty-one in number exclusive of attendants, made an aquatic excursion from Parramatta to Captain McArthur’s estate in Cockle Bay; being highly favoured by the uninterrupted serenity of a salubrious atmosphere and after examining with inexpressible satisfaction the picturesque beauties which that romantic scene afforded, a handsome collation ushered in the evening’s festivity beneath the shelter of a spreading fig tree, whose waving foliage whispered to refreshing breezes. To this enviable retirement one of the fair visitors was pleased to give the appellation le Répos de l’Amitié, the estate receiving at the same time the name of Pyrmont, from its pure and uncontaminated spring, joined to the native beauties of the place, of which the company took leave at five much gratified with the rational festivities of the day.²

The membership of the select party can be speculated to have included the Macarthur family, John and Elizabeth and their children, Elizabeth, Mary, James, William and Edward, who had recently returned to the Colony after his schooling in England. Eldest son John had sailed to England with his father in 1801 for his education and never returned to the colony. Other members of the excursion would have included friends, neighbours, business partners and their families. In attendance there would have been some of the many convict workers assigned to the Macarthur household and estates, but not meriting to be numbered in the party. The whole group sailed down the Parramatta River from Elizabeth Farm, the Macarthur Estate, thirteen miles from Sydney. The most obvious point for landing would have been one of the two sandy bays on the northern headland of the peninsula

There was no mention in the story of the local inhabitants, people of the Cadigal clan of the Eora nation, who perhaps advisedly withdrew at the approach of the boats carrying the ‘select party’.³ Pirrama was the name they used for this area, where they camped at a relatively safe distance from the effects of the smallpox outbreaks that had already halved the Port Jackson indigenous population. Unknown to the Cadigal people, their Pirrama with its ‘picturesque beauties’ had already been several times exchanged among members of the New South Wales Corps. In 1795 fifty-five of the 288 acres of the rocky peninsula stretching north from Parramatta Street had been granted to Private Thomas Jones by Captain William Paterson, continuing the indiscriminate land grants to members of the Corps begun by Captain Francis Grose as acting Governor after the departure of Captain Arthur Phillip. The grant was located at the north-eastern end of the peninsula. In 1794 two grants of 24 and 18 acres on Cockle Bay south of the Macarthur estate had been made. The rest of the peninsula, including these two portions, would end up in the hands of Corps Surgeon John Harris in grants and purchases made between 1803 and 1818.

The name given to the estate in 1806 was suggested to the picnickers by the discovery of a “pure and uncontaminated spring”, which would have brought welcome refreshment on a mid-December summer’s day in Sydney. The spring seems to have been slightly to the west of the demarcation of the Macarthur land. It became known as Tinkers Well; it disappeared with the excavating of stone quarries in the vicinity later in the century. One of the ladies in the party was reminded of the famous German spa town of Pyrmont, whose waters not only refreshed but reputedly healed an impressive range of diseases: “[Pyrmont water] is better supported than most waters of this class; and when it can be procured, merits a decided preference over others, especially in cases of general debility remaining after loss of blood, copious discharges, parturition, or severe illness.”⁴ In 1806 the town and county of Pyrmont was a member state of the Confederation of the Rhine, which had been carved out of the Holy Roman Empire by the conquering Emperor Napoleon as a source of conscripts and supplies for his continuing campaigns, perhaps including supplies of bottled Pyrmont water.

Life in Sydney in 1806 was not all about aquatic excursions, picturesque beauties, handsome collations, fair visitors and rational festivities. The accompanying articles in the Sunday 21 December edition of the Gazette gave a truer picture of the penal colony. Immediately after the delightful story of the Macarthur picnic enjoyed on the Thursday, there followed news of hangings on the Monday and Wednesday of the same week and on the Tuesday punishments of 500 and 200 lashes for theft. The Monday executions had a Macarthur connection. Brothers James and Stephen Halfpenny and three accomplices, described at their trial as ‘bushrangers’—an early use of the word—had been indicted on four counts, all of ‘capital tendency’, one of which was the theft of ‘a cow, two ewes and two lambs, the property of John McArthur Esq’. All were found guilty and sentenced to death. However, as reported by the Gazette, it was ‘His Excellency’s pleasure to extend the Royal Grace in behalf of William Gorman, James Kelly, and James Sheedy, their accomplices; which act of mercy they accepted with every mark of gratitude’. The Halfpenny Brothers were duly hanged. In the same overwrought prose of the report of the Pyrmont picnic, the Gazette described the executions: ‘Those whose melancholy fate it was to expiate their offences by a public execution, were visibly imprest with a dread which increased as they approached the fatal spot. The three who were respited attended the sufferers, James and Stephen Halfpenny, reading by them as they walked, and were the near witnesses of a spectacle, which under their circumstances must doubtless have made an impression that time cannot obliterate.’

It is not known whether there were any Roman Catholics among the Pyrmont picnickers. The only likely candidates would have been among the assigned convict servants in the party. The Catholic population of the penal colony in 1806 was variously estimated. A muster conducted in August in the Sydney region had returned a total population of 7148, of whom 10% were free settlers, 45% convicts, 40% emancipated convicts.⁵ It is estimated that between 25 and 30 per cent of the convicts were Irish, the majority of these being Roman Catholic. Among the approximately two thousand Catholics in 1806 there was one priest, James Dixon, described in the muster as ‘EC [emancipated conditionally]; self [employed]; Roman Catholic Priest’.⁶ He and two other priests, Peter O’Neil and James Harold, had been transported for involvement in the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, arriving in 1800. O’Neil had been allowed to return home in January 1803 after his conviction was overturned. Harold, within months of his arrival, had been exiled to the harsher penal colony on Norfolk Island. Neither Harold nor Dixon had permission to minister to the Catholic population in their respective locations. However, for a brief period between April 1803 and March 1804 Roman Catholicism became a ‘tolerated sect’, and Dixon was authorised to celebrate public Mass on alternate Sundays at Sydney, Parramatta and Hawkesbury. Permission was withdrawn following the convict rebellion at Castle Hill. Governor King considered that the gathering of Irish convicts at Sunday Mass had contributed to the planning of the rising. There is evidence that James Dixon, ‘self-employed’, continued an unofficial ministry of Divine Service, baptism and marriage in Sydney and Parramatta, until full emancipation was granted him in June 1809, after which he sailed from the Colony for England and eventually to Ireland.⁷ For the next eight years, apart from the fleeting clandestine ministry of the erratic Father Jeremiah O’Flynn from November 1817 to May 1818, the Catholic community of convicts, emancipists, free settlers and soldiers was again without priestly ministry.⁸

Following O’Flynn’s expulsion from Sydney, Governor Macquarie had written to Lord Bathurst, Secretary for the Colonies, with a suggestion for any future appointment of Roman Catholic chaplains: ‘If it should at any time be considered advisable to sanction the Ministry of Popish Priests in New South Wales, I would beg to suggest that they should be Englishmen of liberal education and sound constitutional principles, and they should not come hither with any special authority from the Pope, as Rev O’Flynn represented himself to have done.’⁹ In 1819 when two priests were formally appointed chaplains by authorities in both London and Rome, these ‘Popish priests’ were not Englishmen as recommended by Macquarie, but Irishmen, one of whom the Scottish Governor would come to consider to be of decidedly unsound constitutional principles, indeed ungentlemanly. It would be an Irish Governor who would welcome the first English Catholic clergy, a Vicar-General in 1833 and a Bishop in 1835.

Meanwhile on the Pyrmont peninsula, in the years following the 1806 Macarthur picnic, a few business ventures had been undertaken. The first was of brief duration—a salt-boiling works, for producing fine white table salt, transferred by Macarthur from Broken Bay, north of Sydney, to the western shore of Cockle Bay. The next was a windmill erected high on the estate’s sandstone ridge, adding another set of sails to the Sydney skyline. It belonged to a Macarthur business partner, Garnham Blaxcell, who intended to use the mill for the production of flour for the growing Sydney population. The wheat would be provided from the the cultivation of the generous land grants held by Macarthur and Blaxcell.

By 1826 the windmill was a ruin, but rising on the same elevated ridge was a ‘most splendid mansion after the Grecian style’. This latest Macarthur project was described in the usual effusive style of the Sydney Gazette as a ‘rising empire’: ‘There are some 25 or 27 stone-masons and stone-cutters already employed, and the free stone, of which there is a plenitude for ages, is allowed to be the finest in the Country.’¹⁰ The article, as well as providing an accurate assessment of the quality and quantity of Pyrmont sandstone, also noted the rapid increase in shipping within Cockle Bay, an increase which would soon draw attention to the great potential for the development of the west shore and especially the Macarthur Estate:

Cockle Bay, which should most certainly be designated DARLING HARBOUR, is growing into that kind of notice which we have long been predicting though no great foresight was required for the purpose. Many of the owners and captains of vessels prefer that harbour to Sydney Cove, and we think they are in the right for so doing, since it must become the principal harbour within the heads of Australia. The east side of this capacious bay is becoming lined with stupendous edifices.

The next month the Gazette presented its readers with a version of the naming of the estate at odds with its 1806 Pyrmont picnic report: ‘The expensive and engaging edifice that is erecting at Pierpoint by Mr John McArthur is advancing as rapidly as circumstances will admit. Mr G Blaxcell, of olden time, we understand, gave the name of Pierpoint, or Pierre-point, to this fascinating spot, and Mr McArthur became the purchaser upon its being put up for sale.’¹¹ A name reflec...