Brisbane, like all the major cities of Australia, generated two major Christian communities – Anglican and Roman Catholic – from its earliest days.
It began as a convict settlement in 1824. Settlers arrived in the 1830s, and the site was declared free in 1842. Queensland was separated from the colony of New South Wales in 1859, with its capital only a few miles north of the border, by which time the Catholic Archdiocese and the Anglican Diocese, both of Brisbane, were established.
The Catholics quickly raised what is now Old St Stephen’s Chapel, a simple stone cell designed from afar by the great pioneer of the English Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), consecrated in 1850. It was formally designated Brisbane Cathedral in 1863, the year that the foundation stone of its intended successor, also St Stephen’s, was laid.
The British-born Benjamin Backhouse’s planned grand cathedral proceeded no further than its foundations, and Backhouse’s associate, Richard George Suter, designed a simpler nave which was consecrated in 1874. Nothing more was built until after the First World War.
Meanwhile, the Anglicans had opened St John’s Pro-Cathedral in 1854, but hastened slowly to start their cathedral.
The British architect John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897) began work on St John’s Cathedral, for a site bordered by George, Elizabeth and William Streets in 1885. He had been commissioned to design Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, which was begun in 1880 and took thirty years to build. Pearson’s plans for Brisbane were approved by 1889, but work had yet to start at the time of his death.
His son, Frank Loughborough Pearson (1864–1947) was appointed to revise his father’s plans, but the intended site was taken over by the state government and Frank Pearson had to further revise the design for the eventual site on Ann Street. Phase 1, the east end and first bay of the nave, was completed in 1910, after which worked stopped for over half a century.
Meanwhile the Catholic Archbishop James Duhig (1871-1965), characterised by his church-building projects as “Duhig the Builder”, proposed a grandiose Baroque Cathedral of the Holy Name, designed by the Sydney practice of Hennessy & Hennessy for a different site to St Stephen’s. Their 1925 drawings depict a showy version of the London St Paul’s Cathedral, intended to be the largest sacred building in the British Commonwealth.
Construction started, to a toned-down design, in 1927 and eight years later Archbishop Duhig consecrated the main altar of the crypt. After that nothing else was built. The architect Jack Hennessy successfully sued the Archidiocese for unpaid fees in 1949-50, and the site was sold in 1985 to property developers who erected Cathedral Place in place of the cathedral. A heritage-listed retaining wall is all that remains.
The Anglicans hardly had better luck for decades, even after Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein laid the foundation stone for Phase 2 of St John’s in 1947. That project, for two further nave bays, was eventually built in 1965-69, and the final Phase 3, two more nave bays, a porch, the west front and three towers and two spires was completed in 1989-2009.
Later, at the very end of the twentieth century, the earliest surviving church building in Brisbane, Old St Stephen’s, was rededicated. It contains a shrine to Australia’s first Catholic saint, St Mary McKillop (1842-1909).
Brisbane has two fine cathedrals, each the result of redesigns and changes of site, and – like the federal capital Canberra – a cathedral-that-never-was.
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform…
He treasures up His bright designs,
and works His sov’reign will.
[William Cowper, 1731-1800]