Category Bicentenary Snippets

We don’t know for sure what kind of pulpit was used when St. John’s first opened in 1825. The earliest photo of the interior shows a very tall and beautifully carved pulpit on a pedestal, and it was moved from…

By the 1820s, early Launceston was gradually changing from a settlement of tents and huts into a small town, and with the completion of St. John’s Church in 1825, an opportunity arose to install a town clock in its tower,…

Before St. John’s Church was built, and before the appointment of Revd John Youl as chaplain to the settlement, Christian ministry was haphazard and occasional. Revd Robert Knopwood was the only clergyman in Van Diemens Land from 1803, and rarely…

We all have our preferred places to sit in church – sometimes out of habit, sometimes because it seems warmer, or the sound is better. From the early days of St. John’s, “pew rents” were a normal part of the…

In 1899, plans were well in hand for the building of “the great extension” of St. John’s – the present dome area, transepts, chapel, chancel and sanctuary. The nave rebuild was stage 2, and was eventually completed in 1938. But…

Revd Felix Albert Fernau, curate at St. John’s 1902-6, was a remarkable, if nomadic character, who made a name for himself caring for victims of epidemics and leprosy, but also worked as a missionary in New Guinea and in the…

Launceston Church Grammar School occupied what is now the Colonial Hotel, adjoining St. John’s in Elizabeth St, and connections with the church were historically strong. When the great “extension” was completed in 1911, the side chapel was referred to as…

By default, the majority of the population of colonial Launceston, convict and free, was considered “Church of England”, and the “Episcopalian Burial Ground” was consecrated in 1823 in what is now Cypress Street. An estimated 9000 people were buried there…

While earlier plans for the extension of St. John’s proposed a lengthening of the building eastwards, and some felt a complete demolition was best, Alexander North’s 1893 plan included the vast dome area and transepts, the present chancel and sanctuary,…

Even in the first decades of St. John’s Church, the size of the building was seen as inadequate for the growing town. A small eastern chancel, added in 1866, hardly improved the seating capacity, and by 1884, Leslie Corrie had…