Biography

St Oswald's Anglican Church Trevallyn 1894 - 2021

The foundation stone for St. Oswald's was laid in December 1893, on land donated by Mr. Cecil Fawns and Mrs. Barnes, wife of the then owner of the Trevallyn estate, and the building was dedicated and opened in April the next year. Built in a Victorian style, the timber highlights reflect the 19th century love of all things mediaeval.

Trevallyn was in the Anglican parish of Beaconsfield in 1894, but it would have been virtually impossible to administer the new church from that town. Apart from a limited horse coach service most communication was by the river ferries. For that reason St. Oswald's was handed over to Revd (later Canon) R. C. Nugent Kelly, rector of St. John's, Launceston, as part of that parish. He therefore became the incumbent of St. Oswald's as well as of St. John's. He either conducted services at St. Oswald's or sent his curates or lay readers to do so. Successive St. John's rectors were incumbents of the parish until St. Oswald's eventually became a separate parish. It was not until 1954 that St. Oswald's joined with St. David's, Riverside as a parish independent of St. John's.

A fairly comprehensive history of the parish was written in 1993 by J. Branagan, as part of the centenary celebrations of the church. Branagan noted that most records of St. Oswald's prior to the 1970s - weddings, confirmations, registers of services, funeral records - had been lost, and even those extant at the time had been poorly completed. A gap of 25 years existed for the names of church officers and congregation members.

In 1927 the building was considered too small, a hall being needed for a Sunday School and in that year a former Wesleyan Church was purchased and moved next to St. Oswald's for use as a hall.

Like other smaller parishes, finances were a problem from time to time, and Branagan notes that the adoption of the Wells envelope system in 1957 was not particularly successful.

Revd J.R. (Roy) Brown was the first rector of the parish, arriving in 1958. He was a man of strong views, particularly in refusing to use later versions of the Prayer Book. The 1662 Prayer Book remained in use during his 31 year tenure. 

A small wooden church at Cormiston (North Riverside) had been erected about 1900, but as the suburbs extended from Launceston, a new church, St. David's, was built alongside the old building - part of the parish but with its own vestry. See linked article.

No systematic history of the period since the centenary has been written. The St. Oswald's congregation became part of the Riverlinks Parish, established in 2004, and incorporating smaller centres on the East Tamar, along with St. David’s Riverside, St. Mary Magdalene, George Town, St. Barnabas Newnham and St. Aidan’s East Launceston. The Riverlinks Parish itself was merged with St. John’s Launceston and the parish of St. Leonard’s in 2019 to become All Saints Anglican Network.

The building was sold into private hands in 2021, following the way of many other historic Anglican church buildings, along with St. David's, Riverside, which became a Catholic church, taking the name of the now demolished Church of St. Francis of Assisi, formerly in Pomona Rd. The sale of church properties was largely the result of financial pressures on the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania, to fund redress for the victims of abuse exposed by Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse from 2013 onwards.

The buyer of St. Oswald's has re-developed the hall as a residence, but intends to keep the main church building intact and fitted out as a church, with the intention of making it available for community events.