The Architecture of Devotion: James Goold and His Legacies in Colonial Melbourne

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The Architecture of Devotion

JAMES GOOLD AND HIS LEGACIES IN COLONIAL MELBOURNE

EDITED BY

JAYNIE ANDERSON

MAX VODOLA AND

SHANE CARMODY

THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

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First published 2021

Text © individual contributors, 2021

Images © individual contributors, various dates

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2021

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Research for this book was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.

(COVER IMAGE)

‘H.E.W.’

Artist’s impression of WW Wardell’s design for the spire of St Ignatius’ Church, Richmond, 1891

pen and ink with watercolour on paper

61.5 × 43.5 cm

collection: St Ignatius’ Church, Richmond

Contents

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project. We would like to thank the ARC, the University of Melbourne and the University of Divinity for their support. The publishing of the book was made possible through the generosity of Maria Myers AC and Allan Myers AC, together with a grant from the Natalie Mary O’Sullevan Trust. We are very grateful for this assistance, which has ensured a book of the highest quality.

The essays herein began as papers at a symposium held in February 2020. We would like to express our thanks to the Rector of Newman College, Father Frank Brennan SJ, AO, and the Provost of Newman College, Mr Sean Burke, for hosting the first day of the symposium. We would also like to thank the Australian Institute of Art History for its assistance with the symposium.

Throughout this project we have enjoyed the support of a talented team of scholars and experts. Dr Callum Reid has assisted with research; Helen Gill has provided excellent analysis of the paintings that belonged to Goold; Kerrie Burn, Nick Gellatly and Huw Sandaver at Mannix Library have been critical in identifying books from Goold’s library and have created a very fitting new home for them. Huw Sandaver has also ensured wide access to much of Goold’s collection through imaginative use of digital platforms. Dr Paola Colleoni, as the holder of the ARC PhD Scholarship, has generously shared her knowledge of Goold’s most famous architect, William Wilkinson Wardell.

The Archdiocese of Melbourne and many religious orders and congregations have been very helpful. We would like to record our thanks to: Most Rev. Peter A. Commensoli, Archbishop of Melbourne; Most Rev. Denis Hart, Emeritus Archbishop of Melbourne; Very Rev. Werner Utri, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral; Dr Donna Bailey, Diocesan Archivist and Professional Standards Office, Catholic Diocese of Sandhurst, Bendigo; Dr J. Ben Boonen, Archivist, Christian Brothers, Melbourne; Imogen Kennard-King, Collections Registrar, Sisters of Charity Congregational Archives; Father James Clarke, Parish of St Mary of the Angels, Geelong; Father Denis Stanley, Rector of Corpus Christi Seminary; Father Michael Head SJ, Archivist for the Australian Jesuit Province; Damien Burke, Irish Jesuit Archives; Sr Angela Bayliss NDS, Archivist for the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion; and Fr Huy Viet Nguyen SJ, former Parish Priest of St Ignatius Richmond.

All the authors together acknowledge their debt to Belinda Nemec for her skilful editing of the text, and to Cathryn Smith at Melbourne University Press for her thoughtful management of the project.

With this project complete, James Alipius Goold can now been seen in a new light. We did not begin that re-evaluation; that credit properly belongs to the late Father John Rogan. John’s legacy and indeed much of the legacy of Goold has been preserved, recorded and made accessible through the tireless work of the Archdiocesan Archivist, Rachel Naughton. Without Rachel, the research project, this book and its companion volume, The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect (MUP, 2019), would not have been possible. It is with gratitude and deep respect that we dedicate this book to her.

Jaynie Anderson, Max Vodola and Shane Carmody

Introduction

JAYNIE ANDERSON, SHANE CARMODY AND MAX VODOLA

On Sunday 26 April 1885, Archbishop James Alipius Goold set the foundation stone for the completion of the Jesuit Church of St Ignatius in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne. After a delay of some fifteen years since the opening of the first part of the nave, the Jesuits and their parishioners had resolved to build a church more fitting to the needs of a much larger Catholic population. Their architect, William Wilkinson Wardell, proposed a major expansion of the original scheme, adding a great crossing, deep chancel and radiating ambulatory chapels. In what was to be his final contribution to Catholic architecture in Victoria, Wardell returned to the French Gothic that had inspired his first project, St Patrick’s Cathedral. Perhaps to inspire donors, the Jesuits commissioned two artists to make images showing the completed church. One, identified only by his initials, H.E.W., depicted the exterior complete with a spire (see page 250 and cover); while AC Cooke painted the interior (see page 248). Cooke manages to evoke the drama of Wardell’s Neo-Gothic: the huge timbers supporting the roof, the great stone columns and arches, the flooding of light from rose windows high in the apse, and the glimpse of chapels beyond the focal point of the high altar. The tiny figure of a man, reverently holding his hat, appears in the distance before the sanctuary. Placed in the picture to evoke something of the enormous scale of the building, he also invites the viewer to share his awe of this sacred space.

We do not know what Goold thought of his visit to Richmond on that Sunday in April 1885, as his diary for that year is missing. Perhaps after setting the foundation stones for so many of the eighty-six churches built in Victoria during his long episcopate, he thought it not even worthy of a mention. The last entry in his diary was written a little less than a year later, on Saturday 3 April 1886, and is typically brief and to the point:

Saturday April 3rd. Prayers. Horae. Meditation. Collation. Letters. Reading. News. Angelus. Study. Vespers, Compline. Reading. Matins, Lauds. Left for Melbourne. Dinner. Conversazione. About 7 went to St Francis. Confessions. Visit to the Most Blessed Sacrament and Calvary. Home. Reading. About 10 o’clock prayers. Bed.¹

Goold made his first entry in the diary on 1 August 1848: a list of resolutions that he made during his retreat before his consecration five days later as the first Catholic bishop of Melbourne. It is a pious list that includes solemn promises that every day he would faithfully pray the office at the set hours, visit the Blessed Sacrament, and set aside time for reading—promises that, it seems, he kept to the end. Despite his declining health, there is nothing in the diary to suggest that Goold spent much time, if any, reflecting on his nearly thirty-eight years as Bishop and Archbishop of Melbourne. Goold died at his home in Brighton on 11 June 1886, a little over two months after his last diary entry. His obituarists focused on the growth of his diocese in the four decades of his rule, and especially on the building of churches, schools, convents, orphanages and hospitals, with the great Cathedral of St Patrick still rising on Melbourne’s Eastern Hill as his greatest achievement. In the public context of mid-1880s Melbourne, Goold was one of the pioneers who had ridden the wave of gold rush prosperity to help create a marvel in this outpost of empire. In the private context of his diary, it seems that his commitment was to action, leaving reflection and judgment to history.

History, as Max Vodola relates in the opening chapter of this volume, has not always been kind to Goold. His achievements in building his diocese are overshadowed in many accounts by the conflict and controversies that often accompanied them. Another of Goold’s resolutions from 1848: ‘It shall be my particular care to watch my temper and bend it to the practice of patience and mildness’ was, it seems, more often than not honoured in the breach. Most telling is the concluding judgment of the entry on Goold in the Australian Dictionary of Biography: ‘He had no broad views or scholastic achievement and ruled his archdiocese with the conservatism and single-mindedness of an Irish bishop in an Irish see.’²

The revision of this judgment began with the work of the late Father John Rogan, and more recently in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project A Baroque Archbishop in Colonial Australia, led by the editors of this volume, Jaynie Anderson, Max Vodola and Shane Carmody. The James Goold who emerges from this research is much more than a single-minded Irish bishop: he is open to learning in many forms, as witnessed by his library; moved by the emotional power of late Baroque art, as witnessed by his extensive collection of paintings; and attuned to the scholarly rediscovery of Gothic architecture as promoted by Augustus Welby Pugin, and so brilliantly realised by his great follower William Wilkinson Wardell.

The ARC project has produced several major outcomes. An international symposium held in February 2018 resulted in an earlier volume, The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect. This book was launched by Goold’s eighth successor as archbishop of Melbourne, the Most Reverend Dr Peter Comensoli, at the opening of an exhibition with the same title, which was held at the Old Treasury Building from July 2019 to March 2020 and attracted more than 40,000 visitors.³ The project supported a doctoral scholarship awarded to Paola Colleoni, to examine the relationship between Goold and Wardell, with the thesis submitted in May 2020 and the doctorate awarded in October 2020. The research into Goold’s library led to the creation of a Rare Books Room in Mannix Library at the Catholic Theological College, under the leadership of library manager Kerrie Burn, to house what remains of Goold’s collection, and the books of his contemporaries and successors. An innovative cataloguing and digitising project led by Huw Sandaver, technical services librarian at Mannix Library, has made much of this collection available online, and most recently through the scholarly platform JSTOR. The project was included by the Australian Research Council in its list of the top 100 research projects for 2019–20, and the book The Invention of Melbourne was shortlisted for the 2020 Victorian History Awards.

The present book, like the earlier volume, is the product of an international symposium, held at Newman College and the University of Melbourne in February 2020. The first section places Goold in a broader context. Max Vodola’s chapter moves beyond historiography to examine some of the main influences on Goold, both in his religious formation and among his contemporaries. Mark McGowan brings an international perspective, comparing Goold with his Toronto contemporary, Archbishop John Joseph Lynch, exploring the similarities and differences in the way they approached the task of leading a Catholic community in the British empire. Matthew Beckmann reflects on the difficult relationship between Goold and the first Catholic priest in Melbourne, Patrick Bonaventure Geoghegan, with a surprising twist that helps to explain the prominent location of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

The second section revisits Goold’s cultural legacy. Paola Colleoni explains how Goold worked closely with Wardell to create an extraordinary collection of Neo-Gothic churches across Victoria. Lesley Alway uncovers the story of the lesser-known architect and builder Patrick Scanlan and his role in the creation of St Patrick’s College. Jaynie Anderson explores Goold’s collection of late Baroque paintings, deftly explaining how Goold had a purpose for this collection entirely consistent with his missionary vocation. Ruth Pullin uncovers the close relationship between Goold and the pre-eminent colonial artist Eugene von Guérard. Rafael Japón shows how religious art was used in seventeenth-century Spain to promote the Counter-Reformation in a way that Goold would have readily understood, and in many ways emulated. The final two chapters in this section concern books and publishing. Kevin Molloy sheds light on the work of two early Catholic printers in Port Phillip: James Shanley and his son-in-law, Michael Gason, while Huw Sandaver describes some of the new pictorial printing techniques represented in Goold’s book collection.

The third and final section shows the influence and legacy of individuals and religious orders in achieving Goold’s vision. Clara Geoghegan revisits the German missionary priest of the Bendigo goldfields, George Backhaus, and his legacy. Catherine Kovesi tells the story of the Convent of the Good Shepherd in Abbotsford, and how the arrangement of the buildings reflects the particular charism of the religious order that built it. Shane Carmody recounts the intrigues behind the acceptance by the Irish Jesuits of Goold’s invitation to come to Melbourne, and their building of Wardell’s great Church of St Ignatius on Richmond Hill. Finally, Colin Nettelbeck shows how Goold’s trusted secretary and later first bishop of Sale, James Francis Corbett, turned to a French order of nuns, Notre Dame de Sion, to meet the educational needs of his diocese, leaving both an educational and architectural legacy.

The chapters in this volume bring Goold’s legacy to life. Goold walked the streets of Melbourne and traversed the colony of Victoria extensively. He had an eye for detail and left many traces of his long episcopate, which the present contributors have interpreted, contextualised and assessed. The reader sees Goold from different perspectives. Yes, he was of his time and appears similar to many other nineteenth-century Catholic bishops sent to pastor the Irish diaspora. But Goold was an interesting blend of Hibernian, Augustinian, and Italian aesthete, following his years of formation in Rome, Viterbo and Perugia.

That world of continental European culture and history stood in stark contrast to the raw and primitive reality of colonial New South Wales that Goold encountered when he arrived in Sydney in 1838 and was promptly despatched by Bishop John Bede Polding to the Campbelltown district. He had volunteered for the mission, and quickly adapted himself to the work of pastoring, building and teaching his flock in his calm, methodical and business-like manner. He showed little inclination to return to either Ireland or Italy. Those people and that place presented new pastoral horizons for the young Goold, and made an indelible mark on him. In a rare unguarded moment, he reflected with emotion on that strong pastoral bond following his departure from Campbelltown as the newly ordained and first bishop of Melbourne.

Goold arrived in what was effectively a provincial town in 1848, and died as metropolitan archbishop of a major international city in 1886. He contributed enormously to the religious, educational, architectural and cultural life of the diocese, because the new colony of Victoria was like a grand canvas that he slowly helped to fill, with subtlety and determination. His vision was daring, even in the face of criticism, and his energy boundless for the task at hand. This second volume shines new light on James Alipius Goold, and brings him to life as a unique cultural patron.

PART 1

Goold and His Contemporaries

CHAPTER I

James Alipius Goold

New Research Questions

M & N HANHART, LITHOGRAPHERS

frontispiece from The Catholic Directory ad [sic] Order of Divine Service for Australasia, 1858

Michael T Gason, Melbourne (Publisher)

collection: State Library Victoria

MAX VODOLA

Since the commencement of this Australian Research Council (ARC) project in late 2016, Archbishop James Alipius Goold has emerged from the historical shadows and into a new hermeneutical light. As the founding Catholic bishop of Melbourne, Goold had a life and ministry that were seen by many as important but not terribly well known, and therefore consigned to a somewhat distant past. Like many of his episcopal peers, Goold was a stern, aloof and humourless personality, and one does not easily warm to him as a scholarly subject.

The extensive research for this ARC project has already given birth to the impressive exhibition and publication The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect. The second symposium continued to explore new aspects of Goold, his background, formation, the historical context of his life, his vision for Melbourne, and the numerous travels that greatly shaped his life and ministry. For the historian, new research questions arise when previously unknown primary or secondary source material comes to light, such as letters, diaries, oral testimony, newspaper cuttings, journal references, and the public records of civic institutions. Not to be neglected, of course, are items of material culture, such as books, paintings, photographs, buildings, monuments, vestments and implements for ecclesiastical and liturgical use. Such artefacts continue to emerge in abundance, especially through the process of identifying and numbering Goold’s paintings, purchased on his numerous overseas visits, and the continuing investigations into his book collection, which we now know is far more extensive and eclectic in both scope and significance than previously appreciated. Historical perspective also changes when we ask new questions of the existing data and seek to fill gaps in the historiography on Goold and early Catholic Victoria, which has hardly been updated in any substantial way since the 1980s.

In terms of scholarship over the last four decades, let me begin with the 1972 entry on Goold in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), a significant and respectable effort by JRJ Grigsby.¹ Grigsby had also compiled the 1969 ADB entry on Father John Ignatius Bleasdale,² an eccentric and highly gifted priest-scientist and intellectual. Bleasdale was vice-president of St Francis’ Seminary and of St Patrick’s College, Eastern Hill, founder of the Catholic Young Men’s Society, and Goold’s secretary—in addition to being associated with numerous cultural, scientific and medical bodies in Melbourne. Grigsby’s ADB entry on Goold is based on his 1962 honours thesis in the School of History at the University of Melbourne, titled ‘At What Price Victory: The Growth and Administration of the Catholic Church in Melbourne, 1848–1886 (Episcopate of Most Rev. James Alipius Goold D.D.)’.³ In it, Grigsby challenges the hagiographical tributes often given to Catholic prelates by measuring only material success and ignoring the real and sometimes public disputes that arise in achieving such material progress. Grigsby argues that some inner- and outer-suburban parish development was subordinated to Goold’s grand vision from the late 1850s of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the firm and centralised control he used to achieve this end.⁴ Grigsby also argues that by the time of the Education Act 1872, many parochial schools were basically left to fend for themselves.⁵ He also looks at the social composition and increasing wealth of Catholics across Melbourne.

For the purposes of our study, I was delighted to see a quotation from an 1880 retrospective article in the Melbourne Argus, lauding the glories of St Patrick’s Cathedral and praising Goold’s vision, without actually naming him:

From the very first the Roman Catholic authorities appear to have formed an intelligent forecast of future possibilities. With prophetic vision they appear to have seen in the original village of Melbourne not only the metropolis of to-day, but the far greater city of a coming time … Thanks to those who had the management of affairs in the early days, they can boast the possession of the finest spot in Melbourne for ecclesiastical purposes.⁶

Despite these two significant ADB entries, Grigsby seems to have disappeared off the historical radar and, to the best of my knowledge, did not make any further contributions to Catholic historiography, other than two general secondary school resources.⁷

In 1973, the late Tasmanian priest and chronicler of Australian history Father Terrence Southerwood published Planting a Faith in Melbourne: Colonial Era 1839–1899, a contribution to the International Eucharistic Congress held in Melbourne.⁸ In 1973 that other intrepid clerical chronicler, Father Walter Ebsworth, published Pioneer Catholic Victoria,⁹ a substantial work of information and facts that is heavy on detail but light on historical interpretation and analysis. Frustratingly, Ebsworth includes not a single footnote in his work, although he often refers to primary sources in a generic way, such as ‘from the correspondence of the Denominational Schools Board’, and uses newspaper references constantly throughout the book. Scholarship developed in 1976 with Frances O’Kane’s A Path is Set and Margaret Pawsey’s 1982 work The Demon of Discord.¹⁰ Not only are more scholarly methods applied in these books, such as evidence and analysis, but both narratives benefit from the perspective of laywomen, rather than of clerics. Neither author shies away from discussing Goold’s somewhat autocratic and imperial style of governance, especially on financial matters and the treatment of religious.

WFE LIARDET

St Francis’ Church and School, Melbourne

watercolour with pen and ink

11.3 × 17.6 cm

The first temporary church of St Francis in Melbourne, built on the site in 1839 from old floorboards

image recreated from memory, c. 1875

collection: State Library Victoria

At this point, it is worth mentioning the late Professor Francis Xavier Martin OSA (1922–2000).¹¹ FX Martin was professor of medieval history at University College, Dublin (1962–88). As a visiting fellow to both La Trobe University and the Australian National University in the 1970s and 1980s, Martin took a significant interest in Goold. The Augustinian archives in Dublin hold correspondence between Martin and the chairman of the Melbourne Diocesan Historical Commission, Father Jack Keaney, where there was serious discussion about a substantial biography of Goold. University College, Dublin, holds correspondence between Martin and Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell from the same period in the 1970s.¹² Martin often spoke of employing the services of fellow Augustinians to obtain and transcribe material on Goold—priests who had served in Australia and were now located in Rome or Ireland, such as Father Thomas Hunt OSA, Father Stanislaus Roche OSA and Father Patrick Duffner OSA.¹³ It seems that Martin made some progress with this project of a Goold biography, but there is little trace of the material, despite numerous inquiries in Australia and overseas.¹⁴ The only trace of research specifically on Goold published by Martin is a paper on Goold and state aid, delivered at the 1985 conference on Ireland and Irish Australia held at the Australian National University in Canberra,¹⁵ and a short article in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society in 1988.¹⁶

CHARLES RUDD

The Convent of ‘The Good Shepherd’, Nicholson St. Fitzroy, c. 1892–1900

photographic print

13.7 × 20.5 cm

collection: State Library Victoria

Over the years, various articles on Goold were published in Footprints, the journal of the Melbourne Diocesan Historical Commission. Goold always made an appearance when male and female religious congregations with a significant presence in Victoria published their histories, such as the Sisters of Mercy,¹⁷ the Christian Brothers,¹⁸ the Good Shepherd Sisters,¹⁹ the Presentation Sisters,²⁰ and the Jesuits.²¹ Both Goold and his vicar general, Father Patrick Bonaventure Geoghegan, made special appearances in 1989 for the 150th anniversary of the first Catholic Mass in Melbourne, which also drew attention to the history and continuing significance of St Francis’ Church in Lonsdale Street.²² Goold lived at St Francis’ from his arrival in Melbourne in 1848 until moving to Nicholson Street, Fitzroy, in 1853.

At our first symposium, in 2018, I paid tribute to my friend and colleague the late Father John Rogan. John was the driving force behind the exhibitions associated with the centenary of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1997. He constantly spoke of Goold as a ‘collector’ with fine taste and a good eye for detail. Scholarship on Goold advanced significantly a few years ago when the late Dr Colin Holden drew attention to the first-edition folios of the prints of Piranesi that are now at the University of Melbourne but originally belonged to Goold.²³

GOOLD AS AUGUSTINIAN

One research question worth exploring is the place of Augustinian history and spirituality in Goold’s formation,²⁴ especially the place of the Word of God, devotion to study, the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, and the interior life. Goold’s connection with the Augustinians went back to his childhood in Cork. The Augustinian presence in Cork dates back to approximately 1300.²⁵ Goold was educated by the Augustinians and worshipped in the adjacent church of St Augustine. Not surprisingly, in the eighteenth century there were jurisdictional disputes between the bishop of the time and the order, a dispute won by the friars. Goold was formed by a blend of Irish and Italian Augustinian spirituality, especially from the greater part of his years in Perugia, Viterbo and Rome, which, as FX Martin tells us, were characterised by Marian devotion, and missionary zeal and activity.²⁶

In Melbourne, Goold wore his Augustinian credentials lightly. He imitated his congregation’s founder, St Augustine of Hippo, in his dedication to pastoral ministry and to teaching the faith. From his earliest days as a young priest in Sydney, Goold was known for his competence at instructing the faithful, a talent recognised by his bishop, John Bede Polding. Though Goold was not a scholar in the strict academic sense, his significant and eclectic library certainly imitates Augustine’s great love for scholarship and the directive tolle lege: to ‘take up and read’.²⁷ As Goold’s diary makes clear, the missionary bishop always allocated periods of the week throughout his episcopacy in which he ‘read a little’, only occasionally revealing the subjects or titles.²⁸ One can see parallels with Augustine as bishop of Hippo, who would take up the ministry of study and reading as both a form of service to the Church and a source of personal refreshment after a demanding day of pastoral and administrative responsibilities.²⁹

Goold’s library holds the nine-volume Opus