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St Patrick's Church
Adelaide Street, 1859s
The first RC 'church' in Fremantle was a wooden structure in Henry Street on lot 67. The limestone building in the photo above is the first real church. It was built in 1859 and demolished at a date yet to be discovered, but after 1929, the replacement church (aka basilica) having been built by 1900.
Stephen Stout's c. 1863 'carte de visite' (orig. 4 x 2.5 inches) is reproduced in Dowson's Old Fremantle (p. 93) and I took this photo (cropped) from that page. It had previously been shown in Reece & Pascoe's Place of Consequence, but poorly reproduced. Their caption in full:
'Roman Catholic Chapel, presbytery and convent, c. 1861, S. M. Stout. This fine complex of buildings, completed in 1859, housed one of Fremantle's best known schools, St. Joseph's, until it was demolished in the 1960s for Coles' New World.'
The central building (their 'chapel') is the first St Patrick's Church, with the presbytery (men) on the left and the convent (women) on the right.
Hitchcock 1929: The first Roman Catholic place of worship in Fremantle was opened [in 1846]. The denomination purchased a house situated on lot 67 in Henry Street, and that was converted into a little convent and a room set apart for a chapel. The chapel was served on Sundays by a priest from Perth. There was no resident priest in Fremantle until 1855, when the first Sisters of St. Joseph - four in number - arrived with several missionaries. Soon afterwards the building of a presbytery, chapel and convent was commenced in Adelaide Street and Parry Street. Lay brothers trained in carpentry did much of the work, which was finished in 1859. Since then the convent has been enlarged by the addition of another storey and schools have been built. Recently the old presbytery was demolished and a more ornate structure erected on its site. The old chapel still stands [1929], but has been superseded by a new and imposing edifice built in front of it. Hitchcock 1929: 32. [The convent and old chapel to which Hitchcock refers have both been demolished.]
Adelaide Street 1899, from the Town Hall tower. St Patrick's Church can seen towards the rear, right, back from the street. Its roof is a darker grey than the larger buildings fronting onto the street, and you can make out the transept at right angles to the nave.
References and Links
Geraldine Byrne 2000, A Basilica in the Making: the Centenary of St Patrick's Fremantle, Mazenod Press. The photo at the top (photographer unknown) is also shown in Byrne's book, page 15, where a caption gives the Battye reference 66670 P. I cannot find this in the SLWA catalog as yet. The same photo also appears on an EPF page, a page of Tobin genealogy, and in the Winter 2022 newsletter of the FHS.
Dowson, John 2003, Old Fremantle: Photographs 1850-1950, UWAP.
Hitchcock, J.K. 1929, The History of Fremantle, The Front Gate of Australia 1829-1929, Fremantle City Council.
Reece, R. & Pascoe, R. 1983, A Place of Consequence: A Pictorial History of Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 14 August, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/churches/stpatricks1.html (it was last updated on 23 November, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.