Mount St Mary Campus of the Australian Catholic University is a major campus of the Australian Catholic University, located in Strathfield, Municipality of Strathfield, Sydney, Australia.
The main building of the campus, formerly the Mount Royal villa and now called the Edmund Rice Building and Barron Chapel, is a heritage-listed former mansion, and was later used as a college and primary school. Located at 25A Barker Road in Strathfield, it was designed by H.C. Kent, Sheerin & Hennessy and Hennessy Hennessy & Co and built in 1887 (with renovations in 1962 to adapt it to university use). It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 15 April 2016.
The campus is owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.
History
Indigenous history The traditional Indigenous custodians of the area are the Wangal people of the Darug people. There is evidence that the Darug have lived in the Sydney area for over 10,000 years.Jones, 2014
The British colonisation of Australia commenced just to the east of Strathfield at Sydney Cove in 1788. By 1793 land grants were being made to Europeans in the Strathfield area. Land clearing removed the habitats of native animals and thus would have eliminated food sources for the Wangal people as well as desecrating sacred sites. There is historical evidence of hostility between the early settlers and the Aboriginal people here, but by 1804, Governor King was reporting to the British Government that "the natives in the settlements (between Parramatta and Sydney) had been very quiet and in a great measure domesticated". Although Wangal people were separated from their traditional relationship with the land, many Aboriginal people continue to live in the Strathfield locality. There are few known remnants of traditional occupation such as campsites, axe grinding grooves and scarred trees in the Strathfield district.
Perhaps the most famous Wangal man was Bennelong, who became friendly with Governor Phillip. Phillip built a brick hut for him on the present site of the Sydney Opera House and that peninsular is named after him (Bennelong Point). Bennelong became one of the first Aboriginal people to visit Europe when he travelled to England with Phillip in 1792.
Colonial history The first grants in the present day Strathfield Municipality were made in 1793 under the hand of Lieutenant-Governor Grose. The Mount St Mary ACU campus lies on part of a grant made to the Chaplain of St. James Church in 1823; however, that grant soon reverted to the Crown. In 1841, the campus was part of a grant made to Joseph Hyde Potts (1793–1865), then the Secretary of the Bank of New South Wales. The grant remained in the hands of his descendants until it was subdivided in the early 1880s.Weir & Phillips, 2015
Before the 1860s, settlement in the Strathfield area was clustered around inns and other service industries scattered along Parramatta Road and Liverpool Road and near the Homebush Racecourse. The 1866 subdivision of James Wilshire's estate in Strathfield known as Redmire was marketed towards well-to-do families seeking a suburban "villa" lifestyle and attracted many prominent families in Sydney society including members of parliament, senior public servants, surgeons, solicitors and businessmen. After 1877 when Redmyre railway station opened (it was renamed Strathfield railway station in 1900), the distance between Strathfield and the city was reduced to an easy 28 minutes journey although the relative expense of the service at this time helped maintain the social exclusiveness of the area. Albert Road was first listed in John Sands' Sydney and Suburban Directories in 1886. The road was one of the most fashionable streets in Strathfield and the address of numerous grand villa estates including Mount Royal.
Mount Royal In 1883 were sold for £4500 to William Von der Heyde and George Todman, tobacco merchants. Heyde was Mayor of Strathfield 1887–89. In 1885, they sold a lot of land comprising to A. Thomson, F.L. Barker and John Hinchcliff, wool broker, who erected a large country mansion or "villa" on this property. This residence, called Mount Royal, was designed by architect Harry Chambers Kent for John Hinchcliff using finance provided by Hinchcliff's wife, Laura Ann. Hinchcliff was another mayor of Strathfield 1890–92. Tenders for the erection of a "first class residence and stables" were advertised in The Sydney Morning Herald on 20 November 1886. According to a former archivist of the Christian Brothers who researched the history of Mount Royal, the ballroom and billiard room were added to the original building in 1888.Stewart, 2004, p11
Little is known about John Hinchcliff although his firm was described in 1890 as "one of the oldest firms connected with the wool trade in NSW".'Our Leading Wool Firms', Illustrated Sydney News, 9 January 1890 He appears to have been among those city wool merchants who experienced financial difficulties as a result of the severe financial depression of the 1890s. When he died at Mount Royal in 1895, he was heavily in debt. Several photographs of the interior of Mount Royal survive from the period of Hinchcliff family ownership. The original lettering "Hinchcliff" is still marked on the building and it is believed that a face pictured in one of the stained glass windows there is a portrait of John Hinchcliff.Jones, 2006; Weir & Phillips, 2011
Following Hinchcliff's death, Mount Royal was leased to schoolmaster, W. Stewart Page, who temporarily opened a college on the site in 1896, one of a number of private colleges in the area. Page placed an advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald in January 1896 for his "high class boarding and day school... quite in the country, having open fields on three sides and at the same time is only a short distance from Strathfield Station".Michael Jones, 1985, p 91 The school grounds included tennis courts and cricket grounds. Page's school was not a success, and by 1899, the property was again vacant.Weir & Phillips, 2011
The most notable tenant in ensuing years was Sir George Reid, Premier of New South Wales from 1894 to 1899. In 1901, Reid became a member of the Federal Parliament. Reid's occupation of Mount Royal was brief, lasting only from March 1903 until August 1904 when he became Prime Minister and moved to Melbourne.
The Christian Brothers and Mount St Mary Mount Royal was sold to the Christian Brothers on 20 December 1907 for £7,428. The Brothers purchased the property with the intention of opening a training college for teachers. The Brothers renamed it Mount St Mary, placing it under the patronage of Mary, mother of Jesus. Mount St Mary would become the centre of the Christian Brothers congregation for the whole of Australia and New Zealand.
When the Christian Brothers purchased Mount Royal, the order was 105 years old. The Christian Brothers were founded in Waterford, Ireland by Edmund Ignatius Rice in 1802 and became closely tied to education as expressed by their motto: Facere et docere ('To Do and To Teach'). An early attempt to establish the order in Australia in the 1840s failed. The Brothers returned to Australia in 1868 and eventually Sydney where they established community houses and schools at Balmain (1887), Lewisham (1891) and Rozelle (1892). The order was one of many invited by Archbishop Moran into New South Wales at this time, primarily to support the Catholic education system after the withdrawal of state funding.
The Christian Brothers' Provincial, Brother Jerome Barron (1858–1949), had hesitated about purchasing a mansion as grand as Mount Royal, but was impressed by the size of the estate and its reasonable price compared with similar inner city properties. The Christian Brothers were not alone in acquiring such an estate at this time. The purchase of Mount Royal was part of a wider pattern that saw numerous large Victorian period mansions bought by religious orders or charities following the economic depression of the 1890s. Contemporary examples in Strathfield include the purchases of Shubra Hall by the Presbyterian Ladies' College in 1889 and Brundah by the Methodist Church in 1915, both to establish educational institutions.
Cardinal Moran blessed the Mount St Mary Training College and Novitiate on 1 December 1908 in the presence of a large gathering. At the opening, Brother Barron noted that the order in Australia had grown to 45 educational establishments and their teaching force had grown from three brothers to over 200 brothers.Stewart, 2004, p9 and Appendix 1 Training at Mount St Mary began in December 1908 when the novices and scholastics (brothers undergoing teacher training) were transferred from Lewisham. The Brothers acquired an additional from Mr. J.H. Potts of Hyde Brae.
The Brothers carried out alterations and addition to the original Mount Royal villa. In 1908–9, architects Sheerin & Hennessey designed a new two-storey wing to provide additional accommodation. This wing was constructed across the northern end of the building and involved the removal of the conservatory. Sheerin & Hennessey also designed a chapel in the Federation Gothic style that was constructed at the northern end of the new wing. Further additions were made in 1913. These works involved the raising of the ballroom roof to provide a first floor dormitory and a first floor extension to the billiard room on the western side of the villa. Sometime during the 1930s, an additional wing was constructed on the western side of Mount Royal, at its southernmost end. Elsewhere on campus, following the tradition of the Irish monastic orders, three handball courts and a pavilion were constructed. At an unknown date, an elaborate grotto was constructed. The pavilion and grotto are long gone.
Ovalau and Ardross In 1917 and 1918 respectively, the Christian Brothers purchased adjoining villa estates to the northeast of Mount Royal, known as Ovalau (for £3,250) and Ardross (for £2,000), thereby expanding the boundaries of the site to .
Ovalau was a grand Victorian Italianate Style mansion that had been built for Robert Phillips, a South Sea planter, in 1888. The villa was initially used to accommodate teacher trainees and the Brothers who taught at the Burwood parish school. In 1922, Ovalau, since renamed St. Enda's, became a High School known as the Juniorate, providing for boys who had a possible interest in joining the Order. The mansion was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for St. Edmund's Building. Ardross had been built for the Morgan family in 1885. The mansion was purchased to provide a possible retirement place for old Brothers and renamed St. Joseph's. Growth within the college, however, meant that the mansion soon became the home of the Scholastics. It was later used as a second home for the Juniorate boys. After a period of vacancy, the building was partially destroyed by fire in 1961 and soon after demolished.
In 1925, an agreement was reached with Strathfield Municipal Council to incorporate a section of Albert Road into the college campus in exchange for land that enabled Council to connect Albert and Barker Roads. Mount Royal's gates were moved to their current location around this time. This new section of Albert Road would later be closed to create Mount Royal Reserve.
Baron Chapel and Mullens Building With the opening of the Juniorate in the 1920s, the small Federation Gothic style chapel proved too small and in 1924 planning began for a new chapel that could accommodate 250 students and staff. The £12,400 required to construct the new chapel was raised by donation throughout Australia and New Zealand. The chapel was designed by Hennessy & Hennessey, constructed by Kell & Rigby and dedicated on 8 September 1925. The building was named the Barron Chapel in honour of Brother Jerome Barron's Golden jubilee. The design of the chapel won the Master Architect's gold medal in the Turin Exhibition of 1923.