HERITAGE TREASURES (Number 97)

By Brian Andrews, Archdiocese of Hobart Heritage Officer

On 17 April 1850 the Van Diemen’s Land Colonial Secretary granted permission for Bishop William Willson to erect a Temperance Hall in Wapping, Hobart Town, on Crown land lying between the Colonial Hospital and the Hobart Rivulet, on the block bounded by Liverpool, Campbell, Collins and Argyle Streets.

This permission was granted after Willson had given his assurance that activities in the hall, including the singing of hymns, would not cause a disturbance to patients in the hospital.

The stated purpose of the hall was ‘for the use of the Catholic Total Abstinence Society — occasionally for Divine Service on Sundays, Sunday School for Catholic children — and to relieve the Church, St Joseph’s, Macquarie Street, from Secular business’. Provision was made in the permission that should these uses cease the land would revert to the Crown.

The hall was to be erected to a design by Hobart Town ex-convict draughtsman-turned-architect Frederick Thomas. Foundations were laid in 1850, but then work ceased for some five years. Following concerns raised by the Colonial Secretary, Bishop Willson gave an undertaking that the building would be completed by the end of 1855.

In 1903 it was decided to dismantle the hall and remove it to its present location on the corner of Harrington and Brisbane Streets. The descendant architectural firm of Henry Hunter prepared a plan and section of the proposed siting showing the building re-erected essentially as on the Wapping site and facing Harrington Street.

In the event, the building was substantially reconfigured in its re-erection on the new site.

St Peter’s Hall is the only building completed in Hobart by Bishop Willson during his twenty-one years of labours in Tasmania from 1844. Of Willson it was observed by a contemporary:

‘Robert William Willson, a man of singular humanity and benevolence, was the effectual reformer of the management of deported convicts in our penal settlements, a most influential reformer of lunatic asylums and their management, as well in England as in Australia, and a man who through his influence with the imperial and colonial Governments, caused the breaking up of the most horrible penal settlement of Norfolk Island.’

This social dimension to Willson’s apostolate is reflected in his erection of St Peter’s as a temperance hall in the poorest section of Hobart. Because of its association with Willson and his international reputation as a social reformer, St Peter’s Hall is assessed as of high social significance.