All Saints Anglican Church Wickham Terrace, Brisbane, Queensland

All Saints Anglican Church is a heritage-listed church at 32 Wickham Terrace, Spring Hill, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. First founded in 1862, the current building designed by Benjamin Backhouse was completed in 1869, making it the oldest Anglican church in Brisbane. For most of its history, it has been identified with the High Church or Anglo-Catholic tradition within Anglicanism. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992. (Wikipedia)

In 1856, land was granted on Windmill Hill for the establishment of a church to serve the infant colony and the residents of the then fashionable suburb rapidly developing on the high land overlooking the future city.

The original stone church, familiarly called the Brisbane Tabernacle, with pews for 100, welcomed its first worshippers in 1862. By 1869 it was already too small and was reconstructed to the design of architect R. G. Suter. The old Tabernacle had been built of squared blocks of pink "porphyry" from the near-by Windsor quarries, and these were all carefully re-used, so that their present mellowness testifies to more than a century's weathering. It was at this stage that the name All Saints' Church was adopted.

A city has now grown up around its walls. When Wickham Terrace, which became Brisbane's medical district, and Ann Street were laid out, the church, set among large trees, occupied the triangular site at their junction.

The members of the congregation were greatly perturbed when they realized that a tunnel of the railway line linking Brisbane with the Valley, to be built in 1887, would pass under their church. However, the worry was needless—the sturdy 20-inch thick stone walls survived the shocks of the blasting carried out underneath their foundations.

The organ, built in 1873, was originally in old St John's procathedral in George Street. The fine stained glass windows, a gift of the Rev. T. Jones and his family in 1870, are probably the oldest in Queensland.

To mark the first centenary of All Saints', a freestanding sculpture of Christ accepting the Cross, by Andor Meszaros, was erected in the western courtyard.

(White, Unk, P Newell, (1967) Brisbane Sketchbook