Historic Millers Point Church Bell Tolls For First Time In Six Decades
Image: Garrison Church at Millers Point. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The historic Garrison Church in Millers Point dates to the 1840s, but its grand old church bell was cast in 1775, only five years after Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay and twelve years before the First Fleet began British settlement in Australia.
After a long hiatus, it will toll again today, after 60 years.
After six decades during which its cote sat empty, the bell will be rung in a special ceremony at the church, at 6pm on December 10.
The Church Hill Anglican parish invited all to attend “for a glass of wine on the lawn” as the bell rings out over a city which grew up through its tolls.
The bell, cast in Belgium, went missing after its removal in the 1960s.
Happily, it was found six years ago at the back of a nineteenth century sandstone shed on the church grounds. The parish stated that it is not currently known how it arrived in Sydney from Belgium, a matter currently being researched.
Some will have the chance to ring the bell themselves through an app. “Modern times,” Rector Justin Moffatt observes.
A ‘community effort’ to restore historic church bell
Prior to being taken down, the bell rang across Sydney’s historic heart for more than a century.
“It would have been tolled on the death of Queen Victoria. It would have rung out the end of the Great War, and World War II. It will have rung for thousands of weddings and tolled for thousands of funerals,” Rector Moffatt told City Hub.
“And it had been rung every Sunday to invite people to worship God through and because of the life of Jesus Christ. And it will do so again this Sunday at 4pm for the first time in 60 years.”
“The Church has recently restored it, reinforcing the bell cote, with help from a State Government Grant, and most of all from gifts from the Millers Point and Church Communities. It has been a community effort.”
The $15,000 grant came via Heritage Minister Penny Sharpe.
Garrison Church is Australia’s oldest military church
Though the ceremony will take advantage of present-century technology, don’t be fooled – the heritage-listed Garrison Church is Australia’s oldest military church.
At a public meeting held two days before Christmas in 1839, attendees resolved to petition Governor Sir George Gipps to establish a new parish at Millers Point across from Sydney Cove; the Governor approved this in the new year.
The church’s foundation stone was laid in 1840, and it was built at a gradual pace during that decade’s depression. Services began four years later, though it wasn’t until 1878 that the church as it exists today was at last completed, and not until 2000 that it was consecrated.
The church property includes a former drill hall. In 1952, the church received its present name, in full the Holy Trinity Garrison Church, in recognition of the military units that worshipped, drilled or garrisoned on its grounds.
These include the Naval Volunteer Artillery, the New South Wales Scottish Regiment, the Royal New South Wales Regiment, and the imperial troops who were stationed at Dawes Point Battery until 1870. Major General Charles Rosenthal of the First World War was a parishioner, apparently establishing the church’s connection with the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery, now the Royal Australian Artillery.
The Garrison Church is a short walk from Barangaroo station on the new metro line, and directly across from the terminus of the 311 bus from Central.
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