A brief history of St Peter's

St Peter's is the oldest Anglican church standing on its original site in inner city Melbourne.

The foundation stone was laid by La Trobe on 18 June 1846, and the building was being used for services in 1847. During the gold rush years, four hundred baptisms and the same number of weddings took place each year, and the building was extended in 1854 to bring its seating capacity up to 1050: much of this space was in galleries that were removed in 1896. The last extensions to the building took place in 1876.

The Rev’d Henry Handfield

Under Henry Handfield, the longest-standing of the 19th century vicars (1854 to 1900), St Peter’s developed a reputation for good choral music and increasing involvement in social outreach in the inner city, especially when the Sisters of the Holy Name began their work within the parish in the 1880s.

St Peter’s profile was at this time one of a very restrained high church. Here, Dame Nellie Melba had organ lessons as a schoolgirl and Henry Handel Richardson worshipped, fictionalising this part of her life in an episode in The Getting of Wisdom.

From Hughes and Maynard to today

In 1900, Ernest Selwyn Hughes, who was vicar from 1900 to 1926, stamped the parish with an explicit Anglo-Catholic identity, introducing a High Mass as the main Sunday liturgy, along with vestments and incense.

Hughes’s mild Christian Socialism was developed even further by his successor, Farnham Edward Maynard, who was vicar from 1926 to 1964.

Maynard emphasised a sometimes radical message through publications and radio broadcasts. At his instigation, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, then a small religious community, came to work in the Fitzroy part of the parish in 1933.

Since then, the parish and has developed in different ways as a contributor to Melbourne's social conscience. The Catholic and inclusive attitude of Hughes and Maynard has continued in different ways to the present.