The story of St. Katherine’s Church begins on the Island of St Helena in the Atlantic ocean, where Anthony Beale was born on 3 November 1790. Anthony became Paymaster for the East India Company which then controlled the island on behalf of the British Crown. On 15 June 1814 he married Katherine Rose Young, niece of the Governor of St. Helena, and together they went on to produce 17 children, all but the last of whom were born on the island before the family migrated to Australia.
It was to the Island of St. Helena that the British exiled Napoleon after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 15 June 1815.
In 1836 the British Government took over the administration of the island when the East India Company’s charter expired, and Anthony Beale retired to England on a pension of 500 pounds a year. After three years in England he migrated with his family to the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, travelling via Van Dieman’s Land where his son Onesophorous drowned in the Tamar River. A granite tablet in memory of Onesophorous can be seen in the back wall of St. Katherine’s Church.
His first residence was on a three acre allotment purchased for 250 pounds in the suburb of Newtown (now known as Fitzroy). In 1841 he took a pastoral lease of an extensive area on the Plenty River where he built his cottage which he called St. Helena, and which ultimately gave the district its name.
The family appears to have lived quite happily at St. Helena until the death of Anthony’s wife, Katherine Rose, on 5 August 1856. To her memory Anthony erected in his front garden, this beautiful place of worship which he named “The Rose Chapel”. For some two years after her death he used the chapel for long periods of meditation and prayer, much of which he recorded in his diary, now in the State Library of Victoria. After his death on 4 September 1865 the chapel was willed, with three acres of land to the Church of England. It was consecrated St. Katherine’s in 1876 by Bishop Thornton of Ballarat.
Eltham Artist Walter Withers is buried in the cemetery which surrounds the Church.
Links
Church Histories St Helena St Katherine’s Anglican
Ferguson and Urie 1869 St Katherine’s Church at St. Helena Victoria
St Katherine’s Church and Cemetery
Photo: SEPP 0914 St Katherine’s Church, St Helena. Shire of Eltham Pioneers Photograph Collection. Eltham District Historical Society in partnership with Yarra Plenty Regional Library.
St. Katherine’s had the honour in November, 1937 of being the first in a series of historic churches on the A.B.C. he broadcast claimed the chapel was constructed from bricks made by Beale himself, and the trowel was still in possession of one of his grandsons who still lived on the property. It also suggested that the willows along the Diamond Creek were grown from striplings brought from the island of Saint Helena. The grandson appears to also have been Anthony, noted as having passed away at the property in 1944 at 86 years of age. It was noted there were then four houses on the property.