The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Melbourne

Wesleyan Chapel, Melbourne, Port Phillip District

(Source: State Library of Victoria)

The Wesleyan Chapel measuring 57 feet long, 47 feet wide and 24 feet high was designed by John James Peers and built at a cost of £3,000. The Rev. Hurst laid the foundation stone on 11 May 1840, and the first service was conduced there on 24 June 1841, although the building was not completed until 1847.

Ten years later the Wesleyans sold the site for nearly £40,000, using the proceeds to build the present Wesley Church in Lonsdale Street.

Henry Reed (pictured) was a businessman and Methodist lay preacher in Tasmania. He visited Melbourne in 1835, soon after Batman and Fawkner arrived, and conducted the first worship service in the new colony. The congregation was five people: Batman, Fawkner, possibly William Buckley and three native servants.

Joseph Orton was a Wesleyan minister who had been imprisoned in Jamaica in 1828, because he had strongly opposed slavery and offered education to African slaves. He was District Chairperson in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 1836-40. He arrived in Port Phillip with the Batman family in 1836. On April 24, he conducted the first service by an ordained minister in the colony. He stressed that aboriginal people must be treated justly, and that sunstantial land must be reserved for their use.

After Orton’s departure in 1836, Methodist laymen continued to hold prayer meetings at private dwellings. They met first at the hut of George Worthy, one of John Batman’s shepherds. After Worthy was imprisoned early in 1837 for losing many of his master’s sheep the Methodists began to meet in the wattle and daub hut of William Witton (1811-1886) (pictured), a London born carpenter and builder. The first two permanent Wesleyan missionaries to arrive in Port Phillip, the Revs. Benjamin Hurst and Francis Tuckfield, spent most of their time from 1838 onwards in Geelong and at Buntingdale Mission.

By 1838, there was a Wesleyan Society of about 30 people, meeting in a small brick church on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. They were led by lay preachers, including George Lilley, an Irish settler who ran a small shop; Thomas Watson, a Waterloo veteran who ran a water-carting business; and William Witton.

The first Wesleyan Sunday School (above), was built at the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane in 1838.

They soon outgrew the first chapel, and a second brick church, 47 feet x 57 feet was built in 1841 on the corner of Collins Street and Queen Street (pictured at top). The organ installed in 1842, is now in the present church.

There is a lot more to read about this story in “Historical Records of Victoria.”

REFERENCES:

1. Historical Records of Victoria, Vol. 3, Chapter 36.