Goulburn Cathedral (St. Saviour)

St Saviour's Cathedral is the cathedral church of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Australia. The cathedral is named after Jesus in his title of Saviour. The current dean is the Very Reverend Phillip Saunders.

In 1840 a simple brick church to the designs of a Sydney architect, James Hume, was erected. This Church of Saint Saviour was in the manner of English parish churches with a bold square western tower and a simple axiality complimenting the Georgian town plan.

By the early 1860s, when the Diocese of Sydney could not functionally minister to the Goulburn area, it was decided that the Diocese of Goulburn should be created. Accordingly, Bishop Mesac Thomas was consecrated in 1861 and the need for a cathedral church came to be considered.

When the brick church was taken down the bricks were reused in the floor of the current cathedral.

It was not until 1871, however, that cathedral plans came to be actively considered. Three years later, on 15 January 1874, the foundation stone of the cathedral church was laid. The Cathedral Church of Saint Saviour was designed by the then noted Colonial ecclesiastical architect, Edmund Thomas Blacket. Blacket had already had some involvement with the church site at Goulburn. In 1843 he had designed a pulpit for James Hume's original brick church which was approved by Bishop Broughton and then installed.

Since Blacket's cathedral was to take ten years to construct, Blacket was also asked to design a smaller pro-cathedral and parish Sunday school. This building was completed in 1874 and still stands within the cathedral precinct, to the west of the cathedral itself. The first Anglican church, St Saviour's, was completed in 1839 and this later became the pro-cathedral. The first resident Anglican priest of that church was William Sowerby, who had been trained at St Bees Theological College in Cumberland, England, and moved to Australia in 1836 to answer the call for more clergy. Sowerby later became the first Dean of St Saviour's.

The Blacket cathedral was one of the architect's greatest works. It was really the only cathedral he designed unencumbered by distance, financial stringency and unsympathetic clients. It was a favourite building and Blacket spent much of the last nine years of his life working on it. Blacket gave to the cathedral a crucifix which he had carved in his youth; a controversial gift which the authorities hid away for many years. The cathedral is unmistakably a Blacket church, on a grand scale, with nave, aisles, transepts, chancel, porches and tower. It has large and elaborate stone traceried windows and an interior with a heavily carved hammer beam roof, clustered columns and foliage capitals, elaborately moulded arcades and chancel arch and the use of figurative roundels in the nave, transepts and chancel. The tower and spire, however, were never completed. The cathedral cost 20,000 pounds at the time of its completion in 1884.

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