St Stephen's Presbyterian Church and Manse, also known as Queanbeyan Presbyterian Church, is a heritage-listed Presbyterian church and manse at 2 Morisset Street, Queanbeyan, Queanbeyan-Palerang Region, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Alberto Dias Soares (church) and James Barnet (manse) and built from 1872 to 1883 by Thomas Priest (stonemason), Thomas Jordan (carpenter), John Kealman (carpenter). The property is owned by Presbyterian Church of NSW Property Trust. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 24 May 2019.
History
St Stephen's Presbyterian Church
The first Presbyterian services were held in the Queanbeyan district by a visiting minister in mid-1838, but it was to be many years before the town had its own resident minister. In the early 1850s, the Reverend William Ritchie, who resided in Yass rather that Queanbeyan, commenced services four times a year in the old Kent Hotel. It was during this ministry that the local Presbyterian community succeeded in 1852 in obtaining a grant of land at the corner of Morisset and Lowe Streets for a church, school and manse. The grant, which was apparently not formally gazetted until 13 December 1859, consisted of four contiguous allotments - Lots 1, 2, 3 and 20 - in Section 25, Town of Queanbeyan. Each of the allotments measured two roods in area. Lots 1 and 2 were intended for the church, Lot 3 for a school and Lot 20 fronting Lowe Street for the manse.
In December 1861, Dr Andrew Morton, a Queanbeyan medical practitioner, called the local Presbyterians to a meeting to initiate the building of a church in the town. A subscription list was opened and, by the end of May 1862, Morton had secured promises of A£400. But there the matter lapsed. The Presbyterian community was beset with troubles, partly caused by the Rev. J. D. Lang, and was unable to find a minister to settle permanently in the town. It was only in March 1870 that the situation took on a rather more settled aspect when the Reverend William Mackenzie arrived in town virtually direct from Scotland. He would reinvigorate the church building project, as well as fostering the building of churches in Canberra and in Bungendore.
At a meeting following Mackenzie's formal induction to the Queanbeyan charge on 29 June 1870, his brother, the Reverend Simon Mackenzie of Goulburn, approached several prominent members of the local Presbyterian community for donations to build a church. He received promised of A£275, notably A£100 from Charles McKeahnie of "Booroomba" and A£50 from Dr Morton. It was estimated, however, that a sum of around A£750 would be needed for the construction and fitting out of the church. A Church Building Committee was formed with Morton as its chairman, but more than seven months on from Mackenzie's inauguration the committee had not raised sufficient funds to commence buildings.
Six months later, a fresh effort was made to get the project underway when a meeting of the Church Building Committee was called for 12 August 1871. The newspaper advertisement for the meeting specifically requested the attendance of collectors, adding hopefully that "in the interval they will exert themselves in gathering in all promised subscriptions". Evidently sufficient funds were collected for the committee soon afterwards engaged an architect to draw up plans and specifications for the building. The architect the committee chose for the task was the Reverend Alberto Dias Soares who was the local Church of England minister and Rector or Christ Church in Queanbeyan. Soares had actually offered his services as an architect gratis (for free).
Alberto Dias Soares
Born in London in 1830, Soares was the son of the Portuguese Consul and merchant, His Excellency Manoel Joachim Soares, and his English wife Camilla (née Lodington). He attended the Putney School for Civil Engineers in London in 1849–1850. Apart from an innate talent for drawing and art lessons in Oporto in 1847, his training as an engineer appears to have been his only qualification for undertaking architectural work. In August 1852, he departed for Australia with visions of a career in engineering and of furthering a grand scheme that had been proposed for a colonial railway. Once in Australia, however, he found that no-one was interested in the scheme. His life took a wholly new direction in 1855 when he felt, and answered, a call to the ministry of the Anglican Church. Taking Deacon's orders in May 1856, he was appointed to his first incumbency, Queanbeyan, in April 1857 and was ordained a priest on 7 June.