St Patrick's Seminary, Manly is a heritage-listed former residence of the Archbishop of Sydney and Roman Catholic Church seminary at 151 Darley Road, Manly, Northern Beaches Council, New South Wales, Australia. The property was also known as St Patrick's Estate, St. Patricks Estate, St. Patrick's Seminary or College, Cardinal's Palace, Archbishop's Residence, St Pats, St Patricks and Saint Paul's Catholic College. It was designed by Sheerin & Hennessy, Hennessy & Hennessy, Scott Green & Scott and Sydney G Hirst & Kennedy and built from 1885 to 1889 by William Farley (Residence/Palace), W. H. Jennings (College/Seminary). The property is owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. The property was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 21 January 2011.
The seminary operated from 1889 until its relocation in 1995 to Strathfield where the teaching institute has become distinct from the seminary. The Catholic Institute of Sydney is now the ecclesiastical theology faculty. The Seminary of the Good Shepherd is the house of formation. Since 1996, the property has been home to the International College of Management, Sydney (ICMS). The estate also houses a high school, residential housing, the old convent, and a children's hospice.
Current use The campus buildings are now occupied by the International College of Management, Sydney. The Cardinal Cerretti Chapel, however, is still regularly used for weddings.
The building appears as the exterior of Gatsby's mansion in the 2013 movie The Great Gatsby. Palm trees at the building's exterior were digitally removed in post-production to be faithful to the East Coast, United States, where The Great Gatsby is set.
Was the location used to portray Ridge Heights Catholic Ladies College, for the Australian series Class of '07.
History Conceived by archbishops of Sydney Roger Vaughan and Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, the seminary was built from 1885 in Perpendicular Gothic style by Joseph Sheerin and John Hennessy on a spectacular site overlooking the Tasman Sea on a hill above Manly on Sydney's northern beaches, located towards North Head. The seminary opened on 23 January 1889. Though intended as a national seminary, it never entirely achieved that ambition.W.J. Wright, The development of a national priesthood in Australia: the first Manly generation, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 8 (2), (1987), 35-39.
An early student was Patrick Joseph Hartigan, author of the "John O'Brien" poems on Australian Catholic rural life. Two of the first novels of former student Thomas Keneally, The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968), are set in a fictionalized version of the seminary. Tony Abbott was a seminarian there.
By the time of its centenary in 1989, 1,714 men had been ordained, having completed their training at the college. These include Cardinals Gilroy, Freeman, Cassidy and Clancy and 41 bishops.
The seminary closed in November 1995, and the seminary was renamed, when numbers of seminarians no longer justified the large building and shifts in ecclesiological thinking mandated a move to the geographical centre of the Greater Sydney Area.
The following outline history has been reproduced from the Conservation Management Plan for St Patrick's Estate, Manly prepared by Tanner & Associates Pty Ltd:
To aid in understanding, the history of the site was divided into a number of periods:
1810-1858: covers the period of the earliest land grants in Manly including the Quarantine Grounds on North Head. 1859-1900: commences with the granting of land for the purpose of constructing a residence for the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. The major buildings, St. Patrick's College, the Archbishop's Residence and the Recreation Building, date from this period. 1901-1935: saw the division of the site by the construction of Darley Road and the erection of the Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel, the Convent and extensions to St Patrick's College. 1936-1985: includes major site development (with buildings now considered of marginal cultural significance). 1986-2002: includes the most recent work in the conservation of the site and its buildings.
1810-1858
The first land grants in Manly were made to Richard Cheers (100 acres) and Gilbert Baker (30 acres) on 1 January 1810. The western boundary line of Cheers' grant physically separated North Head from what was to become Manly. In 1832 North Head was dedicated for use as a Quarantine station.
Land for the Episcopal grant was later taken from the Quarantine Grounds.
The immediate background to the establishment of St Patrick's College and the Episcopal residence at Manly can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1850 public land and money had been dedicated for the purpose of constructing a residence for the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. At first a five-acre portion of Grose Farm was suggested as a site for the Episcopal residence, but the University of Sydney had already been allocated this land in its endowment. Monastic and diocesan troubles, as McGovern has noted, along with Archbishop Polding's retirement from Sydney, caused the matter to lapse until 1856 but in that year, a request for 6 allotments at Coogee was obstructed by Surveyor General G.W. Barney, as was a subsequent claim for 15 acres on Cabarita Point on the Parramatta River.
1859-1900
In 1859, Abbott Gregory successfully requested 60 acres adjoining and overlapping the Quarantine reserve. (On survey, the allotment was found to be 90 acres and it was subsequently cut back). "Honest" John Robertson, the Secretary for Lands, reported that since
Later commentators unfairly claimed that Robertson's decision rested on "the advantage of having this Catholic property as a barrier between the outer public and the Quarantine Station (since) Catholics were so thick-skinned they would not take smallpox!" This notwithstanding, the grant was approved but the deed was not issued until 1879. As Sydney was without an ecclesiastical seminary an educational function was attached to the grant. Apparently the splendid isolation of the site, yet its general proximity to the city of Sydney was thought appropriate by the Church, given the need for access to a major urban centre which was a focus to the region, and a locale which enabled serious study and retreat from the pressures of normal society.
Ironically, as Henry Parkes pushed through the secular Public Instruction Bill, the grant on which the largest Catholic seminary in the southern hemisphere was to be built was consolidated. In 1885, plans for the Diocesan seminary were drawn up by the Sydney architects Sheerin and Hennessy. Work began during June 1885; the foundation stone was laid and blessed on 19 November 1885, and on 23 January 1889, the opening ceremony was conducted. The magnificent and commanding structure cost 70,000 pounds to build. The builder was W.H. Jennings. The driving force behind its construction was Cardinal Patrick Moran whose strength of personality is indelibly manifest in various architectural and other details, notably the use of his initials and regalia in various carved and cast panels.
The erection of the college coincided with Manly's first, though modest, suburban boom. Despite delays in building and the loss of the life of a labourer, the hill became 'the scene of great activity':
`Three hundred and twenty five men were on the pay-sheet. Labourers' tents and workmen's sheds sprang up with lightning like rapidity, so that the once desolate hill was now a veritable calico-town by day, and resembled a bivouacked army by night.' As far as building materials were concerned, the article continued,
`One cause of trouble was the contractor's inability to secure suitable stone. The opening stages of the work were built with stone hewn from near the tennis-court. The material from that quarter proving inferior, and smallpox barring entrance into the quarantine reserve, recourse had finally to be made to the quarry on the site of the Grotto of our Lady of Lourdes'.("Manly", Vol. 1, No. 1, 1916, p. 36).
The Archbishop's Residence was built slightly earlier at a cost of 10,500 pounds. Problems with its sandstone (which are evident today) led to a choice of a different quarry for the college. As with the college, Sheerin and Hennessy acted as the architects. W. Farley secured the building contract. Work commenced on the residence early in 1885 and was completed by the end of 1886.
Just as work on the college was beginning, however, Manly Council made application to the Minister of Lands for the resumption of 100 feet from the high water mark fronting Cabbage Tree Bay. Shell (later Shelly) Beach and the land to the east and south of that beach as far as the Quarantine Reserve was also requested for public use.See Council Minutes, 11 June 1885
Such action required the surrendering of 8 acres and 27 perches from the Episcopal grant. And on 15 January 1886, the area - along with a separate, adjoining allotment of 2 acres 2 rods and 21 perches - was dedicated for public recreation.Official notification of the reserve was made on 10 November 1900 By way of compensation, however, the Church was granted 23 acres and 3 rods from the Quarantine Reserve behind and adjoining the original Episcopal grant. Later, on 23 August 1904, Cardinal Moran was to arrange for the purchase of an allotment of 3 rods and 11 perches connected to the south eastern end of the exchanged land. This was to finalise the general outline of the property.
Prior to the transfer, the Church grounds had been bounded by a "high galvanised iron and barbed wire fence". By , however, a stone wall had been constructed along the new south eastern boundary.
1901-1937
Over the period 1900-1907 various small residential lots adjacent to College Street, Reddall Street, Fairy Bower Road and Bower Street were purchased by the Church.
The only other modification to the property's physical dimensions resulted from the dedication of a strip of land 66 feet wide through the grounds for the extension of Darley Road. The dedication was made in 1879 and its use as a public road was declared by proclamation in the Government Gazette on 22 October 1887. Construction of the road was not undertaken, however, until World War I. In return for the land lost, the Army - which used St Patrick's tower for military observations during the war - built the stone walls which still flank Darley Road. Their design and construction appears to have been based on the stone walls previously built as a barrier between the college grounds and the Quarantine Station: they are a striking and important visual element in the landscape. The walls may have been built in stages between 1914 and 1932.
In terms of building development on the site up until World War I, a recreation room which housed 2 billiard tables and a gymnasium was constructed . It survives as the Cardinal Freeman Pastoral Centre, though part of the original verandah has been removed to facilitate construction of modern garaging.
The extant basketball and handball courts were also built . Other improvements in sporting facilities, according to an article by Eris O'Brien in Manly:
'The football field has undergone many improvements at the hands of ardent sports committees. Much excavation of rock and sand has been done, thereby making the field sufficiently large for Australian Rules. Another improvement worth mentioning is the dressing-shed, or, as it is commonly called, the grandstand. The former shed was blown down in a wind storm . . .'
By this time, general upkeep and other maintenance costs were becoming a cause for concern. Thus, in 1914, it was decided:
`. . . That the outer fringe of college lands should be made available as revenue-producing to meet the upkeep of the palatial buildings which had been erected.'