Anglicans rebuffed on cathedral site in city but Bishop Short adds to local intellectual life

The Anglican cathedral at North Adelaide had originally been given a site in Victoria Square.
 

The present site of St Peter’s Cathedral represents a rebuff to the authority of the Anglican Church in South Australia. In 1848, conservative governor Frederick Robe granted land in Victoria Square, marked in Colonel William Light’s plan for public use, to the Anglican church to build a cathedral.

The grant was registered in 1851 and from 1849 funds had been coming in to build on the cleared site.

But the legality of the grant of a public reserve began to be questioned. Anglican bishop Augustus Short, supported by his synod, took the matter to the Supreme Court. In 1855, the court confirmed the grant was invalid and the building couldn’t proceed.

Short pressed on with building St Peter’s Cathedral at North Adelaide from 1869. He also created the influential St Peter’s College and founded St Barnabas’ Theological College (1880).

Short led an Anglican tradition of having well-educated clergy sent out to Adelaide.

Short added to the city’s intellectual life, such as his 1869 paper to the Adelaide Philosophical Society addressing “the proper relations of physical science to revealed religion.

He was among those who led the way to founding Adelaide University in 1876 out of the Union College supported by Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists.

In 1860, Short supported Anglican minister and St Peter’s College headmaster George Farr’s wife Julia when created and ran the Anglican Church home for parentless girls, in Carrington Street, city, until 1907 and then Mitcham. Julia Farr later started the Home for Incurables with William Gosse.