St John's College, or the College of St John the Evangelist, is a residential college within the University of Sydney.
Established in 1857, the college is the oldest Roman Catholic, and second-oldest overall, university college in Australia. St John's is a co-educational community of 252 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The rector, Mark Schembri, has held his position since 2022.
History
The College of St. John the Evangelist was founded by Archbishop John Bede Polding, who named it after the author of the fourth Gospel. The symbol of St John's College is the eagle, the traditional symbol of St. John. St. John's is the oldest Catholic tertiary educational institution in Australia, and the first Catholic college to be established in a preexisting, non-Catholic university in the English-speaking world since the Reformation.
In 1854, the first effort to establish a Catholic college within the University of Sydney was made at a meeting in old St Mary's Cathedral. The New South Wales government promised a pound-for-pound subsidy capped at a £20,000 limit, if at least £10,000 were raised by public subscription. The amount was met within six months from July 1857. On 15 December 1857, the act to incorporate St John's College as a college within the University of Sydney passed in the Parliament of New South Wales, and received the Royal Assent from Queen Victoria. The proclamation of the St John's College Council took place on 1 July 1858.
In 1887, James Francis Hogan wrote in The Irish in Australia that "Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview, St. Joseph's College, Hunters Hill and St John's College, affiliated to the University of Sydney, are three educational institutions which reflect the highest credit on the Catholic population of the parent colony"."The Irish in Australia"—by James Francis Hogan, 1887. Reproduced by Project Gutenberg (retrieved 15 June 2006).
English Benedictine influence St. John's was established as a Benedictine foundation by Archbishop Polding, who had formerly been an English Benedictine monk at Downside Abbey. The English Benedictines were prominent in the raising of public support for the founding of St John's; Dom Maurus O'Connell, Dean of St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, and the first Australian-born Benedictine priest, was appointed as the first rector of the college in 1858. When Roger Bede Vaughan, a former monk of Downside Abbey, arrived in Sydney as Polding's coadjutor bishop in 1873, he was elected by the fellows as rector. Vaughan retained the rectorship until he succeeded Polding as archbishop in his own right, but continued to live in the college and use it as his episcopal palace.A.E. Cahill, Archbishop Vaughan and St. John's College, University of Sydney, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 14 (1992), 36-49. Vaughan's secretary—Anselm Gillett, a monk of Ampleforth, who had been resident at Belmont Priory during Vaughan's time as superior before his departure for Australia—acted as rector during Vaughan's time as archbishop. After Vaughan's death and Gillett's return to England, another Benedictine, Fr. David Barry, was appointed rector in 1884. In the latter part of the 19th century, the College Council was dominated by clerical fellows who were Benedictine monks, and the majority of its students were affiliated with Benedictine Lyndhurst College, Glebe.Sons of St Benedict: The English Benedictines and St John's College, Peter Cunich, 1987.
The carved Gothic-style reliquary box in the chapel contains the skull of St. Bede the Lesser, a Benedictine monk who died before AD 1000. The relic had been preserved in a reliquary in the church of St. Benignus at Genoa, served by the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino until the early 19th century. The relic was transported to Sydney by the missionary priest Martial Mary and presented to Archbishop Vaughan while he was residing in the college.
Governance
Government of the college is vested in the College Council by the 1857 Act of Incorporation The Council consists of the Rector and eighteen Fellows, six of whom must be Catholic clergy. The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, currently the Most Rev. Anthony Fisher, takes the role of Visitor of the college. This is a largely ceremonial role, but he can also be called on to give guidance and resolve internal disputes. Under the direction of the Archbishop as Visitor, the college associates itself with the interests of the Church and its mission, particularly by the fostering of appropriate academic directions in education, charity, social justice, ethics and the environment.
Rectors
Visitors
Fellows St John's College has a number of honorary fellows. These are distinguished members of the university and wider community who have been selected to support the rector by representing the interests of the college in their own spheres and by mentoring students
Student club The student club is the body that looks after much of the day-to-day activity of the students of the college. Formed in 1891, the club is governed by its own constitution and is led by its house committee. This committee is elected by the students at the end of each academic year. The activities of the club are varied, ranging across social, cultural, sporting, and disciplinary areas. The house committee comprises the House President, House Secretary, House Treasurer and six committee members.
Architecture
Architects In February 1859, William Wilkinson Wardell, the architect of St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney and St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, was appointed the architect for St John's College. Working from his design for Melbourne, he drew up general plans and sent them to Sydney in May 1859. Wardell originally designed St. John's College as a three-story sandstone Gothic Revival building on an H-shaped plan. Because of budget restrictions, with a limit of £30,000, in July and August there was discussion of Wardell's design and of how much of it could be built. In September and October the general plans were approved by the St John's Council and the university senate.
From October 1859 to April 1860, relations between Wardell and the council deteriorated for various reasons, resulting in Wardell's resignation in June 1860. With the main building program already in progress, the council retained Wardell's plans and proceeded with the construction under the supervision of Edmund Blacket, another of Australia's best-known colonial architects, who had finished construction of the first stage of St. Paul's College, Sydney, the previous year. When Blacket was appointed to supervise the construction of St John's, several changes were made to Wardell's specifications: Australian hardwood was substituted for pitch pine, bar trusses were used in the chapel, a fountain was dropped from the plans, common rather than fire bricks were used, Portland stone was replaced by Colonel stone, and ornamental pillars were incorporated into the design of the library. Blacket estimated that these and other changes would save £1,689, leaving the amended quote at £35,754. When the college was finally occupied, the cost of construction for the first stage was £40,000.
Original building St John's College is perhaps the grandest Gothic Revival building in New South Wales. Designed by one of England's (and Australia's) foremost ecclesiastical architects of the mid-19th century, it is unique in Sydney collegiate architecture in its combination of scale, quality and construction. A rare realisation of Pugin's ideal Catholic college (and in turn based on Magdalen College, Oxford), it demonstrates the influence of Pugin on the work of William Wardell. It is a notable example of the period when Pugin's insistence on archaeological accuracy was giving way to the more eclectic influences of the High Victorian generation.
Built entirely in sandstone, the college is 14th century English Gothic in style, and substantially Renaissance Baroque in plan, in the manner of Wardell's earlier monasteries and convents. The principal floor or piano nobile is above the ground floor and is related to a central space (the ante-chapel) by a series of classical enfilades. The arrangement of the ground floor entry vestibule, and the formal, axially linked Imperial staircase are equally classical in inspiration. In this respect St John's is unlike the traditional layout of an English university college. The formal parts of the building are very grand, particularly if compared to the almost domestic scale of Blacket's contemporary St Paul's College.
The main facade on the north wing is a typical exercise in Victorian near-symmetry, with the central tower nearly in the middle. Under the tower is a porte-cochère. Continuing south along the visitor's line of entry on the main axis is a visually low, dark vestibule. This enhances the view, through an open arcade and transverse passage, of the more brightly sidelit formal stone staircase. To the north of the stair hall on the principal floor is the central space. To the east of this space is the chapel, viewed through an arcaded screen. To the south is a vista across the stairwell, through an ante-room to the library and on to the students' accommodation. To the west is the Great Hall, although this was not visible from the central space on Wardell's original design. Lastly, through a wide opening to the north is the Lady Chapel in the tower.
Chapel and Lady Chapel The Chapel of St John's College, unusual in being located on the first floor, was completed in 1863. The chapel has a plan that includes five bays. The two bays at the east end are distinguished as a chancel by a change in floor level. The eastern half of the chapel is in the traditional collegiate Choir arrangement. The details of the tracery and mouldings are late 13th and early 14th century English Gothic. There is a small gallery over the chapel, originally designed to enable invalids from the infirmary to hear Mass. The chapel is covered by a high wooden roof
Many of the sanctuary furnishings are believed to have been designed by Blackett in the 1860s, including the Blessed Sacrament shrine, which is made of Bondi Gold sandstone, the tabernacle, cedar choir stalls and pews. The walls of keyed sandstone were originally covered in plasterwork with Pugin-like decoration, but the plasterwork was completely removed in 1963. The chapel's wrought-iron gates were designed by Herbert Wardell and George Denning and installed in 1921. The chapel contains five stained glass windows, three of which were commissioned in 1918 from John Hardman and Co., Birmingham, with the design based on the writings of St. Bonaventure, quoted by Cardinal Newman. The eastern window, also from Hardman and Co., was presented to the college by Countess Freehill in 1937, in memory of her late husband, Francis Bede Freehill. The embellished sanctuary and Lady Chapel mosaics were also presented by Countess Freehill and laid by Melocco Co., in 1916–17 and 1937 respectively (approximately the same time as the Kelly Chapel floor at St Mary's Cathedral). The sanctuary features an oak reredos and panelling designed by Herbert Wardell, as well as two life-sized carved statues of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist, which were made by Koffmefer of Munich.
Great Hall