'Sound Taste and a Love of the Fine Arts': Bishop Goold's Experience of Cultural Patronage in the Diocese of Sydney, 1838-1848

Abstract

For the first decade of his apostolate in Australia, James Alipius Goold was a priest of the diocese of Sydney, working primarily in the parish of Campbelltown, a small rural settlement to the south-west of Sydney. Even after his elevation to the episcopate in 1847, Goold continued to reside in the Sydney diocese for more than a year until he was finally consecrated at St Mary’s Cathedral in August 1848. The eleven years that Goold spent in Sydney, representing nearly a quarter of his time in Australia, had a formative influence on his understanding of what it meant to be a missionary bishop in the colonial context; it was a period in his life when he learned much from the example of the English Benedictine archbishop of Sydney, John Bede Polding. This paper examines the influence of Goold’s early years in Australia upon his episcopate in Melbourne, with particular reference to the example of Archbishop Polding in the areas of architectural, artistic and bibliophilic patronage, suggesting that one of the sources of Goold’s inspiration for his cultural programme in Melbourne was the example provided by Polding. If nothing else, Polding demonstrated what it was possible for a colonial bishop to achieve in the fields of church architecture, art and book collection, despite the relative poverty of his missionary diocese.