| Historical notes: | The present area of the Catholic school’s property at Winmalee is nearly 500 hectares (1215 acres). Almost exactly half of this consolidated land-holding is the original grant to William Lawson senior, of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, made in 1839. After reverting to the crown, the land was owned successively by Sir Henry Parkes, the premier of New South Wales, and Sam Lees, an alderman and mayor of Sydney.
The sub-division of Lees’ property in 1890 did not result in many sales, but about 6 hectares were sold to a man called Ipkendanz, who in 1894 built Elmhurst and established an orchard.
In 1908 Cardinal Moran, Catholic archbishop of Sydney, bought first Elmhurst and then the remainder of Lees’ unsold estate. St Patrick’s Seminary at Manly, opened in 1889, had been the realisation of Moran’s ideal of an Australian priesthood ‘Australian born, of Irish descent, largely Australian trained, but with a Roman gloss’ (O’Farrell 10). By 1909 there were 83 students crowding St Patrick’s and Moran decided to build a junior college at Springwood to relieve the accommodation pressure at Manly.
Father Cregan was instructed to build a suitable seminary, dedicated to St Columba, the Irish monk who had established Iona in Scotland in the sixth century. The architects were Nagle and Nurzety, the contractors Wheelwright and Alderton. The first section, classrooms, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, dormitories above, was opened in 1909 and the first 26 students admitted in 1910.
Elmhurst, which is 700 metres from the seminary, became a presbytery and staff accommodation, with four students also lodging there in 1913. The orchard established by Ipkendanz was maintained and some degree of self-sufficiency on the 16 hectares of cleared land was encouraged, with a piggery, milch-cows and an apiary. Water was pumped up from a weir across Springwood Creek to the west.
Pressure of numbers, as students numbers reached 60, prompted the building of a new wing in 1923, with extra classrooms and dormitories above, as well as a chapel and a free-standing recreation hall built entirely by the students themselves and completed only in 1929.
In 1933 the courtyard was completed, with its south wing containing more classrooms and dormitories, the Academy Hall and a spire visible from some distance. This 1933 wing was designed by William Gilroy and built by Butcher.
The number of students continued to grow: 100 in 1931, nearly 150 by the 1950s. So a further accommodation wing for students who would after three years go on to St Patrick’s or to Rome, was added in 1958. A new chapel, designed by Sidney Hirst, was constructed in 1960, replacing the cloister which connected the east ends of the north and south wings.
With a sharp decline in candidates for the priesthood in the 1970s, St Columba’s became redundant as a seminary, since St Patrick’s could now accommodate the 40 students remaining at Springwood. St Columba’s Seminary therefore closed in 1978 and reopened in 1979 as St Columba’s High School. This was a non-boarding, co-educational school, which involved considerable changes in the internal fabric of the old residential, all-male institution. The school started with 114 day students and grew rapidly to the present 1000. The former dormitories and the accommodation wing were progressively remodelled between 1986 and 1995 to serve the needs of the school. The 1960 chapel was converted in 1996 into a new school library, dedicated to Doc Joiner.
The separate convent building, housing the Congregation of Our Lady Help of Christians, who had assisted the seminarians since 1926, was erected in 1953.
Grotto Tracks
The southern grotto some 600 metres to the west of the entrance to the College at Kable’s Springs was built about 1910 and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. St Columba's College was opened on 4/10/1909. The first students began study in 1910. Father Joiner wrote in a letter that 'the Bower' was discovered by the students on St. Patrick’s Day 1910. However, this could be a reference to the second (St. Joseph’s) Grotto. In Lourdes France in 1858 visions of the Virgin Mary were experienced by (later Saint) Bernadette. Pope Pius X made February 11 an international Catholic feast day, commemorating this appearance of the 'Immaculate Conception', in 1907.
It appears that, in the early years of St Columba’s, Marian devotion by the teachers and students led to the construction of a replica of the Lourdes Grotto in the seminary grounds and the building of an elaborate walking track to access it. The first dated photograph, by Harry Phillips, was published in 1917. This photo shows an introduced willow tree at the grotto that could well have been planted in about 1910. In 1927 local parishioners erected 14 'Stations of the Cross' along this track with stonework and flower plantings surround 2m high bush pole crosses with the traditional images of Christ's last days attached to the crosses’ intersections.
There was a revival of interest in the Grotto by local and Sydney Catholics after Bernadette's canonisation in 1933.
The Lourdes Grotto track is unique for the amount of stone which has been carried into the site to line the track, probably from the same quarry used for the main building and for the elaborate dry stone walling around the grotto. Two wooden bridges, a 'summer house', extensive exotic plantings and numerous religious statues of saints, angels etc were further additions to the site. The religious significance of the site was revived in 1997, with parish priest Eugene Stockton conducting a 'Ritual of Reconciliation' there.
To the N.E. of the Seminary, on Lot 56, a second grotto, 'St Joseph's' was constructed with a less elaborate track to it. The Catholic Bushwalking Club had been looking for a site for a shrine to the club’s spiritual patron 'Our Lady of the Way' since 1947. Enthusiasm for this project probably rose after Pope Pius XII raised the status of Mary among Catholics with the declaration of the doctrine of 'The Assumption' in 1950. In 1953 St Joseph's Bower became 'Our Lady of the Way Grotto' with an official blessing and the replacement of the statue of St Joseph with a newly commissioned marble statue of Mary. This grotto was 'decommissioned' due to vandalism in 1982. Vandalism at the Lourdes Grotto had been reported since 1923 and eventually its statue was removed.
A new church was recently built on an elevated site above the Hawkesbury Road.
A heritage study for St Columbas was prepared in 1995 (Perumal Murphy WU Pty Ltd). |