BUCKLAND’S much-loved St John the Baptist Church has finally moved to new ownership. The former Anglican house of worship, built in 1846 and celebrated for its impressive East Window, was handed over to the community group, Friends of Buckland Church, just before Christmas.
The conversion follows several years of negotiations between the church and the community, and includes governance of the adjacent cemetery, some 65 kilometres east of Hobart.
The Buckland Church is one of about 70 owned by Anglican parishes across Tasmania – and others that were formerly part of the Catholic and Uniting churches – that have become surplus to their needs. The Anglican Church has publicly said it’s selling dozens of properties to meet financial obligations under the Commonwealth’s National Redress Scheme.
The success of Buckland community effort provides a road map for communities looking to buy a local church, agrees Bryan Green, the chair of the committee that drove the effort to secure the now-deconsecrated church. Mr Green, the former Labor Party leader who now runs the Twin Lakes Bush Retreat and Fly Fishery in Buckland, says he’s hugely thankful to the local community and beyond, people who’ve felt connected to the building and its history.
It’s a long and fraught process for any group of people, especially one as tiny as that of Buckland, these days home to fewer than 200 people. What’s the secret to bringing a community to coalesce around the purchase of an old church? “We got organised early,” says Mr Green, “put together a good committee and secretary, and set about bringing the entire community into the picture.
“Once you’ve got an incorporated organisation, in our case the Friends of Buckland Church, you can reach out to like-minded agencies such as the National Trust. “We made sure we were completely legitimate on all Historic church’s new era Friendly takeover for Buckland landmark fronts, with clear goals and a way to reach them.”
In Tasmania today, dozens of churches – from different faiths and varying states of repair, distant from their congregations and further yet from sources of funding – await a benefactor, most likely the community of which it still forms a core. And communities need to be able to dig deep for the financial wherewithal to undertake a property purchase that may be as much as $1,000,000. “Some community members are able to contribute more than others,” says Mr Green.
It’s also constructive and valuable to determine what it is about the building that’s important, and how those attributes may be used or put to work in the future. Many churches have excellent records, a detailed provenance, even architectural data and verifications – which furnish a clear understanding of the building’s value beyond the bricks and mortar.
In the case of the Buckland church, Mr Green notes, “The importance of a building like this is the architecture and its long history, and thus, its place in the community as a whole.” He points out that many families in and around Buckland have relatives in the church grounds. “And that means a great deal to people,” he said.
“What we’ve done, in essence, is find a way to continue doing what the church was established for in the first place, back in the 1840s. It’s a place now to bring people together in the community, just as it was then. “What we’ve got is a place where people can admire the work of those who built this church, the only one of its type in the southern hemisphere,” says Mr Green.
“And for the future, we’re finding ways to make it relevant again, such as weddings and funerals. “We want to protect and keep intact a church that’s lasted 180 years,” says the chairman. “We want to make sure its lasts another 180.”
The church’s first fundraising event in this new era will come on January 22, with an afternoon of blues music by Terraplane and the Hudson Horns in the church yard.