(ANGLICAN)
Poath Road, Hughesdale
Not reopened after the pandemic.
Holy Nativity Anglican church in Hughesdale was dedicated in 1961 as a chapel of ease (a branch church in effect) in the then well attended middle-class suburban parish of St Peter’s, Murrumbeena. It replaced a smaller timber church subsequently used as a hall. Like other such buildings of its era it was designed to take the pressure of substantial congregations off the parish church. Who could have known, seeing those comfortably filled churches on Sunday morning, the men in suits, the ladies with hats, that catastrophic decline was just around the corner? – largely because the children of the suited and hatted churchgoers, assembled in the Sunday school by parental fiat while their elders sang hymns in church, did not when they came of age follow their parents’ example but gave the practice of religion away.
When that happened, the no longer new churches became redundant, and this seems to have happened with Holy Nativity. I say “seems to” because I have not been able to obtain definite information on the church’s future. Services were suspended in 2020 when the Chinese virus infested our land. They have not been resumed. But no notice board advises on whether services will begin again and no estate agent’s board, with or without the statutory examples of what passes for wit in the world of property dealing – “A Divine Position”, “A Heavenly Opportunity” announces its impending sale.
Holy Nativity has no visible foundation stone and the name of the architect is not known. It is a simple honest building, brick, with a steep-pitched tiled roof that covers nave and chancel without distinction. The roof slopes down to low side walls that are glazed for most of their length. The position of the church on a grassy knoll gives it a more commanding presence than it would otherwise have. A thin 30-feet (9.1 metres) metal spire rising from its roof at the altar end is the sole architectural indication of its ecclesiastical function.
Holy Nativity was well attended until the 1980s when attendances began to fall away. It now is likely to join the list of mid-twentieth century Anglican churches that have shuts their doors in the diocese of Melbourne. The 1950s and 1960s was a time of expansion, now, one by one, the churches built then are going, in districts that were once Anglican heartland: St Stephen’s Darebin, All Saints’ East Malvern, St Mary’s, East Preston, St George’s Bentleigh and Mont Albert and St Martin’s, Deepdene and others. All were attended by vanished congregations that were young when these churches were built, and have since aged and died and not been replaced.
UPDATE
Reader Andrew Scanlon reports that Holy Nativity was closed after a deconsecration service on Christmas Eve 2023 (see Comments). There is no information about the future of the building.
HERE TODAY... 
Certainly the children of those 1960s parishioners did not embrace in equivalent numbers the Anglican religion of their parents.
But I wonder if there is another factor at play in the sad emptying out of these church buildings, namely a drift on the part of observant (non-Roman-Catholic) Christians to more conservative denominations. My sense – based on observations of church attendance in the country towns where I’ve lived much of my life in WA, is that protestant Christianity, while a much smaller part of civic life than it once was, hasn’t disappeared; rather, the demographic balance has shifted from Anglican and Uniting churches to congregations of the Baptist Union and the Church of Christ; and more recently to Pentecostalism. I happen to attend an Anglican Church; and I seem to be often meeting Baptists and others, particularly of the 60+ generation, who tell me “I used to be Anglican”.
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Looking at the website for St Peters Murrumbeena it appears services were not conducted at Holy Nativity post-Covid except for a farewell and deconsecration service held fittingly on Christmas Eve 2023. Looking at the building you see features with many mainstream protestant churches of this era – the protruding cruciform pattern in the brickwork and the steel spire which is identical to that nearby at the former All Saints Anglican Church East Malvern, now demolished and replaced with a childcare centre.
The main church sits on two blocks in a Neighbourhood Residential Zone with the old timber hall on a third – located far enough from the railway station to protect it from high density apartments, but not from the likes of another childcare centre (of which quite a few church sites around this part of Melbourne have become) or those medium density townhouse developments lined with brick veneer downstairs and cheap rendered cladding upstairs that will in future become a dated identifier of the housing of this era.
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