Churches of Tasmania

This chapel was built in the 1880s on the property ‘Woodrising’, near Spreyton, south of Devonport. The chapel was established by Reverend Claude Roberts after he purchased “Dean’s Point” in 1880 from Colonel Michael Maxwell Shaw, a retired Indian Army officer. Roberts arrived in Tasmania with his wife Helen and children in 1879 and after spending some months at Hobart he moved to the North West Coast. He renamed the property he purchased after his father’s parish, “Woodrising”, at county Norfolk, England. Woodrising is now part of the Devonport Golf Club which was established on the property in 1954. After Roberts’ death in 1895 the chapel was used for public services. In 1913 the chapel was moved to a site near the Spreyton railway station where it became All Saints’ Anglican church. Roberts was buried next to his chapel but his body was later reinterred at Don Congregational Cemetery. While Reverend Claude Roberts is no longer a familiar name, his legacy remains. After Roberts sett...

This blog entry is a challenge because this chapel is a footnote to the magnificent Entally House at Hadspen west of Launceston.  The Entally Estate was established in 1819 by Thomas Haydock Reibey II in Hadspen, Tasmania.   Reibey had worked in the East India company which inspired the house being named after the suburb of Entally in Calcutta, India. He was the eldest son of Thomas Reibey Snr. and Mary Reibey who, as 14-year-old Mary Haydock, was transported to the colony of New South Wales in 1792 as punishment for stealing a horse.   In 1794 she married Reibey, a junior marine officer, and together they had seven children. After her husband’s death in 1811, Mary (whose face is featured on the $20 note) took over his businesses and, through hard work and enterprise, amassed vast landholdings in NSW and Tasmania.   Her grandson, also Thomas Reibey, was the Premier of Tasmania from 1876 to 1877 and later resident at   Entally. The estate has some intere...