English context: the Oxford Movement

The SSA is neither unique nor unusual in the impulses that formed its creation and character. Rather, is a product of the converging religious, cultural and gender-based influences in nineteenth-century English religion, which in turn permeated the Church of England as it spread around the world.

Since the sixteenth century, the Church of England has been England’s established or national church, and for many centuries its character and ethos was strongly Protestant, meaning that aspects of religious practice such as preaching took priority over a more sacramental and mystical experience of religion. In this robustly Protestant identity, there was no need or desire for the revival of the religious orders dormant since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. But change to that ethos came in the mid-nineteenth century when a number of clergy of the Church championed a different way of expressing Anglican identity. Known as the Oxford Movement (due to its emergence among the academic clergy of Oxford University, especially Oriel College), this set of cultural and religious changes inspired the renewal of rule-based religious orders in the English Church.

In broad terms, the Oxford Movement favoured a more sacramental understanding of the Church of England and sought to trace the continuities between the Church as it was by the nineteenth century and as it had been before the Reformation (Faught, 2010: 107). This ‘resurgent catholicism’ (the term ‘catholic’ here implying a universal church rather than Roman Catholicism) created both a theological and practical space for the recreation of the defunct religious orders (Maughan, 2018: 329). The first Anglican religious sisterhood formed in 1845 in London, the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross (Williams, 1947: 350; Pereiro, 2017: 204).

Others soon followed and most orders for women had broadly similar characteristics. The women lived and worked according to a Rule which governed the order and worked under the supervision of a Mother Superior. The sisters engaged in a range of types of work including education, academic research, and service to the poor, the last a particularly compelling function in the context of the widespread urban poverty in Victorian London and other cities, not only in England but throughout the British Empire and its settler colonies such as in Australia (Campbell, 2001: 192).

Women’s work

The Oxford Movement was largely the intellectual and religious enterprise of male university academics and much of their focus was on the sacramental activities of an all-male priesthood. Yet the renewed emphasis on the pre-Reformation Church opened up both a conceptual and a practical entry point for the revival of religious orders. Some were for men, but others importantly were for women, therefore creating the first institutional opportunities for women in English religion since the Reformation. Typically, women could be congregants and participate in the social and religious life of religion, but only as non-ordained lay persons. The revival of religious orders therefore created the opportunity for woman to become members of a corporate religious body and to engage in a fuller commitment to the Church.

These burgeoning opportunities converged with broader ferment in the nineteenth century about the work women could undertake outside their homes. Women’s right to vote and their legal rights as property holders were subjects of controversy and campaigning by the later-nineteenth century. Women became increasingly engaged in public activities such as benevolent societies and charity administration (Campbell, 2001: 190). These widening activities inform the greater drive some English women articulated for service in the Church as a member of a religious order. Indeed, the impulse crossed religious divisions and in the Roman Catholic Church, which had never suppressed its religious orders, a range of new religious orders for nuns developed (Campbell, 2001: 191).

By the nineteenth century, the Church of England was a global entity, carried across the world by missionaries with the British Empire. The work of the Church abroad gave some women opportunities for more energetic and participatory work in religion as missionaries and medical doctors. The Anglican religious orders of the period thus had overseas and colonial analogues. The Episcopal Church in the United States (as the Anglican Church there is known) gained its first order for religious sisters in 1847 (Williams, 1947: 350). Religious orders developed elsewhere including South Africa (Sparrow, 2020: 10) and New Zealand (Campbell, 2007: 61).

For male observers, clerical and lay, the opportunities presented by these developing religious orders for women raised often unsettling questions about what properly constituted a woman’s place in society, in the family, and in the Church. Unmarried Victorian women could enter religious orders and spend the remainder of their lives within mostly autonomous all-female communities. As Woods indicates, Robert Southey, the founder of the Church of England’s first female religious order in 1845, may not have been envisaging it as a means for emancipating women in any way (2015: 152). Debate among Victorian churchmen and intellectuals prefigures debate among modern historians on the implications of this first order and the others which came in its wake. Victorian clergy exponents of the Oxford Movement supported female religious orders both in principle and practice, but thought the women in them were serving out their time in traditional gender roles (Woods, 2015: 152).

In contrast, other commentators then and now point to these orders’ potential for releasing women from ‘familial domesticity,’ in a way few other nineteenth-century institutions or opportunities could. The irony cannot be overlooked that not only did men found some religious orders for women, such as Southey, but also all religious orders of women were reliant on men for both informal support and their sacramental and institutional existence. Informally, influential male patrons could encourage support for orders and their works. Formally, there were no female priests in the Anglican Church until the latter part of the twentieth century, meaning that sisters required the involvement of male clergy as their chaplains, visitors, patrons and to oversee key moments in the life of an order, such as profession of a new sister. Woods summarises that the Victorian-era orders ‘both fostered and threatened “ideas of womanhood”’ (Woods, 2015: 153), and with these contradictory potentials in mind we can consider the SSA in particular.

Enter Mother Caroline

The SSA is notable as a home-grown Anglican religious order that originated in the late-colonial Queensland setting, and in this process the diocese of Brisbane proved a congenial home for the order. The impulse for its foundation came from a man, Montagu Stone-Wigg, the vicar of St John’s pro-cathedral in Brisbane. Himself influenced by the Oxford Movement, it was Stone-Wigg’s personal initiative to invite women to come to Brisbane to contribute to the provision of education in the colony. These circumstances are a striking contrast with the reception of the sisters of another order, the Sisters of the Church, by the more ‘low church’ and evangelical diocese of Sydney. The senior clergy in Sydney did not actively invite these sisters and greeted their arrival with hostility. In contrast was the reception for the first two sisters in Brisbane (Rodgers 1980: 9).

The order’s start in Brisbane was small scale and primitive. The Brisbane Telegraph reported on them in 1893, noting the sisters had ‘established themselves at Chester House, Charlotte Street’ and that ‘they have received for their work numerous gifts, including money, furniture, and utensils, but are still in need of chairs, chests of drawers, and some oilcloth’ (9 January 1893: 4). The order was also still in need of members, and until the early twentieth century the number of sisters remained as single figures (Campbell, 2007: 57).

At Mother Caroline’s death in 1915 the order remained small. While comparable orders such as the Sisters of the Church experienced significant growth in Australia, peaking at around 150 sisters, the SSA never reached such numerical strength and only grew slowly to a peak membership in the 1930s (Rayner, 1962: 162). In 1939 the Anglican Bishop of North Queensland succinctly indicated the small scale of the order, commenting ‘Our friends of the Roman Communion have at least 1,000 nuns in Queensland; we Anglicans have only 34’ (Telegraph 3 August 1939: 15). That smallness makes the geographical and institutional reach of the order all the more remarkable. As will be discussed below in terms of the educational and nursing activities of the order, the SSA came to manage institutions from Brisbane up to far north Queensland, often following a pattern whereby one to two sisters would leave the Community House in Albion to oversee another institution.

From time to time, new women joined and became full sisters. Like Mother Caroline, some sisters came out from England, including Sister Elisabeth, a Cambridge-educated classicist who was the headmistress of St Margaret’s and the order’s Mother Superior (from 1926 to 1936 and 1939 to 1948 respectively) (Surtees, n.d.; Moore, 1992: 26). Other new sisters were Queensland locals, commencing with the first locally-born novice, a Miss Jobling, in December 1893 (Aimes, 1968: 29). Aimes explains the lengthy induction to full membership, as outlined in a Brisbane Church Chronicle article of February 1907:

Each aspirant is asked to spend one month as a ‘visitor’ of the Community before spending six months as a ‘Postulant.’ The next two years are spent in the Novitiate during which time the Novice is trained in various aspects of the Religious Life – keeping the three vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, mental prayer, the saying of the daily Offices etc. …. At the end of this two-year period the Novice can be elected for Profession into the Sisterhood. If she is not elected, she is asked to spend a further time in the Novitiate until the Sisters decide she is ready and suitable for Profession. At her Profession, the Sister undertakes to keep her Vows for a period of three or five years (to be renewed at the end of the time specified). After five years the sister can take her Life Vows or merely renew her original ones (Aimes, 1968: 38).   

Thus the special church services held for the ‘professing’ of a new sister as a member of the order were landmark events. A newspaper report in 1953 not only shows the wider public interest in the work of the SSA but also provides an account of the professing of a new sister. After being ‘in training for three years,’ the paper reported the new sister will ‘spend another five years before she can take her final vows’ (Brisbane Telegraph 6 January 1953: 12). Taking the final vows also meant adopting the SSA’s habit. The sisters of the SSA looked the part and wore a dark tunic and veil, set off by a wimple and guimpe that recreated the appearance of religious sisters from pre-Reformation England.

As noted above, female orders relied on men for their institutional continuity, and this profession of 1953 is a case in point. While the Mother Superior of the order had a role in the professing ceremony, the male co-adjutor Bishop of Bathurst presided and it was this male bishop who admitted the new sister to the order. An even more telling instance is provided by the order’s jubilee celebrations in 1952. Although celebrating fifty years of work by the sisters, the speakers at this celebration (namely the archbishop of Brisbane, the bishop of Newcastle, the bishop of Grafton, the bishop of Riverina, the bishop of Rockhampton and two other clergy) were all male (Townsville Daily Bulletin, 20 December 1952: 3).

… the primary purpose for the sisters would be for their self-sacrificial social work rather than for their witness to, and practice of, prayer and the spiritual life

Contemplative or active?

Anglican religious orders are distinct from their Roman Catholic counterparts in one important respect, in that Anglican bishops have few institutional or legal mechanisms of control over them, compared to the control exercised over their orders by Catholic bishops (Maughan, 2018: 334). While the SSA always had male champions as well as male clergy involved with their order, the women in the order were a largely autonomous body, free to manage their own affairs and make their own decisions about their educational and spiritual activities.

That said, the very beginning of the order in Queensland in the 1890s occurred during a debate conducted by men about women in the diocese of Brisbane’s synod. In 1891 Stone-Wigg addressed Synod on his idea to bring sisters to Brisbane. Rayner notes the importance of this synod discussion for the future direction of the SSA, noting that Stone-Wigg explained the very notion of a sisterhood was that ‘the primary purpose of the sisters would be for their self-sacrificial social work rather than for their witness to, and practice of, prayer and the spiritual life’. As Rayner further notes, that emphasis shaped the work of the sisters from 1892 onwards when demands were placed on them from across the colony for their contribution to education and home mission activity (1962: 162). At their first arrival, the Evening Observer characterised them as coming to Brisbane to carry out works of social welfare especially in the east ward of the city (10 December 1892: 5).

Even if regarded as primarily a practical rather than contemplative order, there were inherent limitations to what the sisters could do based on the modest numbers of their membership.

The SSA schools

Today the most prominent and enduring reminders of the work of the SSA are two schools for girls, St Margaret’s in Albion, and St Aidan’s in Corinda, Brisbane. They are, however, only two parts of what was a much larger portfolio of educational endeavour.

The early years of the twentieth century was a period of precocious growth in the scope of work undertaken by the order. By the First World War, the SSA ran a school for girls in Stanthorpe and the school in Albion, then called the Eton School, and an early success which grew in enrolments rapidly (Rayner, 1962: 157; Moore, 1992: 24). In addition, there was an industrial school for girls in Clayfield. Mother Caroline placed emphasis on the importance of providing education for girls, echoing the high-minded views of other Victorian educators of girls such as Miss Frances Buss and Miss Dorothea Beale, themselves founders of notable English girls’ schools (Kamm, 1958: 39). Mother Caroline believed that schools for girls were intrinsic to ‘a progressive and tolerant community’ (Moore, 1992: 19).

The fact the sisters worked for no pay was an important economic consideration. Anglican historian Keith Rayner pinpoints schools such as St Margaret’s as robust survivors when many other colonial-era efforts failed and closed, and he noted the importance of the sisters’ free labour in the school’s early survival (1962: 157). Other SSA institutions included a children’s home and a hostel for girls in Charleville (Rayner 1962: 160). Before the end of the First World War, the order founded St Anne’s School in Townsville (now the Cathedral School of St Anne and St James), and then a school at Herberton, St Mary’s. After the war came All Souls in Charters Towers (a rare excursion into boys’ education for the order) and St Gabriel’s, also in Charters Towers, a school for girls. In 1929 came St Aidan’s School, another school for girls. By 1947 the order was preparing to operate a toddlers’ home in Nundah (Telegraph, 22 March 1947: 7)

The range and diversity of the teaching, from toddlers up to girls ready to matriculate to university, reflects a developed educational philosophy espoused by the sisters, including emphasis on the importance of the earliest years of education and the provision of a broad curriculum (Moore, 1992: 21). Geographically the extent was great, and so too was the ecclesiastical impact of the order as by 1930 the SSA operated in the majority (three out of five) of Anglican dioceses in Queensland. The order had achieved much on little in terms of personnel and Mother Emma herself reflected that ‘responses to the call of the life of a sister are still very rare in Australia’ (Gregory, 1981).

There was a broader context for this activity. Other Anglican organisations founded schools in Queensland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as did other religious denominations including the Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches. Any Church-run school was a reaction to the long-standing colonial provision that the government provided free but secular education to children, rather than the government giving money to denominational education. In addition, the Queensland Government’s 1875 State Education Act forbad religious instruction in the schools run by the government. Should the Anglican Church wish for Anglican children to receive not only a general education but one inscribed within a religious framework, then the Anglican Church needed Anglican schools. As such, the intent of SSA schools was to ‘teach the faith’ (Cairns Post, 23 August 1938: 12).

The War Memorial hospital

The crucible for the establishment of the SSA was the religious culture of Victorian England, an association that persisted well into the twentieth century. Through this period the Society was not merely part of the Anglican Church but constituted part of a much wider imperial enterprise centred on both Church and Empire.

As such, the order’s work after the First World War included the patriotic endeavour of founding, building, and operating a War Memorial Hospital in Brisbane, to be built next to the cathedral in Ann Street. The hospital’s function was twofold. Symbolically, it commemorated Anglican servicemen who had died in the war, demonstrating ‘thankfulness to God for the triumph of liberty and justice’ (Brisbane Courier, 15 August 1919: 6). Carved into the building’s street frontage is the dedication and promise that the hospital offered ‘perpetual remembrance of the sorrows and sufferings of the Great War, lest the spirit of sacrifice then kindled should perish from among us’. Practically, it offered medical treatment to the community, especially to returned servicemen, and when financially possible, soldiers received free treatment (Kidd 1996: 113).

Once again, this important milestone in the life of the order required male oversight and the archbishop of Brisbane ignited the initial appeal for the hospital (Darling Downs Gazette, 28 June 1919: 4; Kidd 1996: 113). Indeed, it was bishop coadjutor Henry le Fanu, not the sisters of the SSA, who received all the credit for ‘really wonderful work here – creative work, like the building up of the Sisterhood, and St Martin’s War Memorial Hospital’ (Kidd 1996: 15).

The SSA operated the hospital until 1971, when financial pressure compelled its closure.  By then the building itself was becoming clearly unsuitable for more modern nursing and medicine and has since been converted to offices. The near fifty years of operation though was a tangible expression of impulse to commemorate the war dead, making it in the estimation of historian D.W. Martin the ‘Anglican Church’s most prominent World War 1 memorial in Brisbane’ (2016: 32). The sisters worked within the impressive Tudor-style building designed by prominent Brisbane architect Lange Powell. For its era, the hospital was thoughtfully and practically designed including well-ventilated wards and private rooms and the provision of service kitchens on each floor, as well as a large and well-lit operating theatre that, from the outside, looked like the chapter house of a medieval cathedral and therefore complemented the cathedral next door (East 2017: 35).

The future

The English dissolution of the monasteries of the sixteenth century was an aggressive act of monarchical authority. In contrast, Australian Anglican religious orders have gently dissolved over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

These schools in turn have produced many notable alumni including distinguished professional, medical and legal figures and the Olympic athletes Gayle Mayes, Brittany Emslie, Emily Seebohm, and Sally Kehoe. These schools also have a strong visual memory of the sisters, as the girls’ uniforms of a dark tunic with a white collar is derived from the habit of a postulant of the order. Other schools such as in Townsville and Charters Towers retain an Anglican identity but no formal links to the order.

Nor is there a Mother Superior any longer, the office being superfluous when only two sisters remain and there are no postulants coming forward. There are however two vowed sisters, both female Anglican priests. The SSA has therefore undergone significant metamorphosis, but in doing so it has survived. The original institutional pattern of sisters living together under a rule has not survived into the twenty-first century, but the innovation of vowed sisters, meaning women who are not fully professed but who nonetheless have affiliation to the order, promises some possible continuity when almost all other Anglican orders have expired.

Sources and further reading

Aimes, H. 1968. ‘The Aims, Ideals, and Achievements of the Society of the Sacred Advent in Queensland, 1892–1968’. B.A. (Hons) thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland.

Campbell, T. 2001. ‘The Sisters of the Church and the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, 1892–1893: A Controversy’. Journal of Religious History, 25 (2), pp. 188–206.

Campbell, T.W. 2007. Religious Communities of the Anglican Communion: Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, private publication.

East, J.W. 2017. ‘The Art of Architecture: The Brisbane Architect Lange Leopold Powell (1886-1938) and His Work’. Unpublished manuscript, accessed 8 February 2026. espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:395203

Faught, C.B. 2010. The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

Gregory, H. 1981. ‘Crawford, Emma (1864–1939)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/crawford-emma-5811/text9863, published first in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 8 February 2026.

Kidd, A. P. 1996. ‘The Brisbane Episcopate of St. Clair Donaldson 1904–1921.’ PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland.

Jack, S.M. 1970. ‘Dissolution Dates for the Monasteries Dissolved under the Act of 1536.’ Historical Research, 43 (108), pp. 161–81.

Kamm, J. 1958. (2012 reprint). How Different from Us: A Biography of Miss Buss and Miss Beale. London: Routledge.

Martin, D. 2016. ‘Lest We Forget: Sacred Memorials.’ Queensland History Journal, 23 (1), pp. 32–35.

Maughan, S.S. 2018. ‘Sisters and Brothers Abroad: Gender, Race, Empire and Anglican Missionary Reformism in Hawai‘i and the Pacific, 1858–75.’ Studies in Church History, 54, pp. 328–44.

Moore, E. 1992. One Hundred Years of Ministry: A History of the Society of the Sacred Advent 1892–1992. Brisbane: Society of the Sacred Advent.

Pereiro J. 2017. ‘The Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism’ in Strong, R. ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion 1829 – c. 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 187–211.

Rayner, K. 1962. ‘The History of the Church of England in Queensland.’ PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland.

Rodgers, D. 1980. ‘1893: The Kilburn Sisters in Sydney: Deaconesses or Sisters.’ Church Chronicle, December 15, pp. 1, 8–9.

Sparrow, M. 2021. Nuns Across the Orange: A History of the Pioneering Anglican Community of St Michael and All Angels, Bloemfontein. Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg Press.

Surtees, M. n.d. ‘Mother Superiors of the Society of the Sacred Advent (SSA).’ https://paststudents.stmargarets.qld.edu.au/news/from-the-archives/211/211-Mother-Superiors-of-the-Society-of-the-Sacred-Advent-SSA

Williams, T. J. 1947. ‘The Beginnings of Anglican Sisterhoods.’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 16 (4), pp. 350–72.

Woods, L. A. 2015. ‘“What are they to do with their lives?”: Anglican Sisterhoods and Useful Angels in Three Novels by Charlotte Mary Yonge.’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 37 (2), pp. 147–63.