At 9 a.m. on a day towards the end of September 1863, a group of passengers boarded the Parramatta steamer at the Phoenix Wharf at Darling Harbour. Some passengers were bound for Newington, ‘to inspect the last addition to our representative colonial educational establishments, the very recently inaugurated Wesleyan Collegiate Institution.’

An account of their visit appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 September. If the reader can wade through the florid Victorian prose — ‘Sip away thirstily of the nectar of learning then, ye young hope-buds of Newington’ — the account provides a snapshot of the new College less than three months after it opened.

Rev. John Allen Manton, Principal of the College, met the visitors at the Newington wharf. The writer was impressed by the ‘almost palatial pile’ of Newington House, with ‘the finest palm tree in the colony’ at its entrance. He paced out the house’s dimensions: one hundred and twenty feet long and sixty feet deep. ‘We were delighted with the gardens… The orchards, paddocks, poultry-yards, and various offices, are those of a really splendid demesne.’

As he conducted the tour of the property, Rev. Manton undoubtedly explained the principles on which the College was founded. ‘We were much pleased to find that this Wesleyan College at Newington was not so tight as to exclude from its benefits the youth of Christian denominations,’ the writer noted.

In the chapel, which served also at the schoolroom, the visitors observed the classical tutor rendering a lesson in the Latin author, Horace. ‘The teaching, we observed, was thorough. Would that in all collegiate schools it were always so.’ During a devotional service in the dining room, ‘we could almost have heard a pin drop.’

Almost all the students were boarders. Mrs Anne Manton, ‘the excellent wife of the Principal’, was ‘an untiring ministering spirit to the children of others, to whom she endeavours to supply a mother’s care.’

With the day nearing its end, the visitors ‘enjoyed an evening promenade with the Principal and his lady.’ The boys were playing football and other games on the Green, while ‘the noble house dog … disported himself wildly with a stick … or joined his gambolling with the football racings.’

‘Tints of glory rested upon all the fair things around, the foliage glittered and danced in the setting sun.’ And so the visitors said ‘Farewell to the Academia of Newington.’

David Roberts
College Archivist