Our Building
The land for a Presbyterian church was donated by a local timber merchant, John Maxwell Ferguson. The originally symmetrical building was dedicated on 4th May 1903.
The Foundation stone of the second church was laid by Admiral Sir G D Bedford, Governor of WA on 4 April, 1906. In 1911 the church was extended to the west, giving it two aisles and the hall was built.
The church has a notable Memorial Window (1920) designed by G. Pitt Morison, previous Curator of the Western Australian Art Gallery.
The limestone and iron church and the red brick and iron hall, with their Oregon ceilings, are rare surviving examples of well-designed Federation Gothic construction.
Since 1911, the church has included the first pipe organ built in Western Australia, completed by R. C. Clifton in 1879, which continues to still be in use today.
Our History
In the late 1930s, the congregation adopted the name St Aidan’s. St Aidan was an Irish-Scottish monk sent, at the request of the Anglican king, from a monastery on the Isle of Iona in 635 AD to work in Northumbria as a missionary bishop.
Aidan established a small monastery on the isle of Lindisfarne and began preaching the gospel, with the king himself translating until Aidan was proficient in English. More missionaries followed and the Christian faith gained wider acceptance. Aidan died in 651 AD.
In 1977, a union of the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Australia saw St Aidan’s join with the Claremont Congregational and Methodist congregations as a parish of the Uniting Church. In 1980 they decided to use St Aidan’s as their worship centre.
St Aidan’s has been serviced by 20 ministers. In 1997, the Rev Margaret Tyrer became St Aidan’s first woman minister.
