Hunter Baillie Memorial Presbyterian Church, Gothic Revival Presbyterian church in Annandale, Sydney, Australia.
Hunter Baillie Memorial Presbyterian Church is a Gothic Revival church in Annandale featuring a striking white Pyrmont sandstone exterior with Aberdeen granite pillars. Melbourne bluestone architectural elements accent the structure, which is topped by a prominent spire.
Helen Hay Mackie Baillie, sister-in-law of John Dunmore Lang, built the church between 1886 and 1889 as a memorial to her husband John Hunter Baillie (1818–1854), a Scottish-born benefactor of the Presbyterian Church. The design came from Cyril and Arthur Blacket, sons of colonial architect Edmund Blacket. It joined the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.
The porch tablets name the founder, Rev. Peter Falconer Mackenzie, and Helen Hay Baillie, who died in 1897 aged 82; her husband John Hunter Baillie, born in Hamilton, Scotland, in 1818, is commemorated on the wall below. The 1890 William Hill & Son organ survives in original condition, one of only six such instruments in New South Wales, and is noted for its case.
The church stands at the corner of Collins and Johnston Streets in Annandale, its perimeter fenced in Pyrmont sandstone with wrought-iron balustrades. Enter through the tower porch, whose floor is paved in black-and-white diagonal marble bordered in red encaustic tile. A National Trust appeal seeks about $4.5 million for restoration of the building and the 1890 organ.
At 56 metres, the spire is the tallest church spire in New South Wales; only the 70-metre steel-cored twin spires of St Mary's Cathedral, completed in 2000, rise higher in Sydney. Four corner finials are tied to the spire by paired flying buttresses.
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