Former Mt Alexander mayor selling transformed 1865 church

They planned to turn the building into a holiday house and calculated they could afford the combined cost of buying a caravan each.

The 30 foot by 50 foot building, constructed in around 1865, was "literally just a bare shell" at the time and not in salubrious condition.

There had been a fire in one corner, it had green slime and mould running down the wall and a section of the floor had been eaten out by termites.

Jim, a project manager in construction who lived in Melbourne at the time, was travelling to and fro past the church on what was then the highway while working on the development of the Bendigo telephone exchange when he saw a small 'for sale' sign on the fence.

"It had taken my eye. It is a very plain, simple country church, with apricot bricks and tin roof," he said.

"Those were the days when the United Church and the like were selling a large number of churches. They had too many and needed to rationalise their holdings."

Jim hadn't seen inside the building until the day of the auction but the family bought their intended weekender for the nominated $18,000.

"It was more like a solid tent than anything because there was no electricity. I think there was one tap at the back and the furniture had been removed," Jim said.

Not long after, he bought his brother and father out.

At the end of 1988 Jim and his wife, Carmel Coghlan, moved in full time with their three-month-old daughter.

"It was an adventure for both of us," Jim said.

"When we first moved in, it was rudimentary. The stud walls hadn't been lined.

"It was something that evolved over time as money came to hand and time came to hand.

"A lot of the work I did myself but then we employed skilled tradespeople."

One of them was Les Hough, who lived at Fryerstown. He was a stonemason who "rode a horse and cart over on a daily basis" to build a stone wall.

"There's 30 tonne of stone in it, and it's all dry stone, no mortar at all. It's just a magnificent piece of work," Jim said.

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Jim and his wife built the place by not only letting it evolve, but also by getting to know the quality craftsmen in the area.

"All the steel work was done by Neil Tait, and John Parker did a lot of the carpentry work with me working with him," Jim said.

"These are people who are really skilled and who are artisans in their trade."

A major non-structural task was restoring the building's timber trusses and vaulted ceiling, which had been "freshened up" with a paint job in preparation for a 1965 centenary service - the church's last.

Back in the 1960s, boys from the Malmsbury Youth Training Centre who had been employed for the task painted over the original finish, leaving the trusses and exposed timbers gloss white, the ceiling pink and the walls duck shell blue.

"It was atrocious," Jim said. "It's taken an incredible amount of work to get all the timber work stripped back to its original condition and make the place look as it does."

After fitting out the church and building the stone wall, the couple built a garage and workshop complex and finally, 15 to 20 years ago, the tower.

That came about because Jim decided to insulate the west-facing back wall of the church with "an entry of some kind". Like the other components of the property, the project "evolved".

"It's turned into a folly, a very habitable folly," he said.

Linked to the original building by a half-metre wide glass connection, the tower contains a ground level entry area and verandah, a next level ensuite for the mezzanine bedroom, another bedroom above it and above that "anything from a reading room to a yoga room".

"Then it's got the deck on the roof, which is 10 metres above ground level with a view of the whole of the valley," Jim said.

It is a good spot to sit with a glass of wine from the 750-bottle cellar, the owner says, acknowledging the irony of such a generous storage capacity in a Methodist church.

"We are in one of the better wine growing districts of Australia," Jim said.

Two more daughters would follow the baby girl Jim and Carmel brought to the church in 1988, and the three girls grew up thinking little of the fact their home was a 19^th century church.

"We discovered it was a fantastic place to bring up kids," Jim said.

Carmel, a maths and science teacher, worked initially at Castlemaine Secondary College before moving to Kyneton Secondary. She became involved in the school council and the couple's growing community involvement eventually saw Jim find his way onto Mt Alexander Shire Council, where he was mayor for three years.

The former draftsman, who had also studied planning, was then invited to join the Victorian Heritage Council, the statutory body responsible for protecting cultural heritage in Victoria, and eventually became chair of it.

When they first moved to Taradale, Jim says, he and Carmel were part of a sort of renewal of the town. Older residents were moving closer to services in Bendigo and Kyneton and were being replaced by younger tree-changers.

Forty years later, he sees that process repeating.

"And now we've got this COVID tree change thing happening as well," Jim said.

The couple, whose kids have long flown the coop, are moving to Castlemaine, where they are building a new house.

"We're not leaving the area and we're not leaving friends or organisations we've been involved with," Jim said. "It's just time to move on and see somebody else in this space."

Agents Cantwell Property in Castlemaine have listed the unique property at $1.75 million, an unimaginable sum to the then 27-year-old who paid $18,000 at auction for it way back in 1982.

"But I suppose when you spend 30 to 40 years working on something, you end up with something that's a bit more than the average," Jim said.

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