Restoration Australia host Anthony Burke with Rachel Hunt and her partner Tom outside the Boorowa convent. Photo: ABC.
She went looking for a farmlet with a pony, some chickens and a handful of highland cows.
What Rachel Hunt found instead was an imposing brick convent on the fringes of a small country town, sagging in one corner, empty for decades and demanding an enormous act of courage.
It is, even by the standards of the ABC’s Restoration Australia, an unlikely story.
And host Anthony Burke — a professor of architecture and one of Australia’s most recognised voices on design and heritage — will admit he didn’t quite see it coming.
“I thought I’d come across someone who had a big vision, design experience, a network, all that kind of stuff,” Burke says of his expectations heading into Boorowa.
Then he met Rachel.
“She’s a fairly diminutive person — small voice, always smiling, always happy, always got a positive glow about her. And there she is, standing in front of this giant convent, this huge, hulking brick thing, going, ‘Yeah, I can have a go at this’.”
The building in question is St Joseph’s Convent in the Hilltops town of Boorowa and its story stretches back well over a century.
Six Sisters of Mercy arrived in the town in August 1882 to take charge of Catholic education, initially holding classes in St Patrick’s Church while a permanent convent was built.
By May 1885, the convent, erected by builders Bell and Briggs and officially blessed under the name St Joseph’s, was open.
It would serve as the heart of the town’s Catholic community for more than a century, the sisters staffing the adjacent school until their numbers dwindled and the last of them quietly left in 1987.
What they left behind sits at the axis of a road near the town’s cathedral — a muscular, no-prisoners kind of structure, Burke says, that sends its signals clearly from the street.
The brick arches … pointed Gothic references and the long pathway from the front gate to the front door were designed, he suggests, with deliberate psychological intent.
“Imagine you’re a sinner walking up to this thing across that yard,” he says. “Mary is staring down, she’s making a decision. It’s all set up to do that.”
Inside, the convent reveals its contradictions.
The rooms flanking the entrance hallway are unexpectedly vast: tall ceilings and extraordinary glass windows.
Upstairs, the nuns’ former quarters are cellular and labyrinthine, a higgledy-piggledy arrangement that defies easy conversion.
And then there is the internal chapel, modest by the standards of the cathedral next door but quietly beautiful — built, Burke notes, to a rural 1880s convent budget rather than a cathedral one.
“There was just enough to let you know that God was in the room.”
It was the chapel that Rachel fell for first.
And like most great love affairs conducted with old buildings, rationality came second.
“Almost everyone who goes on the show needs a little bit of naivety,” Burke says.
“If you knew all the problems ahead of time, you probably wouldn’t do it. So you fall in love first, and you rationalise that decision second.”
The problems were real. Subsidence in the back corner. A leaking roof. Decaying timber on the upstairs veranda. And the peculiar challenge of all serious restoration work — that small problems have a way of revealing much larger ones underneath.
Rachel’s original plan was to transform the convent into a private retreat and function centre, with the vaulted chapel as the centrepiece for weddings and events.
But the episode takes a turn that Burke describes carefully, unwilling to give too much away.
“The story becomes less about the building and more about her life in and around it,” he says. “The real story was happening somewhere else — through it, around it — in a way we hadn’t anticipated.”
For the people of Boorowa, the stakes were never purely architectural.
The convent is woven into the fabric of the town — visible from the pub on the main street, flanked by the school oval where generations of St Joseph’s students have played, and rooted deeply in the community’s Irish Catholic history.
Everyone, Burke says, wanted to see it live its next chapter.
“Rather than restore it to its former glory, I see it as looking for it to live its next life,” he says. “Everyone wants to see what that is.”
And Rachel? She found something she hadn’t planned for either.
“She took a leap of faith,” Burke says, acknowledging the pun, “and a whole different life opened up in front of her that she could never have predicted.”
“She found herself somewhere she never thought she’d end up. And she’s absolutely loving it.”
Episode 3 of Restoration Australia — The Boorowa Convent — airs on Thursday, 4 June, at 8 pm on ABC TV.
