sketcher, lithographer, architect, engineer and clergyman, son of His Excellency Manoel Joachim Soares, Knight Commander of the Order of the Cross of Christ, Portugal, and Camilla Mary Basset, née Lodington, of London, was educated as an engineer in England, Portugal and Paris. He came to New South Wales in the Formosa in 1852 with his brother Gualter, the two having a wildcat scheme to connect Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide by a railway system centred on a new inland city to be called Alberto Town. When the Sydney Railway Company proved disinclined to employ him on the project, Soares briefly became a tutor with a family at Edensor Park, Liverpool then decided to study theology. On 30 June 1855 he was appointed deacon under Rev. Robert Cartwright at Collector.
Soares married Catherine Tom Lane of Orton Park, Bathurst in 1857 and, immediately after being ordained in May, was appointed parish priest at Queanbeyan. He began building Christ Church of England there in 1859 to his own design. His cardboard scale model and his sketch of the building survive in the church; a lithograph after his drawing of the building, published by J. Degotardi (q.v.) in Sydney about 1859, was also put on the stone by Soares (ML, NLA).
Other architectural designs followed. During his twenty years’ incumbency at least fourteen buildings were erected for which Soares, as Diocesan Architect, was directly responsible for the design. They include St Philip’s, Bungendore, St Thomas’s, Molonglo (Carwoola); St Mark’s, Hoskingtown (c.1872), Christ Church Rectory, Queanbeyan, and a new rectory and extensions to the church of St John, Canberra. In true ecumenical spirit he designed St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church and the Protestant Hall (1876-77) at Queanbeyan and (with Marrianne Campbell q.v. ) appears to have been involved in the Gothic Revival extensions to the Campbells’ Duntroon House, Canberra. Most of his designs were in a Gothic Revival style of some competence and occasional eccentricity, e.g. his 'crown of thorns’ ceiling trusses in St John’s, Canberra. He drew other views of his buildings which were published as lithographs.
Appointed canon of St Saviour’s Cathedral, Goulburn, in September 1876, Soares and his family moved there the following year. He remained in the Goulburn area as incumbent of West Goulburn and diocesan registrar until retiring to Bondi, Sydney, in 1897. He died on 27 April 1909, aged seventy-nine.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
