sketcher, amateur architect, diarist, Church of England clergyman and farmer, was born in England on 23 March 1791. He came to Western Australia in the Henry with his wife Mary Amelia, née Gladstanes, on 20 April 1841. Three sons, William , George and Edward, and two daughters, Agnes and Sophy, accompanied their parents; John was already in Victoria and Henry turned up in 1843 after completing his medical studies in England (and being involved in some unspecified scandal).
Wollaston settled with his family on a 100-acre farm he purchased in the Port Leschenault district and called Charterhouse after the English school where his father, Edward Wollaston, had been a teacher and his mother daughter of the headmaster. He began to build a church at nearby Picton and was later appointed chaplain for the district. With only the assistance of his sons and a thatcher called Hymus, of Horseheath, he succeeded in building a wooden structure with a thatched roof (later shingled) which he opened on 18 September 1842 (now the second oldest surviving church in Western Australia). Wollaston designed it himself. His modest effort, which initially had oiled calico instead of glass in the windows, was hardly comparable with St Saviour’s, Leeds, a very large stone church in Commissioners’ Gothic style, as Wollaston ruefully admitted in his diary entry describing the opening. Nevertheless, Picton’s unusual liturgical planning may well owe something to this source. In 1843 Wollaston assisted in furnishing plans for Wannerup and Busselton churches, the architect of the latter, a Mr Forsyth, working under his direction.
The Wollastons moved to Bunbury late in 1843 then to Albany in 1848 where he completed a more substantial, stone, church building which had been in progress for some years. In 1849 he was appointed the first archdeacon of the Church of England in Western Australia and, as part of his archidiaconal duties, made five tours of Western Australia’s settled areas. He died at Albany on 3 May 1856.
Wollaston is known for the copious personal diaries he kept during his Australian years, part-published as Wollaston’s Picton Journal (Perth 1948) and Wollaston’s Albany Journals (Perth 1954). The originals (Royal Commonwealth Society, London), which were sent to friends in England and later returned to him, contain an occasional tiny sketched figure (e.g. an outline of the window-glazing proposed for Albany Church) more informational than aesthetic in aim and achievement. On 20 April 1842 he wrote in his journal that he was 'send[ing] to Tommy a drawing from life of the tail and claw of a kangaroo’ and on 4 September 1843 he included an elevation of Fremantle church, noting 'I am a very bad draftsman’. Several paintings of Western Australian scenes (p.c.) have been attributed to him but these may be by William, the acknowledged artist of the family.
