St Patrick's Seminary, Manly was the leading seminary of the Australian Catholic Church from its foundation in 1889 to its closure in 1995.
Conceived by Archbishop Vaughan, it was built from 1885 in Perpendicular Gothic style by Sheerin and Hennessy on a spectacular site overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a hill above Manly, New South Wales. It opened in 1889.
An early student was Patrick Joseph Hartigan, author of the "John O'Brien" poems on Australian Catholic rural life. Two of the first novels of former student Thomas Keneally, The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968) are set in a fictionalized version of the seminary.
The seminary closed in 1995 when numbers of seminarians no longer justified the large building.
The building is now occupied by the International College of Management, Sydney, however the Cardinal Cerretti Chapel is still regularly used for weddings, most notably that of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban in 2006.
St Patrick's Seminary and Grounds (former), in AussieHeritage
Article on the closure of St Patrick's by former student Tony Abbott