On the corner of Anglesea and Merioneth Streets in Arrowtown, is an 1870s cottage of various gabled stone and weatherboard elements known as the Old Convent. Incorporating historic, aesthetic, architectural and social significance, it is particularly important as the former home of a convent personally founded by Saint Mary of the Cross MacKillop. It also forms part of a historic precinct in combination with similar cottages in Anglesea Street and testifies to Arrowtown’s evolution from a mining hamlet to an established township of religious concern.

In July 1872, Henry Stratford was appointed sub-warden to the goldfields. He later became Arrowtown’s first Resident Magistrate. In 1872, Stratford bought land on which he built a two roomed, schist cottage. Rates records indicate a cottage was on site by 1878. The sash windows, symmetry and simplicity of the box cottage evoke the Georgian period.

In 1890, the Catholic Diocese of Dunedin bought the cottage as a presbytery for the assistant to the new parish priest at Queenstown. The Church prospered in the small settlement. So much so that in 1897, Mother Mary MacKillop decided to establish a convent at Arrowtown to run St Joseph’s School. MacKillop had founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, an order which established a number of schools and welfare institutions throughout Australasia.

Arriving in October 1897, MacKillop made part of the school a convent. She left Arrowtown in 1898 with the nuns well established at St Joseph’s Convent School. In 1899, the nuns were given the vacant presbytery as a separate convent. The church soon added two bedrooms on the northern side and another room to the east. Later, a timber room for music lessons was added on the west side. The additions repeated the original gabled structure. In 1943, St Joseph’s Convent School closed and in 1945, the convent on Anglesea Street was closed and sold.

From 1956, Shaw’s Motors Limited housed their mechanics at the cottage, then known as the ‘Golden Terrace’ boarding house. Several alterations were made in the 1950s, including removal of the music room. In 2004, Alan and Kathleen Jenkins acquired the Old Convent and restored it. In 2006, further extensions were made. The project received an award for its ‘intimate stitching of an existing historic cottage and outhouse spaces, resulting in a beautiful eclectic group of spaces’.