On Sunday with the rain pouring down, it seemed (somehow) that the best way to spend the day was to go searching for cemeteries in the Ipswich - Toowoomba corridor, so we headed west on the Warrego Highway and proceeded to search for cemeteries. We are rewarded with quite a few (maybe 10), almost all of which are small enough for our online cemetery project.
www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/But an unexpected bonus (well, surprise) was discovering a Cathedral in Hatton Vale. Now most people will probably not even know where Hatton Vale is, and this is frankly not surprising. We never managed to find anything resembling a "town centre"; Hatton Vale seems to be a name for a geographic region with some farms and houses sprinkled randomly across it. And one of those buildings just happens to be a cathedral. To be precise, a cathedral for the Apostolic Church of Queensland, which came as another surprise to me having never heard of it either.
Given that many of the original settlers between Ipswich and Toowoomba were Germans, there are lots of Lutheran churches in the area. So my initial theory was that the Apostolic Church was somehow affiliated with Lutheran Church. However, Google believes that it is "From the Germanic/Prussian wing of the Catholic Apostolic renewal". Why Google thinks this is a mystery to me as the Church does not say this on its own WWW site.
http://www.apostolicchurchqld.org.au/Anyhow, it seems that the Apostolic Church of Queensland was established in 1886 and would appear to be going strong with congregations in various parts of Queensland, notably areas where there were a lot of pioneer German immigrants.
The Apostolic Church of Queensland seems not to be affiliated with the Apostolic Church of Australia
http://www.apostolic.org.au/but is affiliated with the United Apostolic Church of Europe.
http://www.united-apostolic.org/So, it just goes to show what you can learn by going for a drive down a major highway on a wet day.
