Emma Silcock (later known as Sister and then Mother Esther) was a novice in the Community of St Mary the Virgin, Wantage, Oxfordshire, who had suffered an accident and, in 1888, arrived in Melbourne to recuperate there.
[2] In 1912, Archbishop Lowther Clarke formally chartered the sisters as the Community of the Holy Name, thereby becoming the first Anglican religious order in Australia.
[3][4] In 1892 the mission (which would eventually become Anglicare, the social justice arm of the Anglican Church of Australia)[5] established a House of Mercy for pregnant young women in Cheltenham, then a rural area.
In 1935 CHN bought the adjacent land to become their headquarters, designed in a Spanish Mission Style by the ecclesiastical architect Louis Williams and built as a memorial to Mother Esther.
[14] In 1956 a number of the members of the Order of the Good Shepherd in Auckland joined CHN and were formally admitted in 1958.
[21][22] The chapel of the spirituality centre features a tapestry depicting the Creation by the artist Christopher Pyett which was installed in 1996.
The Community of the Ascension had a large and striking outdoor crucifix, cast in bronze by the Belgian sculptor Aloïs de Beule, and located within the calvary garden.
On the closure of the House of Ascension, the community gave de Beule's crucifix to CHN which, at the time, ran a girls' home in Goulburn.
The sisters arrived in 1951, shortly after the devastating eruption of Mount Lamington which killed many Anglican missionaries.