John Cyril Hawes, architect, priest and hermit, arrived in the goldfields of Western Australia in 1915.  Having acquired his profession in the milieu of the London architectural scene of the 1890's, a heady mix of arts and craft handicraft, medieval revivalism and the mysticism of William Lethaby, Hawes expressed his vocation as religious ascetic through a number of idiosyncratic projects in England, the Bahamas and Australia.

During early travels in Ireland, Hawes studied the forms of Celtic and early Christian architecture.  These not only informed the design and detail of his later works, but punctuate a now familiar reading of desert landscapes.  These were places where, in the words of explorer Ernest Giles, leading his party through the salt flats and sand dunes of the Central Australian desert in 1875, "the mind is forced back upon itself, and becomes filled with an endless chain of thoughts which wander through the vastness of the star-bespangled spheres."

Travellers have long idealised Ireland's west country as a place of barren landscapes and spiritual syncretism.  This paper argues that Hawes's finely scaled chapels and hermitage near Geraldton, make manifest an ascetic ideal, one entailing a unique view of human nature associated with colonial enterprise and missionary impulses and which relates the experience of solitude, hardship and deprivation to spiritual transcendence.