It’s Sunday morning and there are plenty of cars parked outside the striking red-brick church in Tarrington, a small town in southwest Victoria. Constructed in the 1920s in a Gothic revival style, the church’s tall, narrow steeple towers over the surrounding wide flat farming landscape.

Ever since Lutheran migrants from Saxony settled in the area in the 1860s there has been a place of worship of some kind here – first built of wood, then bluestone, now brick. In the 19th century, and until the First World War, the town was known as Hochkirch. High church.