The Religious History Society Conference was integrated into the AHA Conference with its keynote speaker being Professor Stuart Clark of the University of Wales. His paper on ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Visual Deception in the 16th and 17th Centuries’ attracted much attention from a number of historians whose main interest was known to be in other fields. This was just one instance of the fruitful cross-fertilisation for which the conference provided. Professor Clark’s paper highlighted the complexity of the highly sensed religious human person, the difficulty that the reformers had with the sacramental Catholic heritage as well as the problem that visionaries, real or imaginary, pose to authorities!

From ACU, papers were presented by Shurlee Swain, Malcolm Prentis, Rosa MacGinley and Sophie McGrath.

‘Irish Ways, Queensland Days’ Conference, Brisbane, 31 August – 1 September, 2002

This conference was convened by the Queensland Irish Association and the Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University. The first day featured general Irish themes presented by noted local, inter-State and overseas speakers, while the second day was given to topics covering many aspects of Queensland history with an Irish significance.

There were presenters from most of the Queensland universities, including Professor Murdach Dynan, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, McAuley Campus, ACU. Several papers dealt specifically with women. Libby Connors (Univ. of Southern Queensland) and social historian, Bernadette Turner, spoke on ‘The Destiny of Irishwomen in Queensalnd’, while ‘Re-making an “old Tradition’s magic”: the Irish strand in Queensland women’s writing’ was the topic explored by Belinda McKay, Director of the Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University. Publication of the papers is planned.

Religious in Polding’s Sydney: Early Connections between the Benedictine Nuns and the Sisters of Charity

A first impression of religious, both women and men, in mid-nineteenth century Sydney could give rise to the judgment, ‘small is beautiful’. This was in part the result of Bishop Polding’s vision of a church where all priests and religious would work effectively with the bishop of the diocese; and in the fact that the first religious men to reach Australia came as individual missionaries, not as members of religious communities.

The first religious to arrive as a community in Australia were the Benedictine monks in 1835. Their superior, John Bede Polding, also came as the first bishop of the new area, replacing the authority of another Benedictine, Dr William Ullathorne OSB, who had been a vicar apostolic for the continent. Polding, realising the need for women religious to work with female convicts, brought from Ireland, in late 1838, the Irish Sisters of Charity. The Marist Fathers, the Benedictine nuns and the Christian Brothers followed.

Letters from Polding and Ullathorne to their confreres in England, to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda in Rome and, later, from Polding’s assistant bishop, Charles Davis, to colleagues and to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in France, all testified to the value of the Sisters of Charity instructions to the female prisoners and to young people preparing for the sacraments.

The Sisters of Charity set in order the already established Catholic Orphan School at Waverley. They also made altar linen, taught others to do church sewing and instructed illiterate adults in the faith and practical life-skills. The record of events kept by the Benedictine monks at St Mary’s frequently mentioned these activities.

The apparent harmony in the relationship of Polding with the religious in the Colony hid some causes of complaint. The Christian Brothers’ memoir of their reasons for leaving Australia soon after their arrival went so far as to say that another religious community, obviously the Sisters of Charity, had advised them to leave while they could, before they had lost all control over their own role in the mission.

Though the Benedictine nuns from their arrival in Sydney in 1848 had the full approval of Polding and his vicar general, Dr Henry Gregory, they suffered similar difficulties about finance and control as had the earlier religious.

While the Benedictine nuns were enclosed and followed Benedictine spirituality, the Sisters of Charity were specifically founded to serve people in need in the wider community. Before the monastery at Subiaco (on the Parramatta River at Rydalmere) was officially founded, there was fluidity in the relationship between the two groups. Thus a Sister of Charity went to Subiaco to nurse Sr Scholastica Gregory OSB who was ill, while her companion went to live with a Sisters of Charity community, in order to avoid infection. Furniture from the Parramatta convent of the Sisters of Charity was given to the new Benedictine monastery and the sisters and nuns shared recreational outings.

The Benedictine nuns were brought to the Colony to teach a wealthier class of girl than the Sisters of Charity had come to minister to. However, differences in training and background were effaced as the Benedictine superior learned to deal with convict workmen, and suffered hardships alien to her English experience.

Relationships between the two groups of women religious, which began in shared experiences, and in the fact of being the only women religious in Australia, continued to be fostered by a surprising number of connections. Some Benedictines had relations in the Sisters of Charity. One young woman who travelled to Sydney as a Benedictine aspirant joined the Sisters of Charity instead. Others, who received an excellent education from the Benedictine nuns, went on to teach and even to train teachers, before joining the Sisters of Charity. Many became the committed Catholic mothers for whom Polding had hoped. One of the most interesting Benedictine ex-pupils must surely be Catherine Heydon, who ran a successful school of her own and had the courage to travel to Europe unaccompanied in search of another dream which is calling to be researched. Another Benedictine ex-pupil who made her mark was Mary McGuigan, who can be termed the refoundress of the Sisters of Charity in Australia. During her time of leadership their numbers increased and she re-established links with the Irish Sisters of Charity. While visiting Ireland on Cardinal Moran’s suggestion, she took time to call to see her former Benedictine teachers, with whom she maintained a long correspondence.

In spite of the excellence of the Benedictine teaching, the relative isolation of Subiaco and parents’ fears that their daughters would be encouraged to become nuns led to the decline of the school. Vocations flowed more to the Sisters of Charity and to the new active Benedictine Sisters of the Good Shepherd, later named the Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Nineteenth century Catholics obviously valued the practical works of mercy carried out by these two groups.

Historically, however, as has been indicated there are significant links between the Sisters of Charity and the Benedictine Nuns in Australia.

(See the Australian Benedictine Journal, Tjurunga 61, (2001), 45 - 77 for a fully referenced essay on this topic by Dr M.M.K O’Sullivan rsc.)

Letter from London

Carmen Mangion from London has good news concerning the forthcoming Brides of Christ Conference to be held at the Centre for Religious History, St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London: they have managed to get some funding from both Birkbeck College and the Royal Historical Society. The conference is attracting interest from home and abroad, even as far away as Moscow!

Carmen’s co-organiser for the Conference is Dr Caroline Bowden, who completed her doctoral work in 1996 at the Institute of Education, University of London, on girls’ education in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England and Wales. Based primarily on family letters, it considered parental attitudes to girls’ education and included a study of some of the applications of female literacy, particularly among the landed gentry. Recent work has developed these themes further to consider the question of a comparison of the educational experience of girls in Protestant and Catholic families and collections of books owned by women.

Currently Caroline is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Religious History at St Mary’s College where she is developing a prosopographical research project on English and Irish convents in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She has published a number of papers on English nuns as well as several entries in the New Dictionary of National Biography for the sixteenth, seventeenth and twentieth centuries. For those interested in this area of women’s history Caroline’s email is cbowden@sas.ac.uk.

Book Reviews

Susan Margarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2001

Building on the foundations established by scholars such as Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake and Anne Summers, Susan Margarey sets herself the goal of redressing an imbalance in Australian feminist history that has too often seen first wave feminists depicted as humourless puritans who could collectively be characterised in Summers’ terms as ‘God’s Police.’ Hence Margarey explores the passions of these early feminists, a term I use here in preference to suffragists because the breadth of their interests was far greater than single issue politics. Their interests encompassed rights for prostitutes, working conditions, the age of consent, the dangers of child-bearing in a time when it could literally kill women, domestic violence and the sexual double standards.

Margarey locates the activism of the first wave feminists within the new medical discourse that had emerged, which emphasised sexual health and so made it a ‘respectable’ topic of conversation, though one with limits. She rightly identifies the woman’s movement as not just political reformation but the reformation of social relationships between men and women that would fundamentally change perceptions of sex and gender.

There is undoubtedly much that is valuable in this book but a notable omission is any in-depth discussion of women’s religious beliefs, spirituality or religious adherence, even though Margarey acknowledges that most of the first wave feminists were strongly motivated by religious commitment. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended for any reader interested in Australian women.

Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: origins of women’s education in nineteeth-century Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1996

Though it is some years since this valuable original study was published, it contains challenges still to be taken up. Beginning with an exploration of the hundreds of small privately run schools for girls which provided a more varied education than the public elementary schools, Marjorie Theobald moves to the development of the more enduring of these into later well known denominational colleges and grammar schools. At the same time she traces the growth of teaching as a remunerative profession for many of the skilled female teachers in competition with men.

While occasionally mentioning them, she does not deal with convent high schools, so many of which in Australia pre-dated the colleges she records and whose curriculum offered the same range of languages, literature, natural science and cultural accomplishments. Nor did their teachers need to struggle with male competitors! A field for future research is also the parallel conducting of high schools for girls by educated Catholic women in the earlier period, as in Sydney and Hobart, before the advent of the first convent schools. Nevertheless, Marjorie Theobald poses key questions about women’s education in Australia and indicates sources and scope for the research involved.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Dr Kerrie Hide, Head of the School of Theology, ACU Signadou Campus, Canberra and presenter at our first Colloquia, on winning first place in the American Press Association awards in the Gender Issues category for her book: Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfilment - The Soteriology of Julian or Norwich

Of Interest

SeaChanges: Journal of Women Scholars of Religion and Theology - an open access web journal http://www.wsrt.com.au/seachanges

(This Newsletter is produced by the Central Project Team. Please send all correspondence to Dr Sophie McGrath, Australian Catholic Unversity, Mount Saint Mary Campus, Locked Bag 2002, Strathfield, NSW, 2135. s.mcgrath@mary.acu.edu.au)